The Kid from Hell Chapter 3 - Life on Another Planet
Gack vs. Earth Technology
Chapter 3 is told entirely from Gack’s perspective, and it’s honestly hilarious and sad at the same time. The guy has been on Earth for five days and he’s completely overwhelmed.
Food comes from tubes. You squeeze it like toothpaste, it froths up, sizzles, and suddenly there’s a perfectly broiled piece of meat on your plate. Rooms clean themselves. Chairs grow out of the floor when you imagine them. The null transporter teleports you anywhere instantly, and Kornei explained how it works with “bending space,” but Gack admits he understood nothing. Not even if you hit him over the head with a club.
Here’s the thing. Gack’s reaction to all this isn’t wonder. It’s suspicion. He looks at the paradise around him and thinks: somebody has to produce all this plenty. And that somebody, he figures, will be Gigandan slaves.
The Barracks Room
One of my favorite scenes in this chapter is Gack recreating his military barracks inside his room. He figures out the house responds to your imagination, so he conjures up an iron cot with a green wool blanket, a steel weapons cabinet, a nightstand with number 0064, a lamp with a tin shade. Everything exactly like his dead commander Leopard’s room.
But here’s the problem. The house fights back. Every time Gack gets distracted, stuff reverts. The chair disappears. The lamp turns into some weird fixture. The nightstand morphs into a semitransparent blob. He destroys the impostor furniture, brings his stuff back, and then it happens again.
This is a small detail but it says so much. Gack can’t even control his own room. He can’t maintain his identity in this place. The house literally won’t let him be who he wants to be. And he knows it: “What could I do against them if I couldn’t even handle my own room?”
He puts on his military uniform, tightens his belt, looks in the mirror, and starts yelling the Fighting Cat march until he’s hoarse and crying. That moment hit me hard.
The Museum of Alien Creatures
Kornei takes Gack to a basement museum filled with specimens from other planets. Kornei used to be a cosmozoologist, and you can tell he genuinely loved that work. He drags Gack from skeleton to skeleton, waving his arms, telling stories about creatures with two backbones, about animals that shed wounded limbs and no one has ever seen one dead.
There’s a hide on the wall, twenty meters long, covered in emerald scales the size of dinner plates. Beautiful.
And then there’s the takhorg from planet Pandora. Its open jaws serve as a doorway into another room. Its head is the size of two railroad cars. Gack says their entire school would fit in its mouth. Kornei walks past it like it’s a frog.
But here’s what really got to Gack. He starts thinking: these animals lived their lives thousands of light-years away, minding their own business, and then these people showed up, shoved them in bags, and put them in a museum. For scientific research. And he realizes, maybe that’s exactly what they’re doing to his people too.
The Pseudo-Homo Skeleton
Then Gack spots a skeleton standing in a corner. Small, no special lighting. But unmistakably humanoid. Skull, hands, feet. The rib cage is broader, the hands are tiny with webbing between the fingers, but it looks like a person.
Kornei notices Gack’s reaction and tells him the story. These creatures from planet Tagora should have been intelligent by every known scientific law. But they weren’t. Scientists treated them as animals, kept them in zoos, dissected them. Years later, someone discovered a civilization on Tagora, totally unlike anything known. One of the original explorers went mad. Another shot himself.
The civilization was real, just completely non-humanoid. The pseudo-homo was something else entirely. Maybe even artificial, created by the Tagorians. But why? Nobody knows. They still can’t communicate with the Tagorians.
Gack doesn’t know if Kornei is telling the truth or messing with his head. Honestly, neither do I. The Strugatskys loved dropping these unsettling details that make you question everything.
Enter Dramba
Back in his study, Kornei asks Gack if he’s bored. Gack’s answer is perfect: “A man’s in a trench under fire, is he bored?”
Then Kornei opens a wall and behind it stands a two-and-a-half-meter freak with enormous shoulders, no neck, a visor over his face, and things sticking out of his head that could be headlights or ears. Gack admits that if he hadn’t been in uniform, he would have run. Even in uniform he wanted to run, but his legs wouldn’t move.
The freak speaks in a deep bass: “Greetings, Kornei.” This is Dramba, an ancient robot that used to travel with Kornei’s father to dangerous planets. Kornei transfers Dramba to Gack’s command. Dramba raises his arms to the ceiling in greeting and booms: “I await your orders, Gack.”
The Writing on the Wall
And then, the quiet twist. Earlier in the chapter, Gack discovered a mysterious corridor with a painted door. He saw three imperial parachutists walk out of a wall in full combat gear and vanish through that door. Terrifying.
But next to the door, someone had written on the wall. Mathematical formulas, and one word in Alayan: “therefore.” Six lines, mostly math. But written in Gack’s language.
He’s not alone. Someone else from Giganda has been here. Or is here now.
So in the middle of the night, Gack sneaks downstairs and writes underneath the formulas: “Who are you, friend?”
That’s where Chapter 3 ends. And honestly, that’s such a Strugatsky move. You get all this spectacle, robots, alien museums, houses that fight you, and then the real hook is six lines of math on a wall.
Previous: Chapter 2 - Waking Up on a New World