The taiga on my way turned out to be really dense, but a couple of dozen kilometers from the drop point the satellites saw an abandoned Old Believers' farmstead, to which I was now approaching. Given that I needed a believable legend and at least some local clothes, it certainly made sense for me to check the place out.
I had no experience walking through the taiga, so my speed left a lot to be desired. I had to go, as they say, using general erudition, since pilot training did not devote much time to the problems of survival in the forests and jungles of the oxygen planets, to say the least.
I reached the lodge when it got noticeably darker. The place really turned out to be long abandoned. Those who once lived here apparently went into the taiga and never came back. There could be many reasons for this. There were plenty of dangerous predators around, and I had more than once praised myself for that I had decided at the last moment to bring my standard pistol.
The horizontal pole fence had long since lost its battle with the rain and wind, and in many places it was gaping holes. Things were no better with the outbuildings, which stood on the perimeter of the vast yard overgrown with grass and young trees. It didn't take long to examine them. If there had ever been anything of value in those animal barns and pens, it was now just shapeless piles of decay.
The house was somewhat better preserved. The thick logs held up for now, and the owners had renewed the roof, apparently just before they disappeared. The door was a little warped, but it still seemed pretty solid. It was bolted from the outside, but there was no lock, so I, after a bit of fiddling with the rusty bolt, I entered the long-abandoned dwelling.
Apparently, only one person lived here. It looked like this house was once inhabited by a large family, but then, evidently, something happened. Maybe illness, or maybe something else. But in the end there was only one owner left. The house had two living rooms, a hallway, and something like a kitchen, although I could not identify with complete certainty the purpose of this elongated room. The roof was leaking in many places and some of the furnishings were hopelessly ruined, but some things have survived.
After a thorough search of the crudely made furniture, I found myself in possession of a pair of pants that fit me relatively well, shapeless but warm enough, three shabby shirts, some very old but neatly stitched quilted jackets, several shifts of strange-looking underwear, and, most important, a bunch of yellowed papers that clearly served as identity documents and social status documents for the locals.
I carefully read and remembered the names of the people who once lived here, their dates of birth, and in some cases of death. The overall picture was poor. Apparently, here, in the middle of nowhere, even births and deaths were not well documented, to say nothing of other, less significant facts of citizens' biographies. But I did manage to understand some things. The documents in a separate box apparently belonged to the last inhabitant of the house Ivan Terentyevich Nagulin, born in 1890.
Judging by the names I could make out on several covers of books blackened by time and damp, he was, like the rest of his family, Old Believer, who had gone into the woods with his parents at the end of the 19th century, and who had been staying in the taiga permanently ever since. Ivan Terentyevich was old enough to be my father, and after some reflection, I decided that I could not find a better option for my legend.
* * *
I was too late for the start of the war after all. An Old Believer who came out of the taiga, having decided to return to the world after his father's death, aroused natural distrust in the representatives of the Republic's authorities. The lack of other documents than my 'father's' passport, issued back in czarist Russia, also did not help my smooth entry into the local society. I was lucky enough to get some of the right words from the newspaper Tuvan Truth, published here in Russian, which was crudely pasted on the wall of the house of some official institution in Kyzyl. I surrendered to the local people's militia completely voluntarily, so I was beaten without any excess, just to prevent and to make sure I knew exactly where I ended up.
The district militia chief, to whose office I was taken after my arrest and initial processing, was rather skeptical about my words about the boring taiga and my desire to return to my ancestral homeland. It seemed that my case was not unique here, although it was quite rare. After the interrogation, which he conducted with a boredom in his eyes, he scribbled some words on a yellowish sheet of paper and summoned a sleepy guard, who took me to a cell with a dirt floor and uneven, badly painted walls. No one was going to feed me here, but they did give me some water.
Toward evening a representative of the local security service came to pick me up. This organization bore the complicated name of the Office of State Internal Political Security. Unlike the militiamen, the officer who arrived was Russian, and his uniform was of much higher quality. Guarded by a soldier armed with a rifle that was outdated even by local standards, I was taken to the central part of town in a very quaint and mercilessly stinking horse-drawn vehicle.
They didn't keep me in a cell and immediately sent me for interrogation. The specialists here were more thorough, in the sense that they beat me longer and more thoughtfully. Nevertheless, they weren't going to maim me, because they didn't seem to have anything to maim me for yet. Naturally, I offered no resistance, limiting myself to timely tensing and relaxing the necessary muscle groups, as well as making light movements of the body and limbs, which helped to minimize the damage to my body from the not too dexterous and skillful blows of the investigators.
At the first interrogation I heard no intelligible questions, except the idiotic accusations of espionage and work for subversive counterrevolutionary organizations. Naturally, I kept making round, innocent eyes, pretending complete incomprehension, and I kept bluntly telling time after time about my Old Believer father who died in the taiga, and the rest of the family, whom I barely remember, who were carried away by some contagious disease. However, the investigator didn't really insist on anything. Apparently, this was the custom here, and it was all standard psychological treatment before the normal interrogation, which took place only a week later.
I don't know how long this whole story would have lasted, and maybe I would have been sent to some mines or camps in the end, for free labor was not at all superfluous to the expanding economy of the People's Republic, but then the Führer of the German nation, Adolf Hitler, ran out of patience and ordered an attack on the USSR. Information about the outbreak of war roused the Tuvan People's Republic with unexpected force. Even I, a prisoner without rights, was made aware of this information, although they could have done without telling me about it, for I knew what was going on far better than any of the investigators here, and even better than Comrade Stalin himself, because from low orbit it was perfectly visible how endless columns of tanks and infantry were advancing toward the border, how technicians at airfields were bustling about, hanging bombs on planes, and how the whole armada, obeying the iron will of their Führer, came into motion and crossed the Soviet border to the roar of the artillery cannonade.