Monday Begins on Saturday

Chapter I

About two o’clock in the afternoon, when the input equipment breaker blew again, the telephone rang. Modest Matveevich Kamnoedov, Deputy Director of Administration and Plant, was on the line.

“Privalov,” he said severely, “why are you not at your post again?”

“What do you mean, not at my post?” I said in a hurt tone. “My day turned out to be particularly busy, and I forgot everything else.”

“You will be noted down for that,” said Modest Matveevich. “You were due here with me for your instruction five minutes ago.”

“I’ll be switched,” I said, and hung up.

I turned off the machine, took off my lab coat and reminded the girls not to forget to turn off the power. The wide corridor was empty; a blizzard blew behind the frosted windows. Putting on my jacket on the run, I hurried to the plant department.

Modest Matveevich, in his shiny suit, awaited me regally in his private reception room. Behind him, a small gnome with hairy ears was running his finger through a page of a monstrous ledger, looking both dismal and diligent.

“You, Privalov, you are like some sort of homunculus,” pronounced Modest. “Never in your place.”

Everyone tried to maintain only the nicest of relations with Modest Matveevich, inasmuch as he was a man of power, unbending and monumentally ignorant. Therefore, I barked, “Yes, sir,” and clicked my heels.

“Everyone must be at his post,” continued Modest. “Always. And there you are with a higher education, wearing glasses and growing a beard, yet you can’t seem to grasp this simple theorem.”

“It won’t happen again!” I said, bulging my eyes.

“I will hold you to that,” said Modest Matveevich, softening. He drew out a sheet of paper from his pocket and looked at it a while. “So then, Privalov,” he said finally, “today you will replace the man in charge. Watching over the Institute during a holiday is a responsible duty. There’s more to it than pressing push buttons. In the first place—we have the fire precautions. That’s number one. No auto-combustion is to be allowed. You will see to it that all the production areas entrusted to you have the power switched off. You will see to it personally, without any of your doublings and triplings. Without any of your facsimiles. At any inkling of combustion factors, you will call extension oh-one at once and take preventive measures yourself. Take this alarm horn for calling the fire brigade for such a contingency….” He handed me a platinum whistle stamped with an inventory number. “Likewise, nobody’s to be let in. Here is a list of persons allowed the use of the laboratories at night, but they are not to be let in either, on account of it being a holiday. There’s not to be a single living soul in the Institute. The entry and exit demons are to have a spell cast on them. Do you grasp the situation? Living souls are not to be permitted in, and all others are not to be permitted out. Because there was a precedent. One of the devils escaped and stole the moon. A widely known incident, which was even recorded in the movies.” He looked at me meaningfully and suddenly asked for my documents.

I obeyed. He looked at my pass with deep attention, returned it, and pronounced, “Everything is in order. Actually, I had a suspicion that you might still be a double. So much for that. Well then, at fifteen hundred-zero-zero, in accordance with labor laws, the working day will end, and everyone will deposit with you the keys to all production areas. After which, you will personally inspect the territory. Thereafter, you will conduct tours every three hours with regard to auto-combustion. You will visit the vivarium not less than twice during the period of your watch. If the supervisor is drinking tea, you will note that down. There have been signs: it’s not tea that he is drinking there. Acknowledge the above in all respects. Your post is in the director’s reception room. You can rest on the couch. Tomorrow at sixteen hundred-zero-zero, you will be replaced by Pochkin, Volodia, from the laboratory of comrade Oira-Oira. Have you got that?”

“Entirely,” I said.

“I will be calling you during the night and tomorrow. Personally. A checkup is also possible by the manager of Industrial Relations.”

“I understand,” said I, looking through the list.

The first thereon was the director of the Institute, Janus Poluektovich Nevstruev, with a penciled note: TWO EX. Next came Modest Matveevich himself. The third was the manager of Industrial Relations, Cerber Roverovich Demm, and then came names that I had never seen before.

“Is something beyond you?” inquired Modest Matveevich, jealously following my perusal.

“Here,” I said ponderously, stabbing my finger at the list, “comrades are present in the number of… mmm… twenty-one, not known to me personally. I would like to go over these names with you personally.” I looked him straight in the eye and added firmly, “Just in case.”

“It’s all correct,” he said condescendingly. “It’s just that you are not au courant, Privalov. The persons listed, starting with number four through number twenty-five, last and inclusive, have been admitted to night work posthumously. In recognition of past contributions. Now do you have it?”

I was still a little dazed, as getting used to it all was yet a bit much for me.

“Assume your post,” Modest Matveevich said grandiosely. “As for me, and also in the name of the administration, I congratulate you, Privalov, with the coming New Year, and wish you, in that new year, every success both in your work and in your personal life.”

I, in turn, wished him corresponding successes and went out into the hall.

Having learned yesterday that I had been designated to stand watch, I was pleased as I intended to finish a computation for Roman Oira-Oira. But now I felt that the matter was not all that simple. The prospect of spending the night at the Institute suddenly appeared in an altogether different light. I had already stayed late at work on previous occasions when the economy-minded personnel left in charge had turned off every four out of five lights in the halls and I had to grope my way out past startled, furry shapes. At first, this sort of thing had a heavy impact on me, then I became used to it. Then I became unused to it again the time when, passing along the main hall, I heard behind me the measured clack, clack, clack of claws on the parquet floor, and turning, discovered a certain phosphorescent animal running unequivocally along my tracks. True, when they took me down off the cornice, it developed that it was an ordinary live dog belonging to one of my colleagues. The colleague came to apologize, and Oira-Oira read me a scathing lecture on the evils of superstition, but nevertheless some sort of unpleasant sediment remained in my soul. First thing, I thought, was to cast the proper spell on the demons.

At the entrance to the director’s reception room, I met up with the gloomy Victor Korneev. He nodded at me glumly and started to pass me by when I caught him by the sleeve.

“Well?” said the rude Korneev, stopping.

“I am on watch, today,” I informed him.

“Too bad about you,” said Korneev.

“You really are a boor, Victor,” I said. “Here is where I part company with you.”

He tugged at the turtleneck of his sweater with a finger, and contemplated me with interest.

“Then what will you do?” he asked.

“I’ll find something,” I said, somewhat taken aback.

Suddenly, he came alive.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “Is this your first watch?”

“Yes.”

“Aha,” said Victor. “And how do you intend to proceed?”

“In accordance with instructions,” I replied. “I’ll cast the spell on the demons and lie down to sleep. That’s with regard to auto-combustion. And where are you off to?”

“Well, there’s company coming together over at Vera’s,” said Victor indefinitely. “And what’s this?” He took my list. “Oh, the Dead Souls…

“I’ll not let anyone in,” I said, “neither the live nor the dead.”

“A correct decision,” said Victor. “The very essence of correctness. But keep an eye on my laboratory. I’ll have a double working there.”

“Whose double?”

“Mine, naturally. Who is going to give me his? I locked him in there; here, take the key, since you are on watch.”

I took the key.

“Listen, Victor. Up to ten o’clock or so, he can carry on, and then I’ll switch everything off. That is in accordance with the legislation.”

“All right, we’ll see about it then. Have you seen Eddie?”

“No, I haven’t,” I said. “And don’t snow me. Ten o’clock—all the power goes off.”

“Did I say anything against it? Power off and welcome. The whole town, for all I care.”

At which point the reception-room door opened and Janus Poluektovich came out into the hall.

“So,” he enunciated, seeing us.

I bowed respectfully. It was obvious from the expression on his face that he had forgotten my name.

“Please,” he said, handing me keys. “You are standing watch, if I am not mistaken…. By the way”—he hesitated—“Did I talk to you yesterday?”

“Yes,” I said. “You came by the Electronics section.”—He nodded. “Yes, yes, indeed… we were talking about trainees…”

“No,” I contradicted respectfully. “Not quite. It was about your letter to Centracademprov. About the peripheral equipment.”

“Oh, so that’s it,” he said. “Well, all right…. I wish you a quiet watch…. Victor Pavlovich, may I have your attention a minute?”

He took Victor under the arm and led him off down the hall. I went into the reception room. There the second Janus Poluektovich was locking up the safes. Seeing me, he said, “So,” and resumed clicking his keys. This was Janus-A, as I had learned to distinguish somewhat between them. Janus-A looked somewhat younger, was a bit standoffish, always correct, and laconic. It was said that he worked hard, and the people who knew him had been insisting for a long time that this mediocre administrator was slowly but surely turning into an outstanding scientist. Janus-U, on the other hand, was always gentle, very attentive, and had the strange habit of unfailingly asking, “Were we talking yesterday?” It was hinted that he had begun to slip badly of late, although remaining a scientist of world renown. Nevertheless, Janus-A and Janus-U were one and the same man. That’s just the part that wouldn’t fit in my head. There seemed something arbitrary about that.

Janus-A clicked his last lock, gave me some of the keys, and left with a frigid farewell. I sat down at the reviewer’s table, laid the list in front of me, and rang up the Electronics Department. No one answered—apparently the girls had already left. It was fourteen hours and thirty minutes.

At fourteen hours and thirty-one minutes, the renowned Feodor Simeonovich Kivrin barged into the room breathing heavily, the parquet creaking under his weight. This was the great magus and wizard, who headed the Department of Linear Happiness. Feodor Simeonovich was famed for his incorrigible optimism and faith in a beautiful future. He had a very stormy past. During the reign of Ivan Vasilievich the Terrible, the retainers of Maliuta Skuratov burned him, joking and jesting, in a wooden steambath as a sorcerer; in the reign of Alexis Mikhailovich the Quiet, they beat him mercilessly with cudgels, and burned the entire collection of his manuscripts on his bare back; during the reign of Peter the Great, he rose at first as a learned chemist and mining expert, but somehow displeased the prince Romodanovsky and wound up condemned to hard labor at the Tula gun works, whence he fled to India, traveled a great deal, was bitten by poisonous snakes and crocodiles, easily transcended Yoga, returned to Russia at the height of the Pugachev rebellion, when he was accused of doctoring the insurgents, was de-nostriled, and exiled to Solovetz in perpetuity. At Solovetz he continued to have a myriad of difficulties until he was picked up by SRITS, where he soon became head of a department.

“Greetings!” he boomed, laying down before me the keys to his laboratories. “P-poor chap, h-how did you get stuck like that? Y-you should be celebrating on a night like this. I’ll call Modest Matveevich. Such n-nonsense; I’ll stand watch myself.” -

It was evident that the idea had just bit him and he was all fired up with it.

“O.K. Where is his phone number? D-damnation, can’t even remember telephone numbers. . One fifteen or five eleven…”

“No, no, Feodor Simeonovich, no thank you!” I exclaimed. “It’s not necessary. I was looking forward to getting some work done.”

“Ah, to work! That’s a different in-matter! That’s ggood, that’s g-great, you are a f-fine young man! M-me—I don’t know a damn thing about electronics…. I sh-should study! Or else all this rn-magic is nothing b-but words, old s-stuff, hocus-p-pocus, with psi-fields and primitivism… granddaddy imitators.

Right there, without moving a step, he created two large pale yellow apples, gave me one, bit a half right out of the other, and proceeded to crunch on it juicily.

“D-damnation, made a wormy one again…. How’s yours—good? That’s g-good… I’ll d-drop by to see you again l-later, Sasha, as I just d-don’t get this system of the management…. Just give me t-time to nab some v-vodka and I’ll be by again…. There is that twenty-ninth instruction in your machine…. Either th-the machine is lying or I don’t understand something I’ll bring you a d-detective story—Gardner’s. You do read English? Ggood, the son-of a-gun writes really well! He has that P-Perry Mason, the tough lawyer, you know! Then I’ll give you something else from science-fiction, some A-Asimov or B-Bradbury…

He went over to the window and said with immense delight, “B-blizzard, devil take it! I just I-love it!”

Cristobal Joseevich Junta came in, slim and elegant wearing a mink coat. Feodor Simeonovich turned around.

“Ah, C–Cristo!” he exclaimed. “B-behold, that cretin Kamnoedov j-jailed this young chap to stand w-watch on New Year’s Eve. Shall we liberate him? The two of us can stay here, r-reminisce on the old days, have a d-drink or two? W-why should he suffer? He should be out there, cutting capers with the girls. .

Junta placed the keys on the table and said negligently, “Association with girls brings pleasure only on those occasions when it is achieved through the surmounting of obstacles…”

“There you go!” roared Feodor Shneonovich. “Much blood, in-many songs have f-flowed for the charming ladies…. How does that go again?… Only he attains his purpose who knows not the word for “fear”. .”

“Exactly,” said Junta. “Further—I can’t stand charity.”

“He can’t stand ch-charity! And wh-who wheedled Odemantiev from me? Enticed this lab technician from me! Now you have to put up a b-bottle of champagne, n-no less…. No, listen, n-no champagne! Amontillado! You still have some left from the Toledo reserves?”

“They are waiting for us, Feodor,” Junta reminded him.

“T-true…. I still have to f-find a tie… and felt boots… We won’t get a taxi. We’re off, Sasha. D-don’t get bored… ”

“On New Year’s Eve, the watch in the Institute does not get bored,” Junta said softly, “especially a novice.”

They went toward the door; Junta let Feodor Simeonovich go first, and before exiting, looked at me out of the corner of his eye. Precipitately he traced Solomon’s Star with his finger on the wall. It glowed and began to fade like the trace on an oscilloscope. I spit thrice over my left shoulder.

Cristobal Joseevich Junta, head of the Meaning of Life Department, was a remarkable man but apparently completely heartless. Long ago, in his early youth, he was for a long time the Grand Inquisitor, and has to date retained some of the mannerisms. He carried out most of his unspeakable experiments either on himself or on his co-workers, and this had already been discussed in outraged tones in my presence at the union meeting. He was involved in studies of the meaning of life, but had not made any extraordinary progress, though he did obtain some interesting results when he proved, on a theoretical basis, that death is not an invariant attribute of life. That particular latest discovery was also the subject of outraged opposition at the philosophical seminar. Almost no one was allowed in his office, and disturbing gossip went about the Institute that he had a multitude of intriguing items there. They said that the corner was occupied by a magnificently executed stuffed figure of one of Cristobal Joseevich’s old friends, an S.S. führer, in full dress uniform, with monocle, ceremonial dagger, iron cross, oak leaves, and other such appurtenances. Junta was an excellent taxidermist. According to Cristobal Joseevich, so was the standartenführer. But Cristobal Joseevich was sooner. He liked to be a sooner in anything he undertook. Neither was a certain amount of skepticism foreign to him. A huge sign hung in one of his laboratories: Do we need ourselves? An uncommon man indeed.

At exactly three o’clock, and in accordance with the labor laws, the doctor of science, Ambrosi Ambruosovitch Vibegallo (Vibegallo has the connotation in Russian of “running out in front”) brought in his keys. He was dressed in felt boots with leather soles and a coachman’s parka whose collar could not contain his unkempt grayish beard. He’ cut his hair as though with a pot, so that no one ever saw his ears.

“Concerning…” he said, approaching. “I could be having something hatch out today. In the laboratory, that is. You should., eh… have it looked at. I have laid in supplies for him—that is, bread, maybe five loaves, a couple of buckets of steamed bran. So, then, when be finishes eating all that, he’ll start running about. So you, mon cher, you might give me a buzz.”

He laid down a bundle of warehouse keys, and stared at me with his mouth open as if struggling with some inner conflict. He had strange translucent eyes and there was birdseed in his beard.

“Where should I buzz you?” I asked.

I disliked the man thoroughly. He was a cynic and a fool to boot. The work he performed, for three hundred and fifty rubles a month, could boldly be called eugenics, but no one called it that-out of reluctance to get involved. This Vibegallo insisted that all the troubles that were came from unsatisfied desires, and if man was given everything, such as plenty of bread and steamed bran, then you’d not have a man, but an angel. He pushed this uncomplicated idea in tireless ways, waving classical tomes out of which he tore citations by their bloody roots, leaving out and extirpating anything that did not suit his purpose. At one time, the Learned Council fell back under the press of his overwhelming and primeval demagogy and the Vibegallo concept was included in the plan.

Acting strictly in line with the plan, diligently measuring his accomplishments in percentages of completion, never forgetting budgets and productivity as well as keeping an eye on practical applications, Vibegallo laid out three experimental models; model of Man, totally unsatisfied; model of Man, unsatisfied stomachwise; and model of Man, completely satisfied. The totally unsatisfied anthropoid matured first—he’d hatched two weeks before. The miserable creature, covered like Job with boils, half decomposed, tortured with all the known and unknown ailments, suffering from heat and cold simultaneously, wandered out into the hall, filled the Institute with the sounds of its inchoate complaints, and expired. Vibegallo was triumphant. Now one could consider it a proved fact that if a man was not fed and given water, was not doctored, then he could be considered to be unhappy—and might even die. As this one had.

The Learned Council was shocked. Vibegallo’s undertaking was turning out to have a very dark side. A commission was instituted to review his work. But he, in no way shaken, presented two depositions, from which it developed that three of his lab technicians took leave yearly to work in the local SOVKHOZ, and, secondly, that he, Vibegallo, had once been a prisoner of the tsar and was now a regular lecturer on popular topics both in the city auditorium and the environs. While the stunned commission was attempting to make sense of the logic in all this data, Vibegallo unhurriedly shipped four truckloads of herring heads from the fish-food factory (as a matter of proper communications with the production sector) intended for the maturing model of Man, unsatisfied stomachwise. The commission was composing a report, and the Institute was fearfully waiting the coming developments. Vibegallo’s neighbors on the same floor were taking leaves of absence at their own expense.

“Where shall I buzz you?” I asked.

“Buzz me? At home! Where else on New Year’s Eve? Morality is what we need. My good man, New Year’s Eve should be celebrated at home. That’s our way—n’est pas?”

“I know it’s your home. What’s the number?”

“Look it up in the book. Are you literate? Then look it up, in the book, that is. We have no secrets, like some others. En mase.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll buzz you.”

“Do buzz me, mon cher. And if he should start in biting, then you can put the clamps on him. Don’t be bashful. C’est Ia vie.”

I gathered my nerve and muttered, “We haven’t drunk our toast to the familiar relationship.”

“Pardon?”

“Never mind, I was just talking,” I said.

He looked at me for some time with his translucent eyes in which nothing at all was expressed, and then pronounced, “Well, if it’s nothing; then that’s good. Congratulations on the coming holiday. Be well. Au revoir, that is.” He pulled on his earmuffed cap and left.

I opened up the ventilator in a hurry. Roman Oira-Oira flew in wearing a green overcoat with a mutton collar, twitched his hump nose, and inquired, “Vibegallo was through?”

“He was through,” I said.

“Mmm, yes,” he said. “That’s some herring! Hold on to the keys. You know where he dumped one of the trucks? Right under Gian Giacomo’s windows. Directly under his office. A New Year’s gift. I think I’ll have a cigarette with you…”

He fell into the huge leather armchair, unbuttoning his coat, and lighted up.

“Consider this,” he said. “Given: The odor of herring marinade, intensity sixteen microlers, volume—“ He looked around the room. “Say, but you can figure that yourself. The year is in transition, Saturn is in Libra. Refine!”

I scratched behind the ear.

“Saturn… why are you giving me Saturn…? What about the magistatum vector?

“That, chum,” said Oira-Oira, “that you have to do yourself…”

I scratched behind the other ear, estimated the vector, and pronounced, stuttering, the acoustic enabler (incantation). Oira-Oira pinched his nose. I pulled two hairs out of my eyebrow (very painful and stupid) and polarized the vector.

The smell increased some more.

“Bad,” Oira-Oira rebuked. “Can’t you see that the ventilator is open?”

“Ah,” I said, “that’s right.”

I took divergence into account and also the rotation, attempted to solve the Stokes equation in my head, became confused, pulled two more hairs, breathing through the mouth, checked the smell, and recited the Auers incantation. I was prepared to pull another hair, when it became evident that the reception room was aired out in a natural way, and Roman advised me to close the ventilator and economize on my eyebrows.

“Mediocre,” he said. “Let’s try materialization.”

We were busy with materialization for a while. I made pears and Roman insisted that I eat them. I refused, and he ordered me to make more. “You’ll work until you’ll make something edible,” he kept saying. “This stuff you can give to Modest. As his name implies, he’s our human incinerator.” Finally, I concocted a real pear, large, yellow, soft as butter, and as bitter as genuine. I ate it and Roman allowed me to rest.

At this point, the baccalaureate of black magic, Magnus Feodorovich Redkin, brought in his keys, looking obese, customarily preoccupied, and hurt. He obtained his baccalaureate three hundred years ago for inventing the invisibility socks. Since then, he has been improving them over and over. The socks became culottes, and then pants, and now they are referred to as trousers. Still, he remained unable to make them work properly. At the last session of the seminar on black magic, when he made his serial presentation “On Certain Novel Aspects of the Redkin Invisibility Trousers,” he was once more overtaken by disaster. During the demonstration of the updated model, something in its inner workings stuck, and the trousers, with a bell-like click, became invisible themselves, instead of their wearer. It was most embarrassing. However, Magnus Feodorovich worked mostly on a dissertation whose subject sounded something like “The Materialization and Linear Naturalization of the White Thesis, as an Argument of the Sufficiently Stochastic Function Representing the Not Quite Imaginable Human Happiness.”

Here he had achieved significant and important results, from which it followed that humanity would be literally swimming in not quite imaginable happiness, if only the White Thesis itself could be found, and most importantly if we could understand what it is and where it could be found.

Mention of the White Thesis could be found only in Ben Beczalel’s diaries. It was alleged that he distilled it as a by-product of some alchemical reaction, and not having the time to waste on such trifles, he built it into some apparatus of his as an auxiliary subsystem. In one of his last memoirs, written while he was already in prison, Ben Beczalel proclaimed, “And can you imagine? That White Thesis did not come up to my expectations, not at all. And when I comprehended what use could have been made of it—I am referring to the happiness of all men, no matter how many—I had already forgotten where I had inserted it.”

The Institute numbered seven apparatus that had once belonged to Ben. Redkin had disassembled six of them down to the last bolt and had not found anything special. The seventh apparatus was the sofa-translator. But Victor Korneev had laid his hands on the sofa, and the blackest suspicions had crept into Redkin’s simple soul. He began to spy on Victor. Victor became instantly incensed. They quarreled, became confirmed enemies, and remained such.

Magnus Feodorovich was friendly toward me as a representative of the hard sciences, though he criticized my friendship “with that plagiarist.” Altogether Redkin was not a bad fellow, very hard working, very persistent, and totally lacking in the grasping instincts. He carried out an immense work, collecting a gigantic collection of the multifarious kinds of happiness. There you could find the simplest of negative definitions (“Happiness is not found in money”), the simplest positive definitions (“The highest satisfaction is in complete plenty, success, recognition”), casuistic definitions (“Happiness is the absence of unhappiness”), and paradoxical definitions (“The most happy of all be the fools, the imbeciles, the dumb, and the unsightly, as they know not the stabs of conscience, fear not ghosts or any of the unliving, are not struck by the terror of impending events; neither are they seduced by the hopes of future bliss”).

Magnus Feodorovich laid down a small box with his key, and looking at us under his eyebrows, said diffidently, “I found yet another definition.”

“What is it?” I said.

“Something like verse. But without rhymes. Do you want to hear it?”

“Of course we do,” said Roman.

Magnus Feodorovich took out a notebook and read haltingly:

“Didn’t understand a thing,” said Roman. “Let me see it with my own eyes.”

Redkin gave him his notebook and clarified, “It’s Christopher Log. From the English.”

“Excellent verse,” said Roman.

Magnus Feodorovich sighed. ‘Some say one thing, others—another.”

“It’s hard,” I said sympathetically.

“Isn’t that the truth? How are you going to combine all that? To hear a maiden’s song… not just any song, but the maiden must be young, not on his way, and on top of that she would be singing after inquiring the way from him…. How can that be? How can you set up an algorithm for such things?”

“Very iffy,” I said. “I wouldn’t undertake it.”

“There you are!” took up Magnus Feodorovich. “And you are our computer facility director. Who then could do it?”

“What if there can’t be any such thing?” said Roman, sounding like a provocateur in a ffim.

“How’s that?”

“Happiness.”

Magnus Feodorovich was instantly offended.

“How can there not be any,” he said with dignity, “when I myself have experienced it many a time?”

“By changing a penny for a shilling?” asked Roman.

Magnus Feodorovich became even more offended and tore the notebook out of his hands.

“You are still too young—“ he began.

But at this juncture there was a roar, a crack, a flash of flame, and a stench of sulphur. Merlin appeared in the middle of the reception room.

“Good God!” said Oira-Oira in English, rubbing his eyes. “Canst thou not come in by the usual way as decent people do? Sir. .” he added.

“Beg thy pardon,” Merlin said smugly, and looked at me with a satisfied mien. I must have been very pale, as I was very much afraid of auto-combustion.

Merlin straightened his moth-eaten mantle, threw a bunch of keys on the table, and pronounced, “Did you notice the weather lately, sirs?”

“As forecast,” said Roman.

“Exactly, Sir Oira-Oiral Exactly as forecast!”

“It’s a useful device, the radio,” said Roman.

“I don’t listen to the radio,” said Merlin. “I have my own methods.” He shook the hem of his mantle and rose a meter above the floor.

“The chandelier,” I said. “Be careful.”

Merlin looked at the chandelier and began, completely out of context, “I cannot forget, dear sirs, how last year, I and Sir Chairman of the Regional Soviet, comrade Pereyaslavski…”

Oira-Oira yawned agonizingly, and I felt very dejected too. Merlin probably would have been worse than Vibegalo, if he weren’t so archaic and self-assured. Due to someone’s absentmindedness, he had succeeded in promoting himself into a directorship of the Department of Prophecies and Forecasting, because in all of his forms he had written about his unremitting struggles with Yankee imperialism even as far back as the early Middle Ages, and attaching to them notarized copies of the appropriate pages from Mark Twain. Subsequently, he was transferred to his proper place as director of the weather bureau and now, even as a thousand years ago, he occupied himself with foretelling atmospheric phenomena—both by magical means and on the basis of the behavior of tarantulas, the increase in rheumatic pains, and the tendency of Solovetz pigs to lie down in the mud or to arise therefrom. As a matter of fact, the basic sources of his prognoses were the crudest intercepts of radio forecasts, carried out by means of a simple detector receiver, which, it was rumored, he stole in the twenties from a Solovetz exhibit of the work of young technicians. He was a great friend of Naina Kievna, and the two of them spent their time together collecting and broadcasting rumors about the appearance of a gigantic hairy woman in the forests, and the capture of a co-ed by a snowman from Elbrus. It was also said that, from time to time, he took pad in the night vigils at Bald Mountain with H.M. Viy, Brutus, and other hooligans.

Roman and I kept quiet and waited for him to disappear. But he, wrapping himself in his mantle, made himself comfortable under the chandelier, and droned on with his tale about how he and comrade Pereyaslavski traveled about the region on a tour of inspection. The entire story, which had become obnoxious to everybody, was pure hocum, a graceless and gratuitous paraphrase of Mark Twain. He spoke of himself in the third person, while occasionally, in confusion, called the chairman King Arthur.

“And so, the Chairman of the Regional Soviet and Merlin set off on their journey and came to the beekeeper, Hero of Labor, Sir Otshelnilcov, who was a good knight and a renowned collector of honey. And Sir Otshelnikov reported on the success of his labors and treated Sir Arthur with bee venom for his arthritis. And so, Sir Chairman stayed there for three days, his arthritis quieted down, and they set out on their way, and on the way Sir Ar… Chairman said, “I have no sword.’

“’No matter,’ said Merlin. ‘I will find you a sword.’ And they came to a large lake, and Arthur saw an arm rise out of the lake…

The telephone then rang, and I seized the receiver with joy.

“Hello,” I said. “Hello, I’m listening.”

Something was mumbling in the receiver while Merlin droned on in his nasal voice, “And by the Lezhnev lake they met Sir Pellinor. However, Merlin arranged it so that Pellinor did not notice the chairman…

“Sir citizen Merlin,” I said. “Could you be a bit quieter? I can’t hear anything.

“Hello,” I said again into the phone.

“Who’s there?”

“Whom do you want?” I said, as a matter of habit.

“You will mark that down for me. You are not in a side show, Privalov.”

“My fault, Modest Matveevich. Privalov on watch, at your service.”

“All right. Report.”

“Report what?”

“Listen, Privalov. You are again behaving like I don’t know what. Whom are you talking with? Why are there others at your post? Why are there people in the Institute after the end of the working day?”

“It’s Merlin,” I said.

“Throw him out!”

“With pleasure,” I said. (Merlin, who was obviously eavesdropping, became covered with spots, said, “Bo-o-or,” and melted away.)

“With pleasure or without pleasure—that does not concern me. But there was a signal received here that the keys entrusted to you are piled in a heap on the table instead of being locked up in a box.”

Vibegallo must have informed him, I thought.

“Why are you silent?”

“It will be done.”

“Acknowledge in that form,” said Modest Matveevich. “Vigilance must be kept high. Are you up to it?”

“I’m up to it.”

Modest Matveevich said, “That’s all from here,” and hung up.

“Well, all right,” said Oira-Oira, buttoning, his green coat. “I’m off to open cans and uncork bottles. Be well, Sasha. I’ll come by again later.”

Chapter 2

Dumping the keys in my jacket pocket I set off on my first round.

Taking the front staircase, which to my memory was used only once when the most august personage from Africa came to visit, I descended into the limitless vestibule decorated with a multi-century accumulation of layers of architectural excesses, and peered into the gatehouse window. Two Maxwell macro-demons were oscillating about in its phosphorescent gloom. They were playing at the most stochastic of all games—pitch-and-toss. They occupied all their free time with this diversion. Looking more like poliomyelitis virus colonies under an electron microscope than anything else, they were huge, indescribably inept, lethargic, and dressed in worn liveries. As befit Maxwell demons, they opened and closed doors throughout all their life. They were experienced, well-trained exemplars, but one of them, the one in charge of the exit door, had reached retirement age, which was comparable to the age of the galaxy, and now and then reverted into second childhood, malfunctioning ignominiously. Thereupon, someone from Technical Maintenance would put on a driving suit, enter the gatehouse with its argon atmosphere, and bring the oldster back to reality.

Following instructions, I cast a spell on both of them, that is, I crossed the information channels and locked the input-output peripherals to myself. The demons did not react, being otherwise absorbed. One was winning, and, correspondingly, the other was losing, which greatly disturbed them, since it upset the statistical equilibrium. I covered the window with a shutter and circled the vestibule. It was damp, dark, and full of echoes. The Institute was obviously old, but apparently the building had been started at the vestibule. Bones of shackled skeletons whitened in moldy corners; somewhere water dripped in rhythmic splashes; statues in rusty armor and unnatural poses stood about in niches; shards of ancient idols were piled up to the right of the entrance, with a pair of plaster legs in boots crowning the lot. Looking sternly down from blackened portraits near the ceiling were the venerable images of old men, whose features bore obvious resemblances to Feodor Simeonovich, comrade Giacomo, and other masters. All this archaic junk should have been thrown out long ago, windows should have been cut into the walls and daylight let in, but it was all registered and inventoried, and forbidden to be sold off, by Modest Matveevich personally. Bats and flying dogs rustled in the capitals of the columns and in the gigantic chandelier, hanging from the blackened ceiling. With these, Modest Matveevich waged a never-ending struggle. He doused them with turpentine and creosote, dusted them with powder, sprayed them with hexachloroethane. They died by the thousands and pro-created by the tens of thousands. They mutated, and talking and singing variants appeared among them, while the descendants of the more ancient breeds now subsisted surely on pyrethrins, mixed with ehlorophoss. The Institute cinephotographer, Sanya Drozd, swore that he saw a vampire that looked as much like the personnel director as two peas in a pod.

Someone moaned and rattled chains in a deep niche, which exuded an icy stench. “You will kindly stop that,” I said severely.

“What is that—some kind of mysticism? You ought to be ashamed!” The niche became quiet. I straightened the crooked rug with an executive mien and mounted the stairway.

As is well known, the Institute from the outside appeared to have two stories. In reality, it had at least twelve. I had simply not gone above the twelfth floor, because the elevator was constantly under repair, and I still hadn’t learned to fly. The front with ten windows was also an optical illusion, like most fronts. The Institute stretched at least a kilometer to the right and left of the vestibule, but nonetheless all the windows decidedly faced on the same crooked street and the same grain storehouse. This amazed me thoroughly. At first I pestered Oira-Oira to explain to me how this could be reconciled with classical, or at least relativistic, concepts of space. I didn’t understand a thing from the explanations, but gradually I became adjusted to the whole thing and ceased to be amazed. I am now fully convinced that in some ten or fifteen years any schoolboy will find his way around the general theory of relativity more easily than a contemporary expert. To achieve this, it is not at all necessary to comprehend how the space-time curvature comes about, hut only to have such a concept inculcated in us from early childhood, so that it can become habitual.

The entire first floor was occupied by the Department of Linear Happiness. This was the kingdom of Feodor Simeonovich; here was the smell of apples and pine forests, here worked the prettiest girls and the handsomest young men. Here there were no gloomy perverts, experts, and adepts in black magic; here no one tore out his hair, hissing and grimacing in pain; no one muttered cutses that sounded like indecent street rhymes; no one boiled live toads and crows at midnight at the full moon on the eve of John the Baptist Day or evil-omen days. Here they worked on the basis of optimism. Here everything possible was done within the framework of white, submolecular, and infraneuron magic in order to raise the spiritual tone of each individual as well as of entire human collectives. Here they condensed and dispersed throughout the world the happiest good-natured laughter; developed, tested, and implemented behavioral and relational models that strengthened friendship and dissolved strife; distilled and sublimated extracts of grief palliatives, which did not contain a single molecule of alcohol or other narcotics. Currently they were preparing for the field trials of a portable disrupter of evil, and were designing new versions of the rarest alloys of intelligence and goodwill.

I unlocked the door to the central room and stood on the threshold admiring the working of the gigantic Children’s Laughter Still, which bore some resemblance to a Van de Graaff generator. In contrast to the generator, however, it operated in complete silence and there was a lovely smell around it. According to instructions, I had to turn off two large switches on the control panel, so that the golden glow in the room would fade, so that it would grow dark and still. In short, the instruction said I must turn off all power in this production section. I didn’t even hesitate, but backed out into the corridor and locked the door behind me. To de-energize anything in the laboratories of Feodor Simeonovich seemed to be pure sacrilege.

I went slowly along the corridor, studying the sketches on the doors to the laboratories, and met Tichon, the house brownie, at the corner. He drew and nightly changed the sketches. We exchanged handshakes. Tichon was a pleasant grayish brownie from the Ryazan oblast, exiled to Solovetz by Viy for some infraction: It seems he either didn’t greet someone properly, or refused to eat a boiled viper…. Feodor Simeonovich welcomed him, cleaned him up, cured him of chronic alcoholism—and he made his home here on the first floor. He drew superbly, in the style of Bidstrup, and was renowned among his local peers for good sense and sober comportment.

I was about to go up to the second floor, but remembered the vivarium and directed my steps to the basement. The vivarium supervisor, a middle-aged emancipated vampire by the name of Alfred, was drinking his tea. Seeing me, he attempted to hide the teapot under the table, broke the glass, reddened, and hid his eyes. I felt sorry for him.

“Congratulations on the coming New Year,” I said, pretending that I didn’t notice anything.

He coughed, covered his mouth with his palm, and replied thickly, “Thank you, and the same to you.”

“Everything in order?” I asked, surveying the rows of cages and stalls.

“Briareus broke a finger,” said Alfred.

“How did he do that?”

“Just like that. On his eighteenth right hand. He was picking his nose, turned clumsily—they are very ungainly, these hekatocheires—and broke it.”

“So we need a veterinarian,” I said.

“He’ll be all right. It’s not his first time.”

“No, we can’t leave it at that. Let’s go and see.”

We went into the depths of the vivarium, by the perch of the harpies, who looked at us with sleep-dulled eyes, by the Lernean hydra, who was dour and silent at this time of year…. The hekatoeheires—hundred-armed and fiftyheaded twins, the firstborn of Heaven and Earth—were housed in a large concrete cave guarded with heavy iron rods. Gyes and Cottus slept curled up in knots, from which protruded bluish shaved heads with closed eyes arid hairy, flaccid arms. Briareus was rocking to and fro. He was sitting on his haunches with his hand, supported by seven others, stuck out into the passage. With his ninety-two other hands, he held on to the iron rods and propped up his heads. Some of the heads were asleep.

“How is it?” I said sympathetically. “Does it hurt?”

The waking heads set up a clamor in Hellenic Greek and woke up a head that knew Russian.

“It’s awful, how it hurts,” it said. The rest stopped talking and stared at me.

I looked the finger over. It was dirty and swollen and not broken. It was simply sprained. In our gymnasium we fixed such a trauma without benefit of a doctor. I grasped the finger and jerked it toward me with all my might. Briareus howled with all of his fifty throats and fell back.

“There, there,” I said, wiping my bands with a handkerchief. “it’s all over…”

Briareus, sniveling through all his noses, peered at his finger. The near heads eagerly stretched their necks, biting the ones in front on the ears in their impatience, so they would not obstruct their view. Alfred was grinning.

“ It would do him good to have his blood let,” he said, with a long-forgotten expression, then sighed and added, “Problem is, what sort of blood does he have? Must be something just for show. Not a very viable specimen.”

Briareus got up. All fifty heads smiled blissfully. I waved at him and started on my way back. I slowed up by Koschei the Deathless. The great evildoer lived in a comfortable private cage, with rugs and bookshelves. The walls were hung with portraits of Gengbis Khan, Himmler, Catherine de Mйdicis, one of the Borgias, and another—either that of McCarthy or Goldwater. Koschei himself, dressed in a colorful robe, stood with his legs crossed before a huge lectern, reading an offset copy of The Witches Court. By way of self-accompaniment, his long fingers wove a sinister pattern: he was either turning a screw or sticking something in or ripping something off. He was kept in indefinite preliminary confinement while an interminable investigation was being conducted into his innumerable crimes. He was highly prized in the Institute, as he was concurrently employed in certain unique experiments and also as interpreter for Gorynitch the Dragon. (The latter was locked up in the boiler room, whence issued his metallic snoring and sleepy roarings.) I stood and thought about the fact that if some time in the infinitely remote future Koschei should be sentenced, then the judges, whoever they might be, would find themselves in a very strange situation; the death sentence could not be applied to a deathless criminal, and external imprisonment, considering the preceding term, he had served already.

Suddenly I was grabbed by my pants leg, and a besotted voice cried out, “What say, buddy, who’ll go against us three?”

I succeeded in wrenching free. Three vampires in the adjoining roost regarded me greedily, pressing their purplish faces against the metallic screen, which was maintained at two hundred volts.

“Crushed my hand, tough guy!” said one.

“Don’t grab,” I said. “Looking for a drubbing?”

Alfred ran in, snapping his whip, and the vampires retreated into the darkness of their cage, where they immediately began cursing in the foulest of language and playing with homemade cards.

I said to Alfred, “Well enough. It seems everything is in order. I’ll go along.”

“Happy traveling,” Alfred replied readily.

Going up the stairs, I could hear him clinking his teapot as he poured his tea. I looked into the mechanical section and checked the operation of the energy generator. The Institute was not dependent on the city for its power. Instead, after refining the principle of determinism, it was decided to utilize the well-known Wheel of Fortune source of free energy. Only a small section of the brightly polished rim of the wheel could be seen above the cement floor. Its axis was located somewhere in infinity, so that the rim looked like a conveyor belt moving out of one wall and into the other. At one time it was fashionable to write dissertations on the wheel’s radius of curvature, hut inasmuch as all of these dissertations yielded results of extremely low accuracy, on the order of ten megaparsecs, the Learned Council of the Institute passed a resolution to stop reviewing the papers on that subject, at least until such time as the creation of transgalactic means of communication would permit the expectation of raising the accuracy substantially.

Several demons from the plant department were playing at the wheel—jumping on the rim, riding to the other wall, jumping off and running back at top speed. I called them to order decisively. “You will cut that out,” I said. “This is not a sideshow, you know.” They hid behind the transformer and set to bombarding me with spitballs. I decided not to get involved with the whelps, walked along the control panels, and, verifying that all was well, ascended to the second floor.

Here everything was quiet, dark, and dusty. At the low half-open door, a feeble old soldier, dressed in a Preobrazhensk regimental uniform and tricornered hat, dozed, leaning on a long-barreled flintlock. Here was the home of the Defensive Magic Department, among whose personnel there hasn’t been a living soul for quite some time. All our old men, with the possible exception of Feodor Simeonovich, had at one time or another given it their due of infatuation. Ben Beczalel had successfully employed Golem in palace revolutions; the clay monster, impervious to poisons and bribery, guarded the laboratory and the imperial treasury as well. Giuseppe Balsamo had founded the first airborne squadron on brooms, which gave a good account of itself in the Hundred Year War engagements. However, the squadron soon fell apart when some of the witches were married and the rest took off after the regiments as canteen-keepers. King Solomon caught and spellbound a gross of afreets and hammered them into an excellent anti-elephant destroyer fire-throwing brigade. Young Cristobal Junta brought a Chinese dragon conditioned against the Moors into Charles the Great’s company, then upon learning that the Emperor was not campaigning against the Moors but the tribes of the Basques, he was enraged, and deserted.

Throughout the many-centuried history of wars, various magicians suggested the use of vampires (for night reconnaissance), basilisks (for striking the enemy with such terror that they would turn into stones), flying carpets (for dropping offal on enemy cities), living swords (for compensating inferiority in numbers), and much else. But, after World War I and after Big Bertha, poison gas, and tanks, defensive magic began to fade. Resignations spread like wildfire through the Department. The last survivor was a certain Pitirim Schwartz, an erstwhile monk and inventor of the forked musket rest, who was selflessly laboring on the jinn bomber project. The essence of the project was to drop on the enemy cities bottles with jinns who had been held imprisoned no less than three thousand years. It is well known that jinns in their free state are capable only of destroying cities or constructing palaces. A thoroughly aged jinn, reasoned Schwartz, was not about to start building palaces, and therefore things would go badly for the enemy. A definite obstacle to the realization of this concept was an insufficient supply of bottled jinns, but Schwartz counted on overcoming this through the deep dragging of the Red and Mediterranean Seas. It was said that having heard about fusion bombs and bacteriological warfare, the old man lost his psychic equilibrium, gave away the jinns be had collected to various departments, and left to study the Meaning of Life with Cristobal Junta. No one ever saw him again.

When I stopped at the doorway, the soldier looked at me out of one eye and croaked, “It’s not allowed to go in any farther,” and dozed off again. I looked over the bare junk-laden room with shards of strange models and fragments of unprofessional drawings, paused by the door to poke my shoe at the folder bearing the smudged legend Absolutely Secret. Burn Before Reading, and went on. There was no power here to switch off, and as to auto-combustion, everything that could auto-combust had already done so years ago.

The same floor contained the book archives. This was a depressing area, not unlike the vestibule but considerably larger. As to its real size, the story went that a fairly good paved highway started about half a kilometer from the entrance and ran along the bookshelves with kilometer marks on posts. Oira-Oira had walked as far as the number 19, and the enterprising Victor Korneev, searching for technical documentation on the sofa-translator, had obtained a pair of seven-league boots, and had run as far as the number 124. He would have gone farther, but his way was blocked by a squad of Danaides in stuffed vests, and armed with paving hammers. Under the supervision of fat-faced Cain, they were breaking up the asphalt and laying some sort of pipes. Over and over, the Learned Council had raised the question about constructing a high-voltage line along the highway, for transmitting the data on wire, but every positive suggestion had been turned down for lack of funds.

The repository was stuffed with the most fascinating books in all the languages of the world, past and present, from Atlantian up to and including pidgin English. But I was most intrigued by the multi-volume edition of the Book of Fates. The Book of Fates was printed in three-and-a-half-point excelsior on the finest of rice paper and contained, in chronological order, data on 73,619,024,511 intelligent individuals.

The first volume began with Pithecanthropus Ayyoukh (Born 2 Aug. 965543 B.C.; died 13 Jan. 96522 B.C. Parents Ramapithecus; wife Rarnapithecus. Children: male Add-Am; female Eihoua. Wandered as a nomad with a Ramapithecus tribe on the planes of Ararat. Ate, drank, and slept to his content. Drilled the first hole in a stone; devoured by a cave bear on one of the hunts). The last name—in the last tome of the regular edition, which came out last year was Francisco-Gaetano-Augustine-Lucia-y-Manuel-y-Josd-Miguel-y

— Augustine-Gaetano-Francisco-Trinidad and Maria Trinidad. (See): Portuguese. Anacephalon. Cavalier of the Order of the Holy Ghost; colonel of the guard.

From the editorial data it was evident that the Book of Fates was published in 1 (one) exemplar, and this last one was printed in the time of the Montgolfier Brothers. Apparently, in order to satisfy somehow the needs of contemporaries, the editorial board undertook the publication of extra irregular editions in which only the dates of birth and death were given. In one of these I found my own name. But due to the rush, errors had crept into these editions by the thousand, so that I saw to my amazement that I would die in 1611. In the eighth volume errata, they had not as yet reached my name. A special group in Prophecies and Forecasts served as consultants for the editing of the Book of Fates. The department was anemic, neglected, and unable to rid itself of the effects of the short-lived directorship of Sir Merlin. The Institute repeatedly ran a competition for the vacant post, and each time there was but one applicant—Merlin himself.

The Learned Council conscientiously reviewed the application and safely voted it down—by forty-three votes “against” and one “for.” (In accordance with tradition, Merlin was a member of the Learned Council.)

The Department of Forecasts and Prophecies occupied the whole third floor. I strolled past doors with the signs Coffee Grounds Group, Augurers Group, Pythian Group, Synoptic Group, Solitaire Group, Solovetz Oracle. There was nothing to switch off, inasmuch as the department labored by candlelight. The notation Dark is the Water in Ye Clouds had already appeared in chalk on the Synoptic Group door. Every morning, Merlin, cursing the intrigues of detractors, erased this message with a wet rag, and every night it renewed itself. In general, it was entirely unclear to me as to what it was that maintained the credibility of the Department. From time to time its workers issued reports on rather strange themes such as: “On the Eye Expression of the Augur,” or “Prediction Properties of Mocha Coffee Grounds, Vintage 1926.” Once in a while the Pythian Group succeeded in predicting something correctly, but each time they appeared so startled and intimidated by their success that the effect was entirely dissipated. Janus-U, a most sensitive individual, could not, as was often noted, control a wan smile each time he was present at the seminar sessions of the Pythians and Augurs.

On the fourth floor, I finally found something to do: I turned off the lights in the cells of the Department of Eternal Youth. There were no youths there, and its thousand-year oldsters, suffering from sclerosis, constantly forgot to switch off their lights when they left However, I suspected that the matter involved something more than just sclerosis. Many of them, to this day, feared a shock. They insisted on calling electricity “the pounder.” In the sublimation laboratory, the listless model of a perpetual youth wandered yawning, hands in its pockets, among the long tables. Its gray two-meter-long beard dragged on the floor and kept catching in the chair legs. Just in case, I put away, in the cabinet, a bottle of aqua regia that was placed on top of a stool, and started toward my own place, the electronic section.

Here was my “Aldan.” I admired it a bit for its compactness, beauty, mysteriousness, and soft highlights. The Institute had rather diverse reactions toward us. Accounting, for example, met me with open arms, and the chief accountant, smiling avidly, loaded me at once with tedious computations of pay scales and productivity. Gian Giacomo, director of the Universal Transformations Department, was also overjoyed at first, but having become convinced that Aldan was incapable of calculating even the elementary transformation of a lead cube into a gold cube, cooled off toward my electronics and granted us only rare and sporadic assignments. In contrast, there was no respite from his subordinate, and favorite pupil, Victor Korneev. Oira-Oira, too, was constantly on my back with his skull-breaking problems in irrational mathematics. Cristobal Junta, who loved to be first in everything, regularly connected his central nervous system to the machine at night, so that the next day something in his head audibly hummed and clicked, while the derailed Aldan, in some manner incomprehensible to me, switched from the binary to the ancient hexadecimal system, and, on top of that, changed its logic, totally disregarding the principle of the excluded third. Feodor Simeonovich, on the other hand, amused himself with the machine like a child with a toy. He played tick-tack-toe with it for hours, taught it Japanese chess, and in order to make it more interesting, infused it with someone’s immortal soul—which was, incidentally, quite jolly and hard working. Janus Poluektovich (I don’t remember anymore whether—A or—U) used the machine only once. He brought with him a small semitransparent box, which he connected to the Aldan. In approximately ten seconds of operation with this device, all the circuit breakers blew, and Janus Poluektovich apologized, took his box, and departed.

But, in spite of all these petty interruptions, in spite of the fact that the animated Alden sometimes printed out, “I am thinking, please don’t interrupt,” in spite of the insufficiency of spare subassemblies, and the feeling of helplessness that took hold of me when it was required to conduct a logical analysis of the “incongruent transgression in the psi-field of incubal transformation,” in spite of all that, it was devilishly interesting to work here, and I was proud of being so obviously needed. I carried out all the calculation in Oira-Oira’s work on the heredity mechanisms of hi-polar homunculi. I constructed tables of the M-field potential around the sofa-translator in the ninth dimension. I carried the routine accounting for the local fish-products factory. I computed the conceptual design for the most economic transport of the Elixir of Children’s Laughter. I even calculated the probabilities of solving the “Great Elephant,” “Government House,” and “Napoleon’s Tomb” solitaires for the players in that group, and also did all the quadratures for Cristobal Joseevich’s numerical solution method, for which accomplishment he taught me how to achieve nirvana. I was satisfied; there were not enough hours in the day, and my life was full of meaning.

It was still early—just after six. I switched on Aldan and worked a while. At nine o’clock I caught myself, turned off the power with regret, and set off to the fifth floor. The blizzard was not about to quit. It was a true New Year’s Eve storm. It howled and moaned in the old abandoned chimneys, it piled drifts in front of the windows, madly shook the infrequent street lamps.

I passed through the territory of the Plant and Administration Department. The entrance to Modest Matveevich’s reception room was interdicted with crossed six-inch girders, flanked by two huge afreets in turbans, full battle dress, and with naked sabers. Each had his nose, red and swollen from a head cold, pierced with a massive gold ring on which hung a tin inventory tag. It stank of sulphur, burned fur, and antibiotics. I stayed for some time, examining them because afreets were a rare phenomenon in our latitudes. But the one on the right, unshaved and with a black patch over his eye, began to bore into me with the other eye. He had a bad reputation, allegedly with a cannibal past, so I hurried along. I could hear him slurping his nose and smacking behind me.

All the window ventilators were open in the Department of Absolute Knowledge, because the stench from Vibegallo’s herring heads was seeping in. Snow had drifted on the sills, and puddles stood under the radiators. I closed the ventilators and strolled past the virginally clean tables of the departmental staff. New writing sets, which had not seen any ink and were stuffed with cigarette stubs, graced the desks. Strange department, this. Their motto was, “The comprehension of Infinity requires infinite time.” I didn’t argue with that, but then they derived an unexpected conclusion from it: “Therefore work or not, it’s all the same.” In the interests of not increasing the entropy of the universe, they did not work. At least the majority of them. “En masse,” as Vibegallo would say. In essence, their problem boiled down to the analysis of the curve of relative knowledge in the region of its asymptotic approach to absolute truth. For this reason, some of the colleagues were constantly busying themselves by dividing zero by zero on their desk calculators, while others were requesting assignments in infinity. From there they returned looking energetic and well fed and immediately took a leave of absence for reasons of health. In the intervals between travels, they sauntered from department to department with smoking cigarettes, taking chairs by the desks of those who were working, and recounting anecdotes about the discovery of indeterminacy by L’hфpital. They were easily recognized by their empty look, and their unique ears, which were perpetually nicked from constant shaving. During my half-year tenure in the Institute, they submitted just one problem for Aldan, and it reduced to the same old division of zero by zero without any content of absolute truth. It is possible that some of them did do something useful, but I had no information to that effect. At ten-thirty I arrived at Ambrosi Arnbruosovitch Vibegallo’s floor. Covering my face with a handkerchief and trying not to breathe through my nose, I went directly to the laboratory generally known among the colleagues as the “Maternity Ward.” Here, in retorts, as Professor Vibegallo said, were born models of the ideal man. Hatched out, that is; comprenez vous?

It was stuffy and dark in the lab. I turned on the lights. The illumination revealed smooth gray walls hung with portraits of Aesculapius, Paracelsus, and Ambrosi Ambruosovitch himself. He was depicted in a small black cap, with noble curls, and an indecipherable medal shining starlike on his chest.

An autoclave stood in the middle of the floor and another bigger one hulked in the corner. Around the central autoclave, piled on the floor, were loaves of bread, several galvanized pails with bluish slops, and a huge tank with steamed bran. Judging by the smell, the herring heads were also nearby, but I couldn’t discern where they were actually located. Silence reigned against a background of rhythmic clicks in the depths of the autoclave.

Not knowing why, I tiptoed over and looked into the viewing port. I was already nauseous from the smell, but now I felt really ill, though I didn’t see anything special: something white and shapeless slowly swaying in the greenish murk. I turned off the lights, went out, and diligently locked the door. I was troubled with vague premonitions. Only now I noticed that a thick black magic line with crude cabalistic signs was drawn around the doorsill. On looking closer, it became evident that it was conjuration against Gaki, the hungry demon of hell.

I left the domain of Vibegallo with some sense of relief and started my ascent to the sixth floor, where Gian Giacomo and his associates were occupied with the theory and practice of Universal Transformations. A colorful poster in verse hung on the stair landing, exhorting contributions to a general-interest library. The idea belonged to the local committee, but the verse was mine:

I blushed and went on. Stepping onto the sixth floor, I saw at once that the door to Victor’s lab was half open, and husky singing impinged on my ears.

Chapter 3

A while back Victor said that he was going off to a party, leaving a double in the laboratory to work. A double—that’s a very interesting item. As a rule it’s a fairly accurate copy of its creator. Let’s say a man doesn’t have enough hands—he makes up a double that is brainless, mute, who knows only how to solder contacts, or lug weights, or take dictation, but knows how to do these things very well indeed. Or he needs a model anthropoid, also brainless and mute but capable only of walking on ceilings or taking telepathgrams and doing that well. Or again, take the simplest of cases. Say the man is expecting to receive his pay, but does not wish to lose time getting it, so he sends his double in his place, who knows only to keep anyone from getting in front of him in the queue, to sign his name in the record book, and to count the money before leaving the cashier. Of course, not everyone can create doubles. I, for one, was unable to do it. So far, whatever I put together couldn’t do a thing—not even walk. There you would be standing in line with ostensible Victor and Roman and Volodia Pochkin, but there would be no one you could talk to. They would stand like stone monuments, not shifting their weight, not breathing, not blinking, and there would be nobody to ask for a cigarette.

True masters can create very complex, multiprogrammed, self-teaching doubles. It was such a superdouble that Roman sent off in my place last summer in the car. None of my friends guessed that it was not me. The double drove the car very competently, cursed when the mosquitoes bit him, and sang joyfully in chorus. Having returned to Leningrad, he dropped everybody off, turned the car in all by himself, paid for it, and disappeared right then and there before the eyes of the stunned rental agent.

At one time I thought that Janus-A and Janus-U were an original and a double. However, it was not like that. First, both directors had a passport, a diploma, passes, and other necessary documents. The most complex of doubles, on the contrary, could not have any personal identifications. At the mere sight of a government stamp on their photographs they became enraged, and immediately tore the documents to shreds. Magnus Redkin studied this mysterious characteristic for a long time, but the problem was clearly too much for him.

Further, the Januses were protein-based beings. The argument between the philosophers and the cyberneticists as to whether doubles should be regarded as living or not has still not been resolved. Most doubles were silico-organic in structure, some were based on germanium, and lately doubles composed of alumopolymers were in fashion.

And finally, and most importantly, no one ever created either Janus-A or Janus-U artificially. They were not original and copy, nor brothers or twins; they were a single man—Janus Poluektovich Nevstruev. No one in the Institute could understand it, but they knew it so well that they did not even try to understand.

Victor’s double stood, palms braced on the laboratory table, and followed the working of a small Ashby homeostat with a riveted gaze. He accompanied himself with a soft little song to a once-popular tune:

I had never heard of doubles singing before. But you could expect anything from one of Victor’s doubles. I recollect one such, which dared argue about the excessive expenditure of psychic energy with Modest Matveevich himself. And this, while the scarecrows I constructed, without legs or arms, feared him to the point of convulsion, entirely by instinct.

In the corner, to the right of the double, stood the two-speed translator, TDX-8OE, under its canvas covering. It was the inadequate product of the Kitezhgrad magitechnic factory. Next to the table stood my old friend the sofa, its restitched leather gleaming in the glare of three spotlights. A baby bath, filed with water in which a dead perch floated belly up, sat on top of the sofa. Also in the laboratory were shelves loaded with instruments, and near the door, there was a large green bottle covered with dust. In the bottle was a sealed-up jinn, and one could see him moving about in there and flashing his little eyes.

Victor’s double quit examining the homeostat, sat down on the sofa next to the bath, ogled the dead fish with the same fixed stare, and sang the following verse:

The perch maintained its status quo. Precipitately, the double plunged his arm deeply into the sofa and started to turn something there, puffing with great effort.

The sofa was a translator. It erected an M-fleld around itself, which, simply stated, converted normal reality into imaginary reality. I had experienced this myself on that memorable night when boarding with Naina Kievna, and the only thing that had saved me was that the sofa was operating at one quarter of its standard output; otherwise I would have ended up as Tom Thumb or something similar. For Magnus Redkin the sofa was a possible container of the White Thesis. For Modest Matveevich it was a museum exhibit, inventory number 1123, and any auctioning off was strictly forbidden. For Victor it was Device Number One. For this reason he stole it every night. Magnus Feodorovich, being jealous, reported this to Personnel Director Demin, while the activity of Modest Matveevich was reduced to exhortations to “note all that down.” Victor kept stealing the sofa until Janus Poluektovich took a hand—in close cooperation with Feodor Simeonovich, and with the active support of Gian Giacomo—relying on an official letter of the Academy Presidium signed personally by four academicians. They were able to neutralize Redkin completely, and press Modest Matveevich somewhat back from his entrenched position. The latter then announced that he, as the person officially accountable, didn’t want to hear any more about that matter and desired that the sofa, inventory number 1123, be placed in its own special place. Should this not be done, Modest Matveevich threatened, then everyone, including the academicians, must blame themselves. Janus Poluektovich agreed to blame himself, so did Feodor Simeonovich, and Victor quickly lugged the sofa to his laboratory.

He was a serious worker, not one of those loafers from the Department of Absolute Knowledge, and he intended to transform all the water in the seas and oceans of our planet into life-giving water. To date, it is true, he was still in the experimental stage.

The perch in the bath stirred and turned belly down. The double took his arm out of the sofa. The perch moved its fins apathetically, opened its mouth as though in a yawn, fell over on its side, and turned belly up again.

“B-beast,” said the double with much expression.

I snapped to full alertness at once. This was said with emotion. No laboratory double could talk like that. The double put his hand in his pocket, got up slowly, and saw me. We looked at each other for a few seconds.

Then I inquired sarcastically, “Working, aren’t we?”

The double looked at me dully.

“Give it up,” I said. “All is clear.”

The double was silent. He stood like a stone and didn’t blink.

“I’ll tell you what,” I said. “It’s now ten-thirty. I am giving you ten minutes. Clean up, throw out the carrion, and run along to the dance. I’ll turn the power off myself.”

The double puckered his lips into a tube and started to back up. He did this very carefully, skirting the sofa, and stopped when the lab was between us. I looked at my watch demonstratively. He mouthed an incantation. A calculator, pen, and a stack of clean paper appeared on the table. The double bent his legs so that he hung seated in the air, and started to write, looking at me fearfully now and then. It was done so naturally that I began to doubt myself. But I had a sure method for establishing the truth of the matter. Doubles were, as a rule, completely insensitive to pain. Searching in my pocket, I drew out a pair of small diagonal pliers, and snapping them meaningfully, moved toward the double. He stopped writing.

Looking him steadily in the eye, I snapped the head off a nail sticking out of the table and said, “Well?”

“Why are you pestering me?” asked Victor. “Can’t you see a man is at work?”

“But you are a double,” I said. “Don’t you dare talk back to me.”

“Get rid of the pliers,” he said.

“Stop playing the fool,” I said. “Some double!”

Victor sat on the edge of the table and tiredly rubbed his ears.

“Nothing works for me today,” he informed me. “Today I am a dumbbell. Made a double and it came out totally brainless. Dropped everything, sat down on the umclidet… the animal… I hit him in the neck and hurt my hand… and even the perch croaks systematically.”

I went over to the sofa and looked in the bath.

“What’s the matter with him?”

“How do I know?”

“Where did you get it?”

“At the market.”

I picked up the perch by the tail.

“So what do you expect? It’s an ordinary dead fish.”

“Oaf,” said Victor. “That’s water-of-life, of course!”

“A-ah,” I said as I tried to figure out how to advise him. I had but a fuzzy understanding of the mechanism of the water-of-life. Basically all I knew was derived from the well-known fairy tale of Ivan the Tsarevitch and the Gray Wolf.

The jinn in the bottle kept moving about and every so often rubbed the glass, which was dusty on the outside, with the palm of his hand.

“You could wipe the bottle, you know,” I said, not having come up with anything at all.

“What?”

“Wipe the dust off the bottle. He’s bored in there.”

“To the devil with him! Let him be bored!” Victor said absentmindedly. He shoved his hand in the sofa, and again twisted at something in there. The perch revived.

“Did you see that?” said Victor. “When I give it the maximum potential—everything works.”

“It’s an unfortunate choice of sample,” I said, guessing.

Victor extracted his arm from the sofa and stared at me.

“Unfortunate…” he said. “Sample…” His eyes took on the aspect of the double. “Sample to sample lupus…”

“Furthermore, it’s probably been frozen,” I said, growing bold.

Victor wasn’t listening.

“Where could I get a fish?” he said, looking around and slapping his pockets. “Just one little fish….”

“For what?” I asked.

“That’s right,” said Victor. “For what? If there isn’t another fish,” he pronounced thoughtfully, “why not take another water sample? Right?”

“Oh, but no,” I contradicted. “It’s no go.”

“Then what?” Victor asked eagerly.

“Trundle yourself out of here,” I said. “Leave the building.”

“Where to?”

“Wherever you like.”

He climbed over the sofa and hugged me around the chest.

“You listen to me, do you hear?” he said threateningly. “Nothing in the world is identical. Everything fits the Gaussian distribution. One water is different from another… This old fool didn’t reckon that there is a dispersion of properties…

“Hey, friend,” I called to him. “The New Year is almost here; don’t get carried away!”

He let me go, and bustled about.

“Where did I put it…? What a dope…! Where did I stick it…? Ah, here it is…” He ran toward the stool, where the umclidet stood upright. The very same one.

I jumped back toward the door and said pleadingly, “Get your wits together! It’s going on twelve! They are waiting for you! Your sweet Vera is waiting!”

“Nah,” he replied. “I sent them a double. A good double, a hefty type. -. dumb as they come. Tells jokes, does handstands, dances with the endurance of an ox.”

He turned the umclidet in his hands, estimating something, looking, calculating, and squinting with one eye.

“Out—I’m telling you! Out!” I yelled in desperation.

Victor looked at me briefly, and I fell back. The fun was over with. Victor was in the condition of a magus who, enthralled by his work, would turn those in his way into spiders, wood lice, lizards, and other quiet animals. I squatted by the bottle with the jinn and looked.

Victor froze in the classical imprecation pose involving materialization (the “Matrikhor” position), and a pink fog rose over the table; batlike shades flitted about, the calculator vanished, the paper vanished, and suddenly the whole surface of the table was covered with vessels filled with a transparent liquid. Victor thrust the umclidet at the stool without looking, and grabbed one of the vessels and studied it with great absorption. It was obvious that he was not going anywhere, anytime soon. Quickly be removed the bath from the sofa, was at the shelf in one jump, and started dragging a cumbersome copper aquavitometer to the table. I arranged myself more comfortably, rubbed clear an observation window for the jinn, when voices sounded in the corridor, accompanied by the sound of running feet and slamming doors. I jumped up and charged out of the lab.

The feeling of nighttime emptiness and darkened quiet in the huge building had vanished without a trace. Lights blazed in the corridor. Someone ran helter-skelter on the stairs; someone yelled, “Valka! The potential is falling! Get to the battery room!” Someone was shaking his coat out on the landing, flinging snow in all dfrections. Coming straight at me, bending elegantly and looking pensive, was Gian Giacomo, followed by a trotting gnome carrying a huge portfolio under his arm and a walking stick in his teeth. We bowed to each other. The great prestidigitator smelled of good wine and French scent. I didn’t dare stop him and he went through the locked door into his office. The gnome pushed through the portfolio and stick in his wake, but dived into a radiator himself.

“What the hell?” I cried, and ran to the stairs.

The Institute was stuffed to the gills with colleagues. It seemed there were even more of them than on a working day. In offices and laboratories the lights were full on, doors were wide open. The usual business hum pervaded the Institute: there was the crack of discharges, the manytoned voices dictating numbers or pronouncing incantations, the staccato pounding of calculators and typewriters. Above it all was the rolling and victorious roar of Feodor Simeonovich: “That’s good! That’s great! You are a good man, old buddy. But who’s the imbecile who plugged in the generator?”

I was struck in the back with a sharp corner and grabbed the railing. I was enraged. It was Volodia Pochkin and Eddie Amperian, who were carrying a coordinate-measuring apparatus that weighed half a ton up to their floor.

“Oh, Sasha?” said Eddie, as friendly as could be. “Hello, Sasha.”

“Sasha, make way!” hollered Volodia, backing up. “Swing it around, swing it around!”

I seized him by the collar.

“Why are you at the Institute? How did you get here?”

“Through the door, through the door! Let go…!” said Volodia. “Eddie, more to the right. Can’t you see it’s not getting through?”

I let him go and darted off to the vestibule. I was burning with administrative wrath. “I’ll show you,” I grated, jumping four steps at a time. “I’ll show you how to goof off. I’ll show you how to let anyone in without checking him out!”

The In and Out macro-demons, instead of tending to their business, were playing roulette, shaking with a gambling frenzy and phosphorescing feverishly. Under my very eyes, “In,” oblivious of his duties, took a bank of some seventy billion molecules from “Out.” I recognized the roulette at once. It was my roulette. I made the thing for a party and kept it behind the cabinet in Electronics, and the only one who knew about it was Victor Korneev, A conspiracy. I decided. I’ll blast them all. And all the time gay, rosy-cheeked colleagues kept coming and coming through the vestibule.

“Some wind! My ears are stuffed. .

“So you left too?”

“It’s a bore…. Everyone got a big laugh. I’d be better off doing some work, I thought to myself. So I left them a double and went.”

“You know, there I was dancing with this girl and I could feel I was getting furry all over. Downed some vodka—it didn’t help.”

“And what if you use an electron beam? Too much mass? Then we use photons…

“Alexis, do you have an extra laser? Let me have one even if it’s a gas type.

“Galka, where did you leave your husband?”

“I left an hour ago, if you must know. Right into a drift, up to my ears, almost buried me.”

It came to me that I wasn’t making it as watchman. There was no sense in taking the roulette from the demons anymore; all that was left was to go and have a tremendous row with the provocateur Victor, and let coMe what may thereafter. I shook my fist at the demons and hauled myself up the stairs, trying to visualize what would happen if Modest Matveevich should look in at the Institute now.

On the way to the director’s reception room, I stopped at the Shock and Vibration Hall. Here they were taming a released jinn… The jinn, huge and purple with rage, was flinging himself about in the open cage, which was surrounded with Gian Ben Gian shields and closed from above with powerful magnetic fields. Stung with high-voltage discharges, he howled, and cursed in several dead languages, leaped about, and belched tongues of flame. Out of sheer excitement he would start building a palace and would immediately destroy it. Finally he surrendered, sat down on the floor shuddering with each shock, moaned piteously, and said, “Enough, leave off! I won’t do it any more… Oi, oi, oi… I am all quiet now…

Calm, unblinking young men, all doubles, stood by the discharge-control console. The originals, on the other hand, crowding around the vibration stand, were glancing at their watches and uncorking bottles.

I went over to them.

“Ah, Sasha!”

“Sasha pal, I hear you are on watch today… I’ll be over to your section later…

“Hey there, somebody, make up a glass for him—my hands are loaded…

I was stunned and didn’t notice how a glass appeared in my hand. Corks fired into Gian Ben Gian shields, icy champagne flowed, hissing and sparkling. The discharges silenced, the jinn stopped whining and started sniffing the air. In the same instant the Kremlin clock started striking twelve.

“Friends! Long live Monday!”

The glasses clinked together. Later someone said, looking the bottle over, “Who made the wine?”

“I did.”

“Don’t forget to pay tomorrow.”

“How about another bottle?”

“Enough, we’ll catch cold.”

“That’s a good jinn, this one. A bit nervous, maybe.”

“One does not look a gift horse…”

“That’s all right, he’ll fly like a doll, hold out for the forty maneuvers, and then he can go peddle his nerves.”

“Hey, guys,” I said timidly. “It’s night out there and it’s a holiday. How about going home…”

They looked at me, patted me on the back, told me, “It’s OK, you’ll get over it,” and moved in a body toward the cage. The doubles rolled away one of the shields and the originals surrounded the jinn in a businesslike manner, took him in powerful grips by his hands and feet and started carrying him toward the vibro stand. The jinn was timidly begging for mercy and diffidently promising all the riches of the tsars. I stood alone to the side and watched them attaching microsensors to the various parts of his body. Next I felt one of the shields. It was huge, heavy, dented with potholes from the ball lightning strokes, and charred in several places. Gian Ben Gian’s shields were constructed out of seven dragon hides glued together with the bile of a patricide, and rated for direct lightning hits. Attached to each shield with upholstery tacks were metallic inventory tags. Theoretically, the outer sides of the shields should have depicted all the famous battles of the past and the inner sides all the great battles of the future. In practice, the face of the shield I was studying showed something like a jet attacking a motorized column, and the inner side was covered with strange swirls reminiscent of an abstract painting.

They started shaking the jinn on the vibro-stand. He giggled and squealed, “It tickles…! Ai, I can’t stand it!” I returned to the corridor. It smelled of Bengal fire. Girandoles swirled under the ceiling, banging into walls; rockets, trailing streams of colored smoke, streaked overhead. I met Volodia Pochkin’s double carrying a gigantic incunabulum bound with brass bands, two doubles of Roman Oira-Oira collapsing under a ponderous beam, then Roman himself with a stack of bright blue folders from the archives of the Department of Unassailable Problems, and next a wrathful lab technician conveying a troop of cursing ghosts in crusader cloaks, to be interrogated by Junta. Everyone was busy and preoccupied…

The labor legislation was being flagrantly ignored and I began to feel that I had lost all desire to struggle against this law-breaking, because, tonight at twelve o’clock on New Year’s Eve, plowing through a blizzard, they came in, these people who had more interest in bringing to a conclusion, or starting anew, a useful undertaking than stunning themselves with vodka, mindlessly kicking with their legs, playing charades, and practicing flirtations in various degrees of frivolity. Here came people who would rather be with each other than anywhere else, who couldn’t stand any kind of Sunday, because they were bored on Sunday. They were magi, Men with a capital M, and their motto was “Monday begins on Saturday.” True, they knew an incantation or two, knew how to turn water into wine, and any one of them would not find it difficult to feed a thousand with five loaves. But they were not magi for that. That was chaff, outer tinsel. They were magi because they had a tremendous knowledge, so much indeed that quantity had finally been transmuted into quality, and they had come into a different relationship with the world than ordinary people. They worked in an Institute that was dedicated above all to the problems of human happiness and the meaning of human life, and even among them, not one knew exactly what was happiness and what precisely was the meaning of life. So they took it as a working hypothesis that happiness lay in gaining perpetually new insights into the unknown and the meaning of life was to be found in the same process. Every man is a magus in his inner soul, but he becomes one only when he begins to think less about himself and more about others, when it becomes more interesting for him to work than to recreate himself in the ancient meaning of the word. In all probability, their working hypothesis was not far from the truth, for just as work had transformed ape into man so had the absence of it transformed man into ape in much shorter periods of time. Sometimes even into something worse than an ape. We constantly notice these things in our daily life. The loafer and sponger, the careerist and the debauchee, continue to walk about on their hind extremities and to speak quite congruently (although the roster of their subjects shrinks to a cipher). As to tight pants and infatuation with jazz, there was an attempt at one time to use these factors as indices of apeward transformation, but it was quickly determined that they were often the property of even the best of the magi.

However, it was impossible to conceal regression at the Institute. It presented limitless opportunities to transform man into magus. But it was merciless toward regressors and marked them without a miss. All a colleague had to do was to give himself over to egotistical and instinctive behavior (and sometimes just thinking about it), and he would notice in terror that the fuzz on his ears would grow thicker. That was by way of warning. Just as a police whistle warns of a fine, or a pain warns of a possible trauma. Then everything depended on oneself. Quite often a man could not contend with his sour thoughts, that’s why he was a man—the passing stage between neanderthal and magus. But he could act contrary to these thoughts, and then he still had a chance. Or he could give in, give it all up (“We live only once,” “You should take all you can out of life,” “I am no stranger to all that’s human”), but then there was only one thing to do: leave the Institute as soon as possible. There, on the outside, he could still remain at least a decent citizen, honestly if flabbily earning his pay. But it was difficult to decide on leaving. It was cozy and pleasant at the Institute, the work was clean and respected, the pay was not bad, the people were wonderful, and shame would not eat one’s eyes out. So they wandered about, pursued with compassionate glances, through the halls and the labs, their ears covered with gray bristles, aimless, losing clarity of speech, growing more stupid under one’s very eyes. Still, you could pity them, you could try to help and hope to revert them to human aspect.

But there were others. With empty eyes. Those knowing with certainty on which side their bread was buttered. In their own way they were not stupid. In their own way they were not bad judges of human nature. They were calculating and unprincipled, knowledgeable of all the weaknesses of man, clever at turning any bad situation into a good deal for themselves, and tireless at that occupation. They shaved their ears painstakingly and kept inventing the most marvelous means for getting rid of their hairy coverings. Quite often, they succeeded in attaining considerable heights and great success in their basic purpose—the construction of a bright future in a single private apartment or on a single private suburban plot, fenced off with barbed wire from the rest of humanity.

I returned to my post in the director’s reception room, dumped the useless keys into the box, and read a few pages from the classic work of J.P. Nevstruev, Mathematical Equations in Magic. The book read like an adventure novel, as it was stuffed with posed and unsolved problems. I began to burn with a desire to work and almost decided to chuck my watch responsibilities so I could go to my Aldan, when Modest Matveevich called.

Chewing crunchily, he inquired, “Where are you, Privalov? I’m calling for the third time. It’s disgraceful!”

“Happy New Year, Modest Matveevich,” I said.

He chewed in silence for some time and replied in a lower tone, “The same to you. How’s the watch going?”

“I just finished my tour of the building,” I said. “All is normal.”

“There wasn’t any auto-combustion?”

“None at all.”

“Power off everywhere?”

“Briareus broke a finger,” I said.

He was worried. “Briareus? Wait a while…. Ah, yes, inventory number fourteen-eighty-nine… Why?”

I explained.

“That was a correct solution,” said Modest Matveevich. “Continue standing watch. That’s all here.”

Immediately after Modest Matveevich, Eddie Amperian, from Linear Happiness, called, and politely asked me to calculate the optimal coefficients of freedom from care for those working in positions of responsibility. I agreed and we worked out a time of meeting for two hours later in Electronics. After that, Oira-Oira’s double came in and asked for the safe keys in a colorless voice. I refused. He insisted. I chased him out.

In a minute, Roman himself came running.

“Give me the keys.”

I shook my head. “I won’t.”

“Give me the keys!”

“Go take a steambath. I am the person materially accountable.”

“Sasha! I’ll carry it off!”

I grinned and said, “Help yourself.”

Roman glared at the safe and strained his whole body, but the safe was either spellbound or screwed to the floor.

“What do you want in there, anyway?” I asked.

“Documentation on RU-Sixteen,” said Roman. “How about it? Let’s have the keys!”

I laughed, and reached for the box with the keys. In the same instant a piercing scream sounded somewhere above us. I jumped up.

Chapter 4

“It’s hatched,” said Roman, calmly looking at the celling.

“Who?” I was ill at ease, as the cry was feminine.

“Vibegallo’s monster,” said Roman. “More precisely, his zombi.”

“Why was there a woman’s cry?”

“You’ll soon see,” said Roman.

He took me by the hand, jumped up, and we streaked through the floors. Piercing the ceilings, we wedged into floors like a knife into frozen butter, then worked through with a sucking sound, burst out into the air, and again charged the next floor. It was dark between the ceilings and floors, and small gnomes mixed with mice scattered away from us with frightened squeals. In the labs through which we flew colleagues were staring upward with worried faces.

We pushed our way through a crowd of the curious that had accumulated at the Maternity Ward, and saw an entirely nude Professor Vibegallo at the table. His bluish-white skin gleamed wetly, his beard hung limply in a cone, wet hair plastered his forehead, on which a functional volcanic boil erupted flames. His empty, translucent eyes wandered aimlessly about the room, blinking sporadically.

Professor Vibegallo was eating. Steaming on the table in front of him was a large photographic tray, filled to the brim with bran, Not paying any special attention to us, he scooped the bran with his palms, kneaded it into a lump, and conveyed it into his mouth orifice, liberally sprinkling his beard with stray bits. With this he crunched, smacked, grunted, and slurped, bent his head to the side, and squinted his eyes as though experiencing an unbearable pleasure. From time to time he became agitated and without interrupting his swallowing and chewing, grasped the rim of the tub with bran and the pails with slops, which stood by him on the floor, and pulled them closer and closer. At the other end of the table, Stella, a young undergraduate witch with clean pink ears, pale and tear-stained, was cutting loaves into huge slabs and handing them to Vibegallo with outstretched hands, turning her face away. The center autoclave was open and overturned, and a greenish puddle oozed around it.

Vibegallo suddenly said indistinctly, “Hey, wench let’s have some milk! Pour it right here in the bran, I mean. S’il vous plaIt, I mean.”

Stella hurriedly picked up a pail and splashed its contents into the tray.

“Eh!” exclaimed Professor Vibegallo. “The dish is small! You, girl… what’s your name… pour it right into the tub. I mean, we’ll eat right out of the tub…

Stella started pouring pailfuls into the tub, and the professor, grasping the tray like a spoon, took to ladling the bran into his maw, which suddenly opened incredibly wide.

“Will somebody please call him!” Stella cried piteously. “He’ll eat it all up in no time.”

“We’ve already called,” said someone in the crowd. “You’d better move away from him. Come on over here.”

“Will he come? Will he?”

“He said he was leaving. Putting on galoshes, I mean, and going out. We’re telling you—move away from him.”

Finally I understood what was going on. That was not Professor Vibegallo. It was the newborn zombi, the model of Man, unsatisfied stomachwise. I thanked God, for I thought the professor had had a stroke as a result of intensive overwork.

Stella moved back cautiously. They took her by the shoulders and drew her into the crowd. She hid behind my back, grasping my elbow, and I immediately squared my shoulders, though I still did not comprehend what it was all about and why she was so frightened. The zombi gorged himself. A stunned silence filled the lab—full of people, but the only sound was that of him, slurping and snuffling like a horse, and scrubbing on the tub walls with the tray. We looked on. He slid off the chair and submerged his head in the tub. The women looked away. Lilya Novosmekhova was ill and they escorted her out into the hall. Then the clear voice of Eddie Amperian was heard.

“All right. Let’s be logical. In a minute he’ll finish the bran, then he’ll eat the bread. And then?”

There was movement in the front ranks. The crowd backed toward the door. I began to comprehend.

Stella said in a thin little voice, “There are still the herring heads.”

“A lot?”

“Two tons.”

“Hmm, yes,” said Eddie. “And where are they?”

“They were supposed to be supplied by conveyor. But I tried it and it’s broken,” said Stella.

“By the way,” said Roman loudly, “it’s now been two minutes since I’ve been trying to pacify him and entirely without effect.”

“I, too,” said Eddie.

“For that reason,” said Roman, “it would be a very good thing if one of the less squeamish among you got busy with fixing the conveyor. As a palliative. Are there any other adepts here? I see Eddie. Anybody else? Korneev! Victor Pavlovich, are you here?”

“He is not. Maybe he went to look for Feodor Simeonovich…”

“I think we shouldn’t bother him for now. We’ll manage somehow. Eddie, let’s try concentrating together.”

“Which approach?”

“The braking regime. Up to tetanus. Guys! Everyone pitch in who can.”

“Wait a minute,” said Eddie. “And what if we damage him?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah!” I said. “Maybe you’d better not. Better he should eat me.”

“Don’t worry, don’t worry. We’ll be careful. Eddie, let’s try the contact method. One touch.”

“Let’s begin,” said Eddie.

The silence became even more intense. The zombi worried the basin, and volunteers exchanged comments and clattered behind the wall, working on the conveyor. A minute passed. The zombi climbed out of the tub, wiped his beard, looked at us sleepily, and suddenly extended his arm to an impossible length and snatched the last of the loaves of bread with a deft movement. Next he gave forth a rolling belch and fell back on the chair, folding his arms on a hugely distended belly. Esctasy flowed over his face. He snuffled and smiled inanely. He was undoubtedly happy, as a terminally tired man is happy on finally reaching the longed-for bed.

“It seems to have worked,” someone in the crowd said. Roman compressed his lips in doubt.

“I don’t have that impression,” Eddie said politely.

“Maybe his spring has run down,” I said hopefully.

Stella complained informatively, “It’s only a temporary relaxation… a paroxysm of satiety. He’ll wake up again soon.”

“You masters just haven’t got the strength,” said a masculine voice. “Let me go; I’ll call Feodor Simeonovich.”

We all looked at each other, smiling uncertainly. Roman pensively toyed with the umclidet, rolling it about in his palm. Stella shivered, whispering, “What’s going to happen, Sasha? I am frightened!” As for me, I stuck my chest out, furrowed my brows, and struggled with an overwhelming desire to call Modest Matveevich. I had a terrible urge to get out from under my responsibility. It was a weakness and I was powerless before it. Modest Matveevich appeared to me at that moment in an entirely different light. I was convinced that all Modest Matveevich had to do was show up here and roar at the monster, “You will cut that out, comrade Vibegallol” and the thing would quit at once.

“Roman,” I said carelessly, “I suppose that in the extreme case you could dematerialize it.”

Roman laughed and patted me on the. back. “Fear not,” he said. “This is just a toy. I just don’t feel like tangling with Vibegallo…. Don’t mind this one, but beware of that one!” He pointed at the second autoclave clicking away peacefully in the corner.

In the meantime, the zombi started to stir uneasily. Stella squeaked softly and pressed herself against me. The zombi’s eyes opened wide. First he bent over and balanced in the tub. Then he banged the empty pails about. Then he was still and sat motionless in the chair for some time. The expression of satisfaction on his face was replaced by one of bitter injury. He raised himself up, sniffed, rapidly twitching his nostrils, and, deploying a long red tongue, licked the crumbs off the table.

“Hold on, everybody. .” whispered the crowd.

The zombi reached into the tub, pulled out the tray, looked over on all sides, and bit at its edge. His eyebrows rose in pain. He bit another piece out and crunched on it. His face turned blue, as though in irritation; his eyes watered, but he kept biting time after time until he had chewed up the whole tray. For a minute he sat in thought, fingering his teeth, then he slid his gaze slowly over the stilled crowd. It was not a nice gaze; it was somehow evaluative and selective.

Volodia Pochkin said involuntarily, “No, no, take it easy, you… ”

The empty translucent eyes fixed on Stella, and she let out a scream, the same soul-rending scream, reaching up into the supersonic range, that Roman and I had heard four floors below in the director’s reception room just a few minutes before. I shuddered. The zombi was also discomfited; he lowered his eyes and started drumming his fingers nervously on the table.

There was a commotion at the entrance. Everyone moved about, and Ambrosi Ambruosovitch Vibegallo pushed through the crowd, elbowing the entranced curious and plucking icicles out of his beard. He smelled of vodka, overcoat, and frost.

“Dear me!” he hollered. “What’s all this? Queue situation! Stella, what are you doing just gaping there? Where is the herring? He has needs! They are increasing! You should have read my papers!”

He approached the zombi, who immediately started to sniff him greedily. Vibegallo gave the zombi his coat.

“The needs must be satisfied!” he said, hurriedly flicking the switches at the conveyor control board. “Why didn’t you give it to him at once? Oh, these les femmes. Who said it’s broken? It’s not broken at all; it’s spellbound.”

A window opened in the wall, the conveyor clattered, and a flood of stinking herring heads flowed right onto the floor. The zombi’s eyes gleamed. He fell on all fours, trotted smartly to the window, and set to work. Vibegallo stood alongside, clapped his hands, exclaimed joyfully, and, brimming with feelings, scratched the zombi behind the ear now and then.

The crowd sighed in relief. It developed that Vibegallo had brought two regional newspaper correspondents with him. The correspondents were familiar—G. Perspicaciov and B. Pupilov. They, too, smelled of vodka. Setting off their flashes, they proceeded to take pictures and notes.

The two specialized in scientific reporting. G. Perspicaciov was famous for the phrase: “Oort was the first to look at the starry sky and to note the rotation of the galaxy.” He was also the owner of the literary writings of the saga of Merlin’s journey with the Chairman of the Regional Soviet and an interview (conducted in ignorance) with OiraOira’s double. The interview bore the title, “Man with a Capital M,” and started with the words, “Like every true scientist, he was not talkative.” B. Pupiov sponged off Vibegallo. His daring sketches about boots that put themselves on, about self-harvesting, self-loading carrots, and about other Vibegallo projects were widely known in the region, while the article “Magician from Solovetz” even appeared in one of the national magazines.

When the zombi finally reached another of his paroxysms of satiation and dozed off, Vibegallo’s newly arrived laboratory assistants dressed the monster in a two-piece suit and hoisted him into the chair. Having been rudely extirpated from their New Year’s repasts, they were a bit surly about it. The correspondents placed Vibegallo alongside the monster with his hand on the monster’s shoulder, and taking aim with their lenses, asked him to continue.

“What, then, is most important?” Vibegallo went on readily. “The most imporant thing is that man should be happy. I note this in parentheses: Happiness is a human concept. And what is man, philosophically speaking? Man, comrades, is Homo sapiens, who has desires and abilities. Perhaps, I mean, he wants, and he wants all that he can. N’est pas, comrades? If he—man, that is—can have all that he wants and wants all that he can have, then he is truly happy. We will define him so. And what have we here in front of us, comrades? We have a model. But this model has desires, and that is all to the good. So to speak, excellent, exquis, charmant. And furthermore, comrades, it is capable. This is even better because, that being the case, it… he, I mean… is happy. We have here a metaphysical transformation from unhappiness to happiness, and this does not surprise us, since people are not born happy, but, I mean, that is, they become happy. Here it is waking up… it desires. For this reason it is temporarily unhappy. But it is able, and through this, “being able,’ a dialectic jump occurs. There, there! Look at that! Did you see how able it is? Oh, you dear! My joy! There, there! And how it is able! It is able for ten-fifteen minutes. . You there, comrade Pupilov. Why don’t you put away your still camera and use your movie camera,because we have here a dynamic process, here everything is in motion! Rest is as it should be, a relative phenomenon, but movement is absolute. There you are. Now it has been able to move dialectically into the region of happiness. To the realm of satisfaction, that is. You see it has closed its eyes. It’s enjoying itself. It feels good. I tell you, in a scientific sense, I would be willing to change places with him, right now, of course… Comrade Perspicaciov, write down everything I say and then let me have a look at it. I’ll smooth it out and add references…. Now it is sleeping, but that’s not all. Our needs must go deeper as well as wider. That would be the only correct process. On dit que Vibegallo is allegedly an enemy of the spiritual. That, comrades, is a label. We should have put aside such labels in scientific discussions a long time ago, comrades. We all know that all that is material leads the way and all that is spiritual brings up the rear. Satur venter, as is well known, non studit libentur.[1] Which we will translate, as it applies to this situation, in this way: Bread is always on the mind of the hungry.”

“It is the other way around,” said Oira-Oira.

Vibegallo looked at him vacantly for some time and then said, “The commentary from the audience, comrades, will be noted with indignation. It is regarded as unformed. Let us not be diverted from the main topic—from the practical aspects. I continue and turn to the next stage of the experiment. I am clarifying my presentation for the sake of the press. In accordance with the materialist concept, and material consumption needs having been temporarily satisfied, we can turn to the satisfaction of spiritual needs. Such as go to a movie, enjoy television, listen to folk songs or sing oneself, or even read a book, say Krokodil[2] or a newspaper… Comrades, we do not forget that abilities are required for all that, while the satisfaction of material needs does not require any special abilities, which are always present, since nature follows the materialistic viewpoint. As yet we cannot say anything about this model’s spiritual capabilities, inasmuch as the seed of its rationality resides in alimentary hunger. But we shall expose these spiritual capabilities now.”

The dour technicians deployed a tape recorder, a radio, a movie projector, and a small portable library on the table. The zombi scanned the instruments of culture with an indifferent gaze and sampled the tape for taste. It became evident that the spiritual capabilities of the model would not develop spontaneously. And so Vibegallo ordered a forceful infusion of cultural habits, as he put it. The tape recorder sang in surgary tones, “My darling and I were parting, we swore everlasting love.” The radio whistled and gargled. The projector displayed the animated film, Wolf and the Seven Sheep. Two technicians stood one on each side of the zombi and started to read aloud simultaneously…. As should have been expected, the alimentary model responded to all this noise with complete indifference. While it desired to stuff itself, it couldn’t care less about its spiritual world, because it wanted to stuff itself, and it did lust that. Having satisfied its hunger, it ignored its spiritual self, because it went limp and temporarily did not desire anything at all. The sharp-eyed Vibegallo managed, nevertheless, to observe an unmistakable connection between the drumbeats (from the radio) and the reflex quiverings in the model’s lower extremities. This jerking threw him into a fit of joy.

“The leg!” he cried, seizing B. Pupilov by the sleeve. “Photograph the leg! Close-up. La vibration de son mollet gauche est un grand signe. (The quivering of its left calf is an important sign.) This leg will sweep away all the intrigues and tear off all the labels that have been hung on me. Oui, sans doute, someone who is not a specialist could be surprised at my reaction to the leg. But, comrades, all great things are manifest in small, and I must remind you that this model is a model of limited needs—speaking concretely, with only one need, and calling a spade a spade, just between us, without any obfuscation, it’s a model with alimentary needs only. That is why it has such limited spiritual needs. We assert, however, that only a variety of material needs could guarantee a variety in spiritual needs. I clarify for the press with an example in terms comprehensible to them. If, for instance, it had a strongly developed desire for the tape recorder—the Astra-Seven, worth a hundred and forty rubles—it would play that tape recorder; for you can understand there would be nothing else to do with it, if it could get it. And if it played it, then there would be music, and one would have to listen to it, or dance to it. And what, comrades, is listening to music, with or without dancing? It is the satisfaction of spiritual needs. Comprenez vous?”

I had noticed for some time that the zombi behavior had undergone a substantial change. Whether something had gone wrong with it or whether it was normal, the periods of its relaxation had grown shorter and shorter, so that toward the end of Vibegallo’s speech, it no longer left the conveyor. Although it could have been that it became more and more difficult for it to move.

“May I be permitted a question?” Eddie said politely. “How do you explain the cessation of the satiation paroxysms?”

Vibegallo stopped talking and looked at the zombi. It was stuffing itself. He looked at Eddie.

“I’ll answer you,” he said smugly. “The question, comrades, is a good one. I’d even say an intelligent question, comrades. We have before us a real model of perpetually increasing material needs. It would appear that the satiation paroxysms have ceased, but only to the superficial observer. In reality they have been dialectically transformed into a new quality. Comrades, they have spread to the very process of the satisfaction of needs. Now its not enough for the model to be well fed. Now its needs have grown, now it needs to eat all the time, now it has taught itself that chewing is also wonderful. Do you understand, comrade Amperian?”

I looked at Eddie. Eddie was smiling politely. Next to him, arm in arm, stood the doubles of Feodor Simeonovich and Cristobal Joseevich. Their heads with widely spaced ears were turning slowly to and fro like airport radar antennas.

“May I ask another question?” said Roman.

“Please,” said Vibegallo, looking tiredly condescending.

“Ambrosi Ambruosovitch,” said Roman. “And what will happen when he has consumed it all?”

Vibegallo looked around angrily.

“I request that everyone present here note this provocative question, which stinks of Malthusianism, neo-Malthusianism, pragmatism, existentialism, and a lack of faith, comrades, in the inexhaustible might of mankind. What are you trying to say with your question, comrade OiraOira? That in the future of our scientific organization there will come a time of crisis, of regression, when our consumers will not have enough consumer products? That’s not nice, comrade Oira-Oira! You didn’t think it through! But we cannot allow, comrades, that shadows should be cast, and labels hung on our work. And we will not permit that to happen, comrades.”

He took out a handkerchief and wiped his beard. G. Perspicaciov, his face twisted in concentration, asked the next question.

“I am not an expert, of course. But what is the future of this model? I understand that the experiment is proceeding successfully. But it is consuming most energetically.”

Vibegallo smiled a bitter little smile.

“There you are, comrade Oira-Oira,” he said. “That’s how unhealthy rumors are started. You asked your question without adequate thought. Right away a layman becomes incorrectly oriented. He does not consider the correct ideal You are not looking at the right ideal, comrade Perspicaciov.” He addressed the correspondent directly. “This model is already a passing stage. Here is the ideal that you should consider!” He walked up to the second autoclave and laid his red-haired hand on its polished side. His beard assumed an upward thrust “Here is our ideal!” he announced. “Or, expressing myself more precisely, here is the model of our common ideal. We have here the universal consumer who desires everything and, correspondingly, is capable of everything. He has in him all the needs that exist in our world. And he is capable of satisfying all of them. With the help of our science, of course. I am elucidating for the press. The universal consumer model, imprisoned in this autoclave—or as we say, here in the auto-locker—has unlimited desires. All of us, comrades, with due respect to us, are simply ciphers in comparison. Because it desires such things as we cannot even conceive of. And it won’t wait for a gift from nature. It will take from nature all that it needs for its complete happiness, which is its satiation. Magi-materialistic forces will extract for it all that it needs from the surrounding environment. The happiness of the model will be indescribable. It will not know hunger, nor thirst, nor toothache, nor personal problems. All its needs will be immediately satisfied upon their appearance.”

“Excuse me,” said the polite Eddie. “And will its needs be material?”

“Of course!” cried Vibegallo. “Spiritual needs will develop in parallel. I have already noted that the more material needs there are, the more variegated will the spiritual needs become. That will be a giant of the spirit and a super artist.”

I surveyed those present. Many were flabbergasted. The correspondents wrote desperately fast. Some, as I noticed, constantly shifted their attention from the autoclave to the zombi, who ate without interruption, and back again. Stella, pressing her head against my shoulder, sobbed and whispered, “I am going to leave, I can’t stand it, I’m going…”

“I thought that I, too, was beginning to understand what Oira-Oira feared. I visualized a huge open mouth, into which, thrown by the force of magic, animals, people, cities, continents, planets, and suns were falling in an endless stream….

B. Pupilov again addressed Vibegallo. “When will the universal model be demonstrated?”

“The answer is,” said Vibegallo, “that the demonstration will take place here in my laboratory. As to time, the press will be notified further.”

“Will that be in the next few days?”

“There is an opinion that it will be in the next few hours. So the comrades of the press had best stay and wait.”

At this point, the doubles of Feodor Simeonovich and Cristobal Ioseevich turned as though on command, and left.

Oira-Oira said, “Don’t you feel, Ambrosi Ambruosovitch, that carrying out such experiments in a building and in the center of a town is dangerous?”

“There is nothing to fear,” Vibegallo said weightily. “Let our enemies be afraid.”

“You remember, I told you that it is impossible—”

“Comrade Oira-Oira, you have not done your homework. You should distinguish, comrade, possibilities from realities, happenstances from necessities, theory from practice, and in general—”

“Still, wouldn’t it be better done on the polygon?”

“I am not testing a bomb,” Vibegallo said loftily. “I am testing the model of an ideal man. Are there any other questions?”

Some brain from the Absolute Knowledge Department started inquiring into the autoclave operational regime. Vibegallo launched gladly into explanations. The dour lab technicians were collecting their technology for the satisfaction of spiritual needs. The zombi continued eating. The black suit was parting and splitting along the seams.

Oira-Oira looked at it appraisingly. Suddenly he said loudly, “Here is a suggestion. All those not personally involved should leave the room.”

Everybody turned toward him.

“Very soon it’s going to get very filthy here,” he explained. “Unbearably filthy.”

“That’s a provocation,” Vibegallo said with dignity.

Roman grabbed me by the sleeve and started urging me toward the door. I dragged Stella after me. The rest of the spectators streamed after us. They trusted Roman in the Institute, but not Vibegallo. Only the correspondents, of those not associated with Vibegallo, remained behind, while we crowded into the hall.

“What’s the matter?” they asked Roman. “What will happen? Why filthy?”

“He’ll let go any minute now,” he answered, not taking his eyes off the door.

“Who’ll let go? Vibegallo?’

“I feel sorry for the correspondents,” said Eddie. “I say, Sasha, is the shower turned on today?”

The door of the laboratory opened and two technicians came out, dragging the tub and empty pails; the third, glancing behind him fearfully, was bustling about and muttering, “Let me give you a hand, guys—it’s too heavy for you….

“Close the door,” advised Roman.

The bustling technician quickly closed the door and walked up to us, taking out a pack of cigarettes. His eyes were big and shifty.

“It’s going to happen now,” he said. “Perspicaciov is a fool. I kept winking at him! How the zombi is eating! It’s enough to drive you out of your mind…

“It is now twenty-five minutes past two—“ Roman began.

But here a roar sounded. There was a crash of broken glass. The door groaned and flew off its hinges. A camera and someone’s tie was carried out in a flood through the crack. We all shied away. Steila squealed again.

“Be calm,” said Roman. “It’s all over. There is one less destroyer on earth.”

The technician, as white as his coat, smoked, drawing on his cigarette without a pause. Coughings, gurglings, and curses sounded in the laboratory. A bad smell wafted out.

I mumbled indecisively, “Shouldn’t we take a look?” No one responded. Everyone looked at me with empathy. Stella was crying quietly and held me by the jacket. Someone was explaining to somebody in a whisper, “He is on watch today, get it? Somebody has to go help out…

I took a few uncertain steps toward the door when, clutching at each other, Vibegallo and the correspondents came staggering out.

Good God, what a sight!

Regaining my presence of mind, I drew out the platinum whistle and blew. The house brownie sanitation brigade was hurrying toward me, pushing the colleagues aside.

Chapter 5

I was the most surprised by the fact that Vibegallo was not the least discomfited by what had happened. While the brownies were working him over, dousing him with absorbents and plying him with deodorants, he was orating in a falsetto.

“There you are, comrades Oira-Oira and Amperian, with your constant fears. Implying this will happen and that, and how are we going to stop him… There is in you, comrades, that which I might call an unhealthy skepticism. A lack of confidence in the forces of nature and the potentialities of man, I would say. And where are your doubts now? Exploded! Exploded, comrades, in plain view of the public, and spattered me and the comrades of the press here.”

The press were at a loss for words, docilely presenting themselves to the stream of hissing absorbents. G. Perspicaciov was trembling uncontrollably, while B. Pupilov was shaking his head to and fro and compulsively running his tongue over dry lips.

When the brownies had cleaned up the laboratory to a first approximation of cleanliness, I looked in. The emergency squad was proceeding in a businesslike manner, replacing broken glass and burning the remains of the model in a vented furnace. The remains, however, were few. There was a pile of buttons labeled For Gentlemen, the sleeve of a jacket, an unbelievably stretched pair of suspenders and a lower jaw, reminiscent of an archaeological exhibit of Neanderthal man. The rest had apparently been blown to dust.

Vibegallo looked over the autoclave, which was also a self-locker, and announced that all was in order. “The press is invited to join me,” he said. “I suggest the rest return to their respective duties.” The press drew forth their notebooks and all three sat down at the table to polish the sketch, “The Birth of a Discovery,” and the informative remarks, “Professor Vibegallo Tells All.”

The onlookers left. Oira-Oira also departed, having taken the safe keys from me. Stella, too, left in desperation, as Vibegallo refused to let her go to another department. The much-relieved technicians also left. So did Eddie, surrounded by a crowd of theoreticians peripatetically figuring the minimal pressure that must have been obtained in the stomach of the exploded zombi. I, too, departed for my post, having ascertained that the testing of the second cadaver was not to take place before eight in the morning.

The experiment left me in an oppressed mood, and, settling in the huge reception-room armchair, I tried to decide whether Vibegallo was a fool or a clever demagogue and back. The scientific value of all of his cadavers was obviously equal to zero. Models based on the original could be produced by any colleague who had successfully defended his thesis and had completed the two-year specialized course in nonlinear transgression. Endowing the models with magical properties was also trivial, because applicable references, tables, and textbooks were available to all undergraduate magi. Such models did not prove anything in their own right, and were equivalent to card tricks and sword-swallowing, from a scientific viewpoint. These miserable correspondents, who clung to him like flies to manure, could be easily understood. Because, from a lay viewpoint, all this was tremendously spectacular and evoked shivering awe and vague expectations of some sort of tremendous possibilities. But it was harder to understand Vibegallo with his pathological passion for putting on circuslike shows and public blowouts, pandering to the curious, who were deprived of the opportunity (and desire) to fathom the essence of the problem. Leaving out one or two absolutists, returned from overlong trips, who loved to give interviews on the situation in infinity, no one in the Institute, to put it mildly, took advantage of contacts with the press: this was regarded as being in bad taste, and with good reason.

The fact is that the most fascinating and elegant scientific results quite often have the characteristic of appearing precious and dully incomprehensible to the uninitiated. Today, people far removed from science expect miracles from it, and only miracles, and are functionally incapable of distinguishing a true miracle from a trick or some intellectual somersault. The science of thaumaturgy and spell-craft is no exception. Many are capable of organizing a convention of famous ghosts in a TV studio, or boring a hole in a foot-and-a-half concrete wall with their look, and this no one needs, but it can drive the vulnerable public into fits of ecstasy, since it is incapable of visualizing to what extent science has intertwined and intermixed the concepts of reality with those of fairy tales. But try instead to find the profound inner relationship between the drilling look and the philological properties of the word concrete. Try to solve the small particular problem, known as Auers’ Great Problem! It was solved by Oira-Oira, who created the Theory of Fantastic Commonality, and who laid down the framework for an entirely new field of mathematical magic. Nevertheless, almost no one heard of Oira-Oira, while everyone was fully informed about Professor Vibegallo. (“Oh, you work at SRITS? And how is Professor Vibegallo? What has he invented lately?”) This had come about because only two or three.jaundred people on this entire globe were capable of grasping Oira-Oira’s ideas. Among them were several corresponding members but, alas, not one correspondent. The classic work of Vibegallo, Fundamentals of Production Technology of Auto-attiring Footwear, on the other hand, which was stuffed with demagogic prattling, made quite an impact at one time due to B. Pupilov’s efforts. (Later, it became evident that auto-attiring shoes cost more than a motorcycle and were sensitive to dust and humidity.)

The time was late. I was quite tired and drifted off imperceptibly into a fitful sleep. All kinds of unseemly trash populated my visions: multilegged gigantic mosquitoes bearded like Vibegallo, talking pails with sour milk, the tub on stubby legs running up and down stairs. Occasionally, some indiscreet brownie would look in on my dream but, seeing such terrors, would hastily depart in fear. Finally I woke up in pain and saw a sullen mosquito, with a beard, standing next to me trying to sink his stinger, as big as a fountain pen, into my calf.

“Shoo!” I yelled, and hit him on his bulging eye.

It hummed disappointedly and ran off a ways. It was reddish, with spots, and the size of a dog.

Apparently I had pronounced the materialization formula in my sleep and had thus brought this nasty creature out of nonexistence. I was unable to drive it back into nothingness. So I armed myself with a volume of Equations of Mathematical Magic, opened the window ventilator, and chased the critter out into the frost. The blizzard caught it at once and it disappeared in the swirling darkness. That’s how unwholesome sensations originate, I thought.

It was six o’clock in the morning. I listened. Silence reigned in the Institute. Either they were all working diligently or had scattered to their homes. I was due to make another tour, but I was just not in the mood to go anywhere, and the only thing I was in the mood for was to have something to eat, as my last meal had been eighteen hours ago.

I decided to send a double in my place.

In general I’m still a very uncertain magus. Inexperienced. Had there been anyone nearby, I would never have risked exposing my ignorance. But I was alone and decided to take a chance and practice up at the same time. I found the general formula in Mathmagic Equations, substituted my own parameters, carried out all the necessary manipulations, and pronounced all the requisite expressions in ancient Chaldean. It is said that hard work and patience overcome all obstacles. For the first time in my life, I managed to make a decent double. Everything about him was in the right place and he even looked a little like me, except that his left eye wouldn’t open for some reason, and he had six fingers on each hand. I explained his task to him, he nodded, bowed and scraped, and went off, swaying slightly. We never met again. Maybe he strayed into S. Gorynitch’s bunker or maybe he set off on an infinite voyage on the rim of the Wheel of Fortune…. I just don’t know. The fact is I quickly forgot about him since I determined upon making myself a breakfast.

I am not a demanding person. All I needed was a plain sandwich and a cup of black coffee. Possibly with some so-called doctor’s bologna for the sandwich, I don’t know how it came out that way for me, but at first a doctor’s coat, thickly buttered, appeared on the table. After the first shock of astonishment passed, I examined the coat attentively. The butter was creamy and not of vegetable origin. So what I had to do now was to eradicate the coat and begin anew. But in a revolting fit of self-assurance, I pictured myself as a god-creator, and proceeded along the method of consecutive transformations. A bottle with a black liquid appeared next to the coat, and the coat itself started to char around the edges. Hurriedly, I made my imaging more precise, with special emphasis on the images of a cup and beef. The bottle turned into a cup, the liquid remained unchanged, one of the sleeves grew long, thin, and brown, and started to twitch. Perspiring in dismay, I recognized that it was now a cow’s tail. I got out of the chair and went into a corner. The whole business did not go beyond the tail formation, but the spectacle was frightening enough by itself. I tried once more and the tail bloomed. I took myself well in hand, shut my eyes, and started to visualize, with the utmost detail, a slice of ordinary rye bread as it gets cut from a loaf, and buttered with natural butter from a cut-glass butter dish, and a round of bologna placed upon it. Forget the doctor’s bologna pan—I’ll take any kind… let it be the plain half-smoked kind. As to coffee, let it wait. I opened my eyes cautiously. A large crystal lay on the coat, and something dark lurked inside it. I picked up the crystal, the coat following, as it was inexplicably attached, and discerned the longed-for sandwich inside. I groaned and attempted to split the crystal mentally. It became covered with a fine network of cracks so that the sandwich was almost lost to view.

“Numbskull,” said I to myself, “you have eaten a thousand sandwiches and you can’t even approximately, accurately visualize one. Don’t get excited, there is no one here, no one can see you. This is not a test, nor a crucial paper, nor an examination. Try again.” I tried. It would have been better if I hadn’t. My imagination grew wilder, the most unexpected associations flared up in my mind, and as I kept trying, the reception room kept filling with strange objects. Many of them were born, apparently, out of the subconscious, the brooding jungles of hereditary memory, out of primeval fears long suppressed by the higher levels of education. They had extremities and kept moving about, they emitted disgusting sounds, they were indecent, they were aggressive and fought constantly. I was casting about like a trapped animal. All this vividly reminded me of the old cuts with scenes of St. Anthony’s temptations. Particularly vile was the oval dish on spider legs, covered with a straight, sparse fur on the edges. I couldn’t imagine what it wanted from me, but it would back off into a distant corner, then charge, trying to buckle me at the knees. This went on until I squeezed it between wall and chair. I finally succeeded in destroying a part of the mess and the rest wandered off into corners and hid. The remainder consisted of the dish, coat with crystal, and the mug with black liquid, which had grown to the size of a pitcher. I picked it up in both hands and smelled. Seemingly it contained black fountain-pen ink. The oval dish behind the chair kept squirming and scrabbling its legs on the colored linoleum, hissing vilely. I felt most uncomfortable.

I heard steps in the hall, then voices; the door flew open and Janus Poluektovieh appeared on the threshold and as usual said his “So.” I flew into a frenzy of activity. Janus Poluektovich went into his office, eliminating negligently as he walked, with one universal flick of his eyebrow, my entire chamber of horrors. He was followed by Feodor Simeonovich, Cristobal Junta with a fat black cigar in the corner of his mouth, a surly Vibegallo, and a determined-looking Oira-Oira. They were all very preoccupied, very much in a hurry, and didn’t pay me any attention.

The door to the office remained open. I sat down in my old place with a sigh of relief and thereupon discovered that a large china cup of steaming coffee and a plate of sandwiches was waiting there for me. Some one of the titans had looked after me, after all. I attacked my breakfast, listening to the voices from the office.

“Let’s start with the fact”—Cristobal Joseevich was saying with cold disdain—“that your, pardon me, Maternity Ward is situated directly under my laboratories. You have already arranged one explosion, as a result of which I was obliged to wait ten minutes while they replaced the blown-out glass in my office. I understand full well that arguments of a more general nature will have no effect on you and, for that reason, restrict myself to purely egotistical aspects. .

“It’s my business, dear friend, what I do in my place,” answered Vibegallo’s falsetto. “I don’t interfere on your floor, despite the water-of-life, which flows there without interruption and which has wet my ceilings. Besides, bedbugs are encouraged by this. But I don’t interfere in your affairs, so don’t interfere in mine!”

“M-my dear friend,” cooed Feodor Simeonovich. “Ambrosi Ambruosovitch! You must take into account the possible complications…. After all, no one works the dragon in the building, even though there are fire-resistant shields, and—”

“I don’t have a dragon, I have a felicitous man. A colossus of the spirit! That’s a peculiar logic you are deploying, comrade Kivrin, with strange and extraneous analogies! The model of an ideal man compared to an unclassifiable fire-breathing dragon…

“My dear one, the crux of the matter is not whether he is classifiable, but that he can start a fire…

“There you go again! The ideal man can start a fire! Really, you haven’t thought it through, comrade Feodor Simeonovichl”

“I–I am talking about the dragon…

“And I am talking about your incorrect framework! You are smearing it all up, Feodor Simeonovich! You are confusing the issue every way you can! Of course we are erasing the contradictions… between the mental and the physical… between the rural and the urban… between man and woman, finally. But we will not allow you to paste over an abyss, Feodor Simeonovich!”

“What abyss? What sort of deviltry is this? R-Roman, s-say something! Didn’t you explain to him in my presence? I am t-telling you, Ambrosi Ambruosovitch, that your experiment is d-dangerous, d-do you understand?”

“I understand, all right. I’ll not permit the ideal man to hatch in an open field, in the wind!”

“Ambrosi Ambruosovitch,” said Roman. “I could go through my argument once again. The experiment is dangerous because—”

“And I, Roman Petrovich, have been looking at you for a long time and no way can I understand how you can apply such terminology to the ideal man. Behold! the ideal man is dangerous to him!”

Here, Roman, apparently in youthful impatience, lost his temper.

“Not an ideal man,” he roared, “but your all-out consumer!”

An ominous silence reigned.

“How did you say?” Vibegallo inquired in a terrible voice. “Will you repeat that! What did you call the ideal man?”

‘J-Janus Poluektovich,” said Feodor Simeonovich. “After all! That won’t do, my friend. .

“Won’t do!” exclaimed Vibegallo. “You are quite right, comrade Kivrin, it won’t do! We have here a scientific experiment of international caliber! The colossus of the spirit must appear here within the Insfitute walls! This is symbolic! Comrade Oira-Oira with his pragmatic proclivities takes a divisive approach to the problem. And comrade Junta, also, takes the narrow-minded view! You don’t have to give me that look, comrade Junta: the tsarist gendarmerie did not frighten me, and you don’t frighten me either! Is it in our spirit, comrades, to fear an experiment? Of course, it’s understandable that comrade Junta, as a one-time soldier of the church and foreigner, could wander in his judgment, but you, comrade Oira-Oira, and you, Feodor Simeonovich, you are simple Russian people!”

“L-leave off the d-demagogy!” Feodor Simeonovich exploded finally. “H-how can your c-conscience permit you to c-carry on with such d-drivel? W-what sort of s-simple man am I? And what kind of word is that—‘simple’? Our d-doubles are simple!”

“I can say one thing,” Junta said indifferently. “I am a simple old Grand Inquisitor, and I will close off access to your autoclave until such time as I receive a guarantee that the experiment will be conducted on the polygon.

“N-no closer than f-five kilometers from the town,” added Feodor Simeonovich. “Or even ten.”

Obviously Vibegallo was awfully reluctant to drag his apparatus and himself to the polygon, where a blizzard blew and the light was inadequate for a documentary film.

“So,” he said, “I understand. You wish to fence our science off from the public. Well then, maybe instead of ten kilometers we should go ten thousand, Feodor Simeonovich! To someplace on the other side? Somewhere in Alaska, Cristobal Joseevich… or wherever you are from? Then say so directly. And, as for us, we’ll take it all down—on paper…

Silence reigned once more and Feodor Simeonovich, who had lost the power of speech, was breathing heavily.

‘Three hundred years ago,” Junta pronounced coldly, “I would have invited you out for such words; for a walk out of town, where I would have rattled the dust off your ears and run you through.”

“Easy, easy there,” said Vibegallo. “This is not Portugal for you. You can’t stand criticism. Three hundred years ago we’d not stand on ceremony with you either, my fugitive prelate.”

I was contorted with disgust. Why was Janus keeping quiet? How much could one take? Footsteps broke the silence and a pale Roman entered with bared teeth. Snapping his fingers, he created a Vibegallo double. Next, he seized it with unholy joy by the chest, shook it rapidly, grabbed it by the beard and jerked it with passionate might several times, calmed down, dissolved the double, and went back into the office.

“Well now, it seems you should be d-drummed out of here, V–Vibegallo,” pronounced Feodor Simeonovich in an unexpectedly calm voice. “It turns out you are quite an unsavory figure.”

“It’s criticism, criticism that you can’t abide,” responded Vibegallo, puffing.

And here, at last, Janus Poluektovich spoke up. His voice was powerful and even, like that of a Jack London captain.

“The experiment, in accordance with Ambrosi Ambruosovitch’s request, will take place today at ten-zero-zero. In view of the fact that the experiment will be accompanied by considerable destruction, which could include human casualties, I designate the far sector of the polygon fifteen kilometers outside the city limits as the site of the experiment. I take this early occasion to thank Roman Petrovich for his initiative and courage.”

Apparently everyone was disgesting this decision for some time. Janus Poluektovich had an undoubtedly strange manner of expressing his thoughts. But everyone willingly accepted that his vision was the better. There were precedents.

“I’ll go call for the truck,” Roman said suddenly, and probably went through a wall, as he didn’t pass me by in the reception room.

Feodor Simeonovich and Junta probably were nodding agreement, while Vibegallo, regaining his composure, cried out, “A correct decision, Janus Poluektovich! You have given us a timely reminder of our forgotten vigilance. Farther, yes farther, from extraneous eyes. Only thing is, I’ll need some stevedores. My autoclave is heavy; that is, it is a good five tons.

“Of course,” said Janus. “Issue your orders.”

Chairs were being moved in the office and I quickly finished my coffee.

During the next hour, in the company of those who still remained in the Institute, I hung about the entrance watching the autoclave, stereo telescopes, armored shields, and contingency supplies being loaded. The blizzard had blown itself out and the morning was clear and frosty.

Roman drove up in a half-track truck. Alfred, the vampire, herded in the hekatocheire stevedores. Cottus and Gyes came willingly, conversing animatedly in a hundred voices, rolling up their sleeves on the go. Briareus dragged behind, displaying his damaged finger, and complaining that several of his heads were dizzy, that it hurt, and that he didn’t sleep last night. Cottus took the autoclave, Gyes carried everything else. When Briareus saw that there was nothing left for him, he began giving orders, directions, and helping with advice. He ran ahead, opened and held doors, kept squatting down, looking under the loads, yelling “Steady as she goes,” or “Bear off to the right. You’re getting snagged!” In the end he got his hand stepped on, and his body squeezed between the autoclave and a wall. He broke into sobs and Alfred walked him back to the vivarmum.

Quite a few people climbed aboard the truck. Vibegallo got into the cab. He was considerably put out and kept asking everyone what time it was. The truck started off, but came back in five minutes, as it developed that the correspondents had been forgotten. While they were being sought, Cottus and Gyes started pelting each other with snowballs to warm up and broke two windowpanes. Then Gyes quarreled with an early drunk who was yelling, “All against one, right?” He was dragged back and stuffed into the van. He kept swiveling his eyes and cursing in ancient Greek. G. Perspicaciov and B. Pupilov showed up, shivering and half awake, and the truck finally drove off.

The Institute emptied out. It was half-past eight. The whole town was asleep. I was very eager to go to the polygon with everyone else, but there was no way for me to leave, so I sighed and started on another round.

Yawning, I went up and down the halls, turning off lights until I came to Victor Korneev’s lab. Victor was not interested in Vibegallo’s experiments. He was wont to say Vibegallo and his ilk should be mercilessly handed over to Junta as experimental animals to determine whether they were reverse mutations. Consequently, Victor didn’t go anywhere, but sat on the translator-sofa, smoking a cigarette and lazily conversing with Eddie Ainperian. Eddie reclined nearby, sucking on a hard candy and pensively contemplating the ceiling.

The perch was vigorously swimming about in the tub.

“Happy New Year,” I said.

“Happy New Year,” Eddie responded cheerily.

“Let Sasha decide,” offered Korneev. “Sasha, is there such a thing as nonprotein life?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t seen any. Why?”

“What do you mean, you haven’t seen any? You have never seen an M-field either, but you compute its intensity.”

“And so?” I said. I was watching the perch in the tub. It was going around and around, leaning hard into the turns, so that you could see that it had been gutted. “Victor,” I went on, “did it work after all?”

“Sasha is reluctant to talk about nonprotein life,” said Eddie. “And he is right”

“It’s possible to live without protein,” I said, “but how does he live without innards?”

“But here is comrade Amperian, who says that there can be no life without protein,” said Victor, forcing a stream of tobacco smoke to turn into a miniature tornado that traveled about the room, curving around the furniture.

“I say that life is protein,” argued Eddie.

“I don’t sense the distinction,” said Victor. “You say that if there is no protein, there is no life.”

“Yes.”

“And what, then, is this?” asked Victor. He waved his hand feebly.

On the table next to the tub appeared a revolting creature resembling both a hedgehog and a spider. Eddie raised himself up and looked at the table.

“Ah,” he said, and lay down again. “That’s not life. That’s un-life. Isn’t Koschei the Undead nonprotein life?”

“What more do you want?” asked Korneev. “Does it move? It moves. Does it eat? It eats. It can reproduce, too. Would you like it to reproduce right now?”

Eddie raised up for the second time and glanced at the table. The hedgehog-spider was shuffling about clumsily.

It seemed to be trying to move in all four directions simultaneously.

“Un-life is not life,” said Eddie. “Un-life exists only insofar as there is intelligent life. You could even say more accurately—only insofar as there are magi. Un-life is a by-product of their activity.”

“All right,” said Victor.

The hedgehog-spider vanished. In its place appeared a miniature Victor Korneev, an exact copy the size of an arm. He snapped his tiny fingers and created a micro-double of even smaller size. This one did the same. A fountain-pen-sized double materialized. Then one the size of a matchbox. Then a thimble.

“Enough?” asked Victor. “Each of them is a magus. Not one has a single protein molecule.”

“An untoward example,” Eddie said with regret. “In the first place, they do not, in principle, differ from a programmed lathe. In the second place, they are not a product of development but of your protein mastery. It’s hardly worth arguing whether evolution could produce self-reproducing programmed lathes.”

“A lot you know about evolution,” Korneev said rudely. “A new Darwin! What’s the difference whether it’s a chemical process or a conscious act? Not all your ancestors were protein either. Your great-great-great-grandmother also, though quite complicated, I admit, was not a protein molecule. It may be that our so-called conscious activity is also a variety of evolution. How do we know it was the aim of nature to create a comrade Amperian? Maybe the aim of nature was the creation of un-life at the hands of Amperian. It could be.”

“Indeed, indeed. First an anti-virus, then protein, then comrade Amperian, and then the whole planet is filled with un-life.”

“Exactly,” said Victor.

“And all of us are dead out of sheer use…”

“And why not?” said Victor.

“I have an acquaintance,” said Eddie. “He asserts that man is just an intermediary link that nature requires for the crown of its creation: a glass of cognac with a lemon slice.”

“And why, in the final analysis, not?”

“Just because it doesn’t suit me,” said Eddie. “Nature has her aims and I have mine.”

“Anthropocentric,” Victor said in revulsion.

“Yes,” Amperian said haughtily.

“I’ll not debate with anthropocentrics.”

“In that case, let’s tell anecdotes,” Eddie calmly offered and stuffed another rock candy in his mouth.

Victor’s doubles continued their labors on the table. The smallest was now the height of an ant. While listening to the argument between the anthropocentric and the cosmocentric, a thought entered my head.

“I say, chums,” I came out with ersatz animation. “Why aren’t you at the polygon?”

“And why should we be?” asked Eddie.

“Well, it is still quite interesting.

“I never go to a circus,” said Eddie. “Besides: ubi nil vales, ibi nil velis.(Where you are not competent, there you should not wish to be)”

“That’s in reference to yourself?” asked Victor.

“No. It’ s in reference to Vibegallo.”

“Chums,” I said. “I like a circus very much. Isn’t it all the same to you where you are going to tell jokes?”

“Meaning?” said Victor.

“Stand watch for me, and I’ll run off to the polygon.”

“It’s cold,” reminded Victor. “Frost, Vibegallo.”

“I have a great yen,” I said. “It’s all so mysterious.”

“Shall we let the child go?” asked Victor of Eddie.

Eddie nodded.

“Go, Privalov,” said Victor. “It will cost you four hours of computer time.”

“Two,” I said quickly. I was expecting something like that.

“Five,” Victor said boorishly.

“Then three,” I said. “I am working for you all the time as it is.”

“Six,” Victor said coolly.

“Vitya,” said Eddie, “fur will grow on your ears.”

“Red,” I said, gloating. “Maybe even shot through with green.”

“All right, then,” said Victor. “Go for free. Two hours will fix me.”

We went to the entry together. On the way, the magi took up an incomprehensible debate about something called cyclotation, and I had to interrupt them to get transgressed to the polygon. They had already tired of me, and being in a rush to get rid of me, they transgressed me with such energy that I had no time to get prepared, and was flung backward into the crowd of spectators.

Everything was in readiness at the polygon. The public hid behind the armored shields. Vibegallo, poking out of the freshly dug trench, was looking jauntily through the big stereo periscope. Feodor Simeonovich and Cristobal Junta, forty-power binoculars in hand, were exchanging words quietly in Latin. Janus Poluektovich, in a heavy fur coat, stood to the side, dabbling his walking stick in the snow. B. Pupilov sat on his haunches by the trench with an open notebook and pen at the ready. G. Perspicaciov, hung about with still and movie cameras, was rubbing his frozen cheeks and stamping his feet behind him.

The sky was clear and a full moon was sinking in the west. Blurred shafts of the northern lights appeared shimmering amid the stars and disappeared again. The snow glistened on the plain, and the large rounded cylinder of the autoclave was clearly visible some one hundred meters away.

Vibegallo tore himself from the periscope, coughed, and said, “Comrades! Com-m-r-ades! What are we observing in the periscope? Overwhelmed with complex feelings and faint with expectations, comrades, we are observing how the protective lock is beginning to unscrew itself automatically…. Write, write,” he said to B. Pupilov. “And most accurately…. That is, unscrewing automatically. In a few minutes we will see the appearance among us of an ideal man—chevalier, that is, sans peur et sans reproche!”

I could see with my naked eye as the lock turned and fell soundlessly in the snow. A long streamer of steam shot out of the autoclave, all the way, it seemed, to the stars.

“I am clarifying for the press—“ Vibegallo started to say, when a horrendous roar sounded.

The earth slid and tossed. A huge snow cloud soared upward. Everyone fell against each other and I, too, was thrown and rolled. The roar kept increasing, and when I stood up with an all-out effort, grasping the treads of the half-track, I saw, in horrified terror, that the horizon was curling up and rolling like a bowl’s edge toward us. The armored shields were swaying threateningly, and the people were running and falling and jumping up again covered with snow. I saw Feodor Simeonovich and Cristobal Junta, encased in the rainbow-hued caps of their protective shields, backing under the press of the storm and raising their hands trying to stretch their defenses over the rest of us. I saw, too, the gusts tearing that defense into shreds that were carried off across the plain as so many huge soap bubbles bursting against the starry sky. I saw Janus Poluektovich, collar raised, standing with his back to the wind, planted firmly on his walking stick buried in the bared earth, looking at his watch. Over there, at the site of the autoclave, a thick cloud of steam, red and lighted from within, twisted in a tight vortex, while the horizon steeply curved higher and higher till it seemed we were at the bottom of a vast pitcher. And then, right near the epicenter of this cosmic abomination, Roman suddenly appeared, his green coat flying in shreds from his shoulders. He flung his arm in a wide arc, threw something large and glinting like a bottle into the howling steam, and immediately fell to the ground, covering his head with his arms.

The foul and enraged face of a jinn rose above the cloud, eyes rolling in fury. His mouth gaping in soundless laughter, he flapped his extensive hairy ears. A burning stench permeated the blizzard and then the ghostly walls of a magnificent castle arose and slumped, oozing down, while the jinn himself, turned into a long tongue of orange flame, vanished into the sky.

There was quiet for several seconds. The horizon sank back down with a heavy rumble. I was thrown high and regaining my senses, discovered that I was sitting not far from the truck, my arms braced against the earth. The snow was all blown away. The field around us was bare and black. Where the autoclave had stood a minute before now yawned a large crater. A wisp of white smoke curled above it, and there was a smell of fire.

The spectators started climbing back upon their feet. Faces were dirty and distorted. Many were speechless, coughed, spit, and moaned softly. They set to cleaning themselves up a bit, whereupon it developed that quite a few were disrobed down to underwear. There was grumbling, then cries of, “Where are my trousers? Why am I without trousers? I was dressed in trousers!”

“Comrades, has anyone seen my watch?”

“And mine, also!”

“Mine, too, has disappeared!”

“Platinum tooth is gone! It was put in just this summer.”

“Oh, no! My ring is gone… and my bracelet.”

“Where is Vibegallo? What sort of disgrace is this? What’s it all mean?”

“To hell with all the watches and teeth! Are the people all right? How many were there?”

“What has actually happened? Some sort of explosion the jinn… and where is the colossus of the spirit?”

“Where is the consumer?”

“Where is Vibegallo, damn it!”

“Did you see that horizon? Do you know what that implies?”

“The roll-up of space. I know about these tricks…”

“It’s cold in my shirt sleeves; can someone let me have something…

“W-where is that Vi-Vibegallo? W-where is th-thal moron?”

The earth heaved and Vibegallo clawed his way out of the trench. He was without his boots.

“I elucidate for the press,” he said huskily.

But he was not allowed to elucidate. Magnus Feodorovich Redkin, who came especially to find out once and for all what true happiness was, ran up to him and, shaking his clenched fists, yelled, “Charlatan! You’ll answer for this! Sideshow! Where is my hat? Where is my fur coat? I will put in a complaint about you! I am asking you, where is my hat?”

“In complete accord with the program,” mumbled Vibegallo, glancing around. “Our dear colossus—”

Feodor Simeonovich advanced on him. “You, my fine friend, are bu-burying your talents in the g-ground. They should be used to s-strengthen the de-department of Defensive Magic. Your ideal in-men should be d-dropped or enemy bases. To throw fear into the ag-aggressors.”

Vibegallo backed away, covering himself with the sleeve of his coat. Cristobal Joseevich approached silently measuring him with his eye, flung his dirty gloves at his feet, and left.

Gian Giacomo, hurriedly concocting the image of ar elegant suit, cried from afar, “This is truly phenomenal signores. I always felt a certain antipathy toward him, bul I couldn’t ever imagine anything like this…

Here, finally, G. Perspicaciov and B. Pupilov figured out the real situation. Until then, smiling uncertainly, they had hoped to be at least partially enlightened. Now it dawned on them that all had not gone in complete conformity to plan.

G. Perspicaciov, moving with firm steps, accosted Vibegallo, laying his hand on his shoulder, and saying in an iron voice, “Comrade Professor, where can I get my cameras back? Three still cameras, and one movie camera.”‘

“Also, my wedding ring,” added B. Pupilov.

“Pardon,” Vibegallo said with dignity. “You’ll be called on when needed,” he said in his affected French. “Wait for explanations.”

The correspondents were thrown for a loss. Vibegallo turned and walked toward the crater. Roman already was standing over it.

“What all isn’t in there…” he said yet from afar.

There was no consumer colossus in the crater. Instead, everything else was there and much more. There were still and movie cameras, wallets, overcoats, rings, necklaces, trousers, and a platinum tooth. There were Vibegallo’s felt boots, and Magnus Feodorovich’s hat. My platinum whistle for calling the emergency squad turned up too. Further we discovered two Moskvich and three Volga cars, an iron safe with the local savings-office seals, a large piece of roasted meat two cases of vodka, a case of Zhiguli beer and an iron bed with nickel-plated knobs.

Having pulled on his boots, Vibegallo, smiling condescendingly, announced that now the discussion could get started. “Let’s have your questions,” he said. But discussions did not take place. The enraged Magnus Feodorovich had called the police. Young Sergeant Kovalev dashed up in his police car. We all had to be recorded as witnesses. Sergeant Kovalev went around and around the crater, trying to discover traces of the criminal. He found a huge lower jaw and examined it minutely. The correspondents, having received their instruments back, saw everything in a new light and were listening attentively to Vibegallo, who again poured forth a litany of demagogy about limitless and variegated needs. It was becoming dull and I was freezing.

“Let’s go home,” said Roman.

“Let’s,” I said. “Where did you get the jinn?”

“Drew it out of the stores yesterday. For entirely different purposes.”

“And what really happened? Did he overeat again?”

“No, it’s simply that Vibegallo is a moron,” said Roman.

“That’s understood,” I said. “But why the cataclysm?”

“All from the same quarters,” said Roman. “I told him a thousand times: “You are programming a standard superegocentrist. He will gather up all the material valuables he can lay his hands on, then he’ll fold space, wrap himself up in a cocoon, and stop time….’ But Vibegallo’ could never grasp that the true colossus of the spirit does not consume so much as he thinks and feels.

‘That’s all trash,” he continued as we flew up to the Institute. “That’s all too clear. But you tell me. Where did Janus-U learn that everything would turn out just so and not otherwise? He must have foreseen everything, both the vast destruction and that I would figure out how to terminate the colossus in embryo.”

‘That’s a fact,” I said. “He even expressed his gratitude to you. In advance.”

“Isn’t that really strange?” said Roman. “All this needs thorough thinking through.”

And we did start to think through thoroughly. It took us a long time. Only by spring, and only by chance, were we able to decipher the mystery.

But that’s an altogether different story.