The Kid from Hell Chapter 4 - Private Dramba
A Walk Through an Empty World
Chapter 4 switches to third person and takes us outside, into the open. Gack and Dramba are walking along a deserted road on Earth’s plains. The sun is up, grasshoppers are screaming, and the road stretches from one horizon to the other in a perfectly straight line.
But this is not a normal road. It’s made of some dense rubber-like material, cool to the touch, no dust, no tire marks. Nothing. Dramba explains it used to be a self-moving road, over twenty meters wide. People stood on it and it carried them. It flowed, slow at the edges, fast in the center.
Now it’s dead. Dried out. Shrunk to a fraction of its former size.
Eighty Years of Silence
This walk is where we learn just how much Earth has changed. Dramba lays it out in his flat monotone. The roads stopped moving. The sky used to be full of flying machines, now it’s empty. The fields that used to grow wheat taller than him are now bare plains. And the radio signals, hundreds per second across the entire spectrum, are gone. Just atmospheric noise.
Dramba says something that hits hard: “I belong to an earlier world. The world has changed.”
Gack asks if maybe the world is sick. Dramba doesn’t understand the question. And honestly, that might be the most telling response. A robot built for a thriving civilization can’t even process the idea that the civilization might have collapsed. Or evolved into something unrecognizable.
Then something huge rises from beyond the horizon, blue-gray, like a sail of impossible proportions. It arcs across the sky and melts away. Neither of them knows what it is. Dramba admits there was nothing like it before. That’s unsettling. When even the old robot is confused, you know things have changed in ways nobody expected.
Gack the Drill Sergeant
Back on the walk home, Gack shifts into a mode he understands. Military mode. He starts calling Dramba “Private Dramba” and teaches him basic soldier protocol. Attention. At ease. Yes, sir, corporal, sir.
Dramba picks it up instantly. Heels together, chest out, palms against thighs. Gack even makes him lower his ear-sensors on the “at ease” command. The robot complies without argument, just notes he won’t be able to see as well.
Then Gack orders him to run thirty laps around a hill. And this is where the chapter gets wild.
The Blur
Dramba starts running, and at first it’s strange but graceful, these enormous leaps where he hangs in the air. Smooth enough that a pot of water on his head wouldn’t spill.
Then Gack yells at him to go faster.
Dramba’s legs disappear. Literally. Instead of legs, there’s just a cloudy blur under his torso, like a propeller at full speed. The ground can’t handle it. A deep furrow tears open behind him. The air whistles. Dirt flies.
And then it’s over. Dramba is standing at ease again. Not even warm. Like nothing happened.
Gack’s reaction is pure soldier: with a squad of these guys, you’d make any enemy sweat. He’s dreaming of military advantage while standing on a planet that abandoned war centuries ago.
The Test at the Obelisk
Here’s the key scene. On top of the hill stands a granite obelisk, a monument over a heroes’ grave from the last war, discovered by archaeologists a hundred years ago.
Gack has been trying to figure out two things the entire chapter. First, will Dramba truly obey him over Kornei? He tested this earlier through conversation, trying to trick Dramba into revealing whether he’s transmitting back to Kornei. The robot says no, he has no such instructions. Whether that’s true, Gack can’t be sure.
Second, is Kornei watching? Is there some kind of surveillance? Dramba says no contact. But Gack needs proof, not words.
So he comes up with a terrible test. He orders Private Dramba to knock over the obelisk.
The Moral Weight
What makes this scene great is Gack’s internal struggle before he gives the order. He knows this is wrong. These are soldiers buried here. Heroes. He saw how they fought in films Kornei showed him. He respects them, maybe the only Earth people he truly respects, because they were warriors like him.
He thinks about what his commander Leopard would say. He decides Leopard would be just as torn. Anyone with real honor would be.
But Gack is a soldier doing his duty. He needs to know if this robot will truly follow his orders, and he needs to know if Kornei will come running to stop it. If nobody intervenes, he has his answer on both counts.
He gives the order.
Dramba walks to the obelisk. His hands sink into the earth like shovels. His legs swell up, shorten, turn into thick cylinders. The hill trembles. The granite creaks and tilts.
And Gack can’t take it.
He screams “Stop!” over and over, swearing in Earth language and Alayan, yelling even though Dramba already stopped the moment he heard the first command. Then Gack walks around the obelisk on shaking legs, touches the granite with trembling fingers. Everything looks the same, except for two holes in the ground. He kicks dirt into them furiously, covering up the evidence.
What This Chapter Tells Us
This is Gack at his most complex. He’s not just a brute. He has a code of honor, real respect for fallen soldiers, even enemy soldiers from a civilization he barely understands. But his survival instinct and military training override that respect, at least until the moment of truth.
He got his answer. Dramba obeys. Nobody came running to stop him. Maybe Kornei really isn’t watching every move.
But at what cost? Gack almost desecrated a war memorial to test a theory. And the fact that he couldn’t go through with it, that he stopped it himself, tells us something important about who Gack really is underneath the soldier act.
The Strugatskys are showing us a man trapped between two identities. The loyal soldier who needs intelligence and obedience from his assets. And the human being who can’t bring himself to dishonor the dead. Chapter 4 is where those two sides collide head-on.
Previous: Chapter 3 - Life on Another Planet