Monday Starts on Saturday

1

Eighty-three percent of all the days in the year start the same way: the alarm clock rings. The ringing insinuates itself into my final dreams as the frenetic clattering of an automatic card punch or Fyodor Simeonovich’s booming, thunderous bass, or the rasping of a basilisk playing in the constant temperature cabinet.

That morning I was dreaming about Modest Matveevich Kamnoedov. He’d been made head of the computer center and was training me to work on the Aldan. “Modest Matveevich,” I was telling him, “all this advice you’re trying to give me is nothing but crazy gibberish.”

And he kept yelling, “Thaaat’s quite eeenough of that frrrom you! Everything you’ve got here iiis absolute nonsense, toootal rubbish!”

Then I realized it wasn’t Modest Matveevich but my “Friendship” alarm clock with its eleven stones and picture of a little elephant with its trunk raised. “I hear you, I hear you,” I muttered, and started slapping away at the tabletop, trying to hit the clock.

The window was wide open: I caught a glimpse of clear blue spring sky and felt the sharp breath of a cool spring breeze. There were pigeons clattering along the sheet metal of the cornice. Three flies were fluttering exhaustedly around the glass dome of the ceiling light—they must have been the first flies of the year. Every now and then they suddenly began dashing frenziedly from side to side, and in my half-awake state the brilliant idea occurred to me that the flies were probably trying to break free of a plane that transected them. I sympathized with their hopeless struggle. Two flies settled on the light cover and the third disappeared, and then I finally woke up completely.

First of all I threw off the blanket and attempted to rise into the air above the bed. As always, without my morning exercises, shower, and breakfast, the only result I achieved was that the moment of reaction drove me back down hard into the sofa bed, unhooking the springs and setting them jangling plaintively somewhere beneath me. Then I remembered the previous evening and felt really upset, because I knew I’d be left without any work to do all day long. Yesterday at eleven o’clock in the evening Cristóbal Junta had come into the computer room and, as always, connected himself to the Aldan so that the two of them together could tackle the latest problem of the meaning of life. Five minutes later the Aldan had burst into flames. I don’t know what there was inside it that could have burned, but the Aldan was going to be out of action for a long time, which meant that instead of working I would be doing the same thing that all the hairy-eared parasites did: wandering aimlessly from one department to another, complaining about life and telling jokes.

I frowned, sat on the edge of the bed, and began by filling my lungs up to the top with prāṇa mingled with the cold spring air. I waited a while for the prāṇa to be absorbed and followed the standard recommendations by thinking bright and happy thoughts. Then I breathed out the cold spring air and began performing a sequence of morning exercises. I’d been told that the old school used to prescribe yoga exercises, but the yoga sequence, like the now almost forgotten maya sequence, used to take from fifteen to twenty hours a day, and when a new president of the USSR Academy of Sciences was appointed, the old school had been forced to give way. NITWiT’s young generation had been only too glad to break with the old traditions.

At the 115th leap my roommate Vitka Korneev came floating into the room. As always in the morning, he was cheerful and full of energy, even good humored. He lashed me across my bare back with a wet towel and began flying around the room, making movements with his arms and legs as if he were swimming the breaststroke, telling me as he did so about his dreams and interpreting them as he went along according to Freud, Merlin, and Mademoiselle Lenormand. I went and got washed, then we both got ready and set out for the cafeteria.

In the cafeteria we took our favorite table under a large, faded poster (“Be bold, comrades, and snap your jaws! —Gustave Flaubert”), opened our bottles of kefir, and started eating while we listened to the local news and gossip:

The traditional spring rally had taken place the night before on Bald Mountain, and the participants had behaved quite deplorably. Viy and Khoma Brut had gotten drunk and gone wandering through the dark streets of the town, pestering passersby and using foul language, then Viy had stepped on his own left eyelid and flown into a furious rage. He and Khoma had gotten into a fight, knocked over a newspaper kiosk, and ended up in the militia station, where they were both given fifteen days for being drunk and disorderly. It had taken six men to hold Khoma Brut so that his head could be shaved, and meanwhile the bald-headed Viy had sat in the corner giggling offensively. The case was being passed on to the people’s court because of what Khoma Brut had said while his hair was being cut.

Vasily the cat had taken a spring vacation—to get married. Soon Solovets would be blessed once again with talking kittens suffering from hereditary amnesia.

Louis Sedlovoi from the Department of Absolute Knowledge had invented some kind of time machine, and he was going to give a paper about it at a seminar today.

Vybegallo had reappeared in the Institute. He was going around boasting that he’d been inspired by an absolutely titanic idea. It seemed that the speech of many monkeys resembled human speech recorded on tape and played backward at high speed. So he’d, you know, recorded the conversations of the baboons in the Sukhumi nature reserve and listened to them back to front at low speed. The result, he claimed, was something absolutely phenomenal, but exactly what he wasn’t saying.

The computing center’s Aldan had burned out again, but it wasn’t Sashka Privalov’s fault, it was Junta’s: just recently he’d made it a matter of principle to take an interest only in problems that had already been proved not to have any solution.

The decrepit old sorcerer Perun Markovich Neunyvai-Dubino from the Department of Militant Atheism had taken leave for his next reincarnation.

In the Department of Eternal Youth the model of immortal man had died following a protracted illness.

The Academy of Sciences had allocated the Institute a massive amount of money to improve the facilities on its site. Modest Matveevich intended to use this sum to surround the Institute with fancy cast-iron railings supported by columns with allegorical images and pots of flowers, and in the backyard, between the transformer shed and the fuel store, he was going to install a fountain with a jet nine meters high. The sports committee had requested money for a tennis court, but he had refused, declaring that a fountain was required for scholarly cogitation, and tennis was nothing but a pointless jiggling of arms and joggling of legs.

After breakfast everyone went off to their labs. I stopped by the computer room and shuffled miserably around the Aldan while the sullen, unfriendly technicians from the Technical Service Department fiddled around inside its gaping entrails. They didn’t want to talk to me and suggested morosely that I should go somewhere else and mind my own business. I wandered off to visit friends.

Vitka Korneev threw me out because he couldn’t concentrate with me around. Roman was giving a lecture to some trainees. Volodya Pochkin was chatting with some journalists. When he caught sight of me he looked delighted and shouted, “Aha, there he is! Let me introduce the head of our computer center, he’ll tell you all about how…” I gave a very cunning imitation of my own double, which gave the journalists a real fright, and managed to escape. At Edik Amperian’s place they treated me to fresh cucumbers and we’d just struck up a lively conversation about the advantages of the gastronomical view of life when their distillation apparatus exploded and they forgot all about me.

I went out into the corridor in absolute despair and ran into S-Janus, who said, “I see,” and then after a pause inquired whether we’d spoken yesterday. “No,” I said, “unfortunately we didn’t.” He carried on, and I heard him ask Gian Giacomo the same standard question at the end of the corridor.

Eventually I wound up with the Absolutists, arriving there just before the beginning of the seminar. The members of the department were taking their seats in the small conference hall, yawning and gently stroking their ears. Sitting in the chairman’s seat with his fingers calmly clasped together was the head of department, master academician of all white, black, and gray magic, the all-knowing Maurice Johann Laurentius Pupkov-Zadny. He was gazing benignly at the fidgety efforts of the speaker, assisted by two clumsily made doubles with hairy ears, to set up a machine with a saddle and pedals on the display stand. It looked like an exercise machine for the overweight. I took a seat in the corner as far away as possible from everyone else, pulled out a notebook and a pen, and assumed an interested expression.

“Very well, then,” said the master academician, “do you have everything ready?”

“Yes, Maurice Johannovich,” Louis Sedlovoi replied. “It’s all ready, Maurice Johannovich.”

“Then perhaps we should begin? I don’t see Smoguly anywhere…”

“He’s away on a research trip, Johann Laurentievich,” said a voice from the hall.

“Ah yes, now I remember. Exponential investigations? Right, right… Well, then. Today Louis Ivanovich will present a brief report concerning certain possible types of time machines… Am I right, Louis Ivanovich?”

“Er… actually… actually, the title I would have given to my talk is—”

“Very well then. Call it that.”

“Thank you. Er… I would call it ‘The Feasibility of a Time Machine for Traveling in Artificially Structured Temporal Dimensions.’”

“Very interesting,” put in the master academician. “However, I seem to recall there was a case when one of our colleagues—”

“Excuse me, that is the very point I’d like to start with.”

“Oh, I see… Then please carry on.”

I listened attentively at first. I even got quite engrossed. It seemed that some of these guys were working on very peculiar things. It turned out that some of them were still wrestling with the problem of movement in physical time, but without actually getting anywhere. But someone—I didn’t catch the name, someone old and famous—had proved it was possible to displace material bodies into ideal worlds, that is, into worlds created by the human imagination. It seemed that apart from our usual world with its Riemannian metrics, uncertainty principle, physical vacuum, and boozy Khoma Brut, there were other worlds that possessed a very distinctly defined reality. These were the worlds that had been produced by the creative imagination throughout the course of human history. For instance, there was the world of mankind’s cosmological ideas; the world created by painters; even a semiabstract, subtly structured world created by generations of composers.

Some years ago, it seemed, a pupil of that someone old and famous had put together a machine on which he had set off on a journey to the world of cosmological ideas. Unidirectional telepathic contact had been maintained for a while, and he had managed to report that he was on the edge of a flat Earth and below him he could see the coiling trunk of one of the three great elephants, and he was about to make the descent to the great tortoise. No further communications had been received from him.

The speaker, Louis Ivanovich Sedlovoi, was clearly not a bad scientist (he had a master’s degree) but he suffered from vestigial elements of Paleolithic consciousness, so that he was obliged to shave his ears regularly. He had constructed a machine for traveling in described time. According to him, a world actually existed that was populated by Anna Karenina, Don Quixote, Sherlock Holmes, Grigory Melekhov, and even Captain Nemo. This world possessed its own extremely curious properties and laws, and the degree of vividness, reality, and individuality of the people who inhabited it depended on the talent, passion, and veracity with which they had been depicted by the authors of the relevant works. I found all this very interesting, because Sedlovoi got quite carried away and spoke in a lively and engaging manner. But then he suddenly got the idea that all this didn’t sound very scientific, so he hung up a load of diagrams and charts on the stage and launched into a tedious exposition in highly specialized language about decremental bevel gears, multiple temporal transmissions, and some kind of permeative steering device.

I soon lost track of the thread of his reasoning and started gazing around at the other people there. The master academician was sleeping majestically, occasionally raising his right eyebrow in a pure reflex reaction, as if he were expressing some doubt concerning what the speaker was saying. The people in the back rows were engrossed in a furious game of battleships in Banach space. Two extramural students working as lab assistants were studiously noting down every word, their faces frozen in hopeless despair and abject submission to their fate. Someone furtively lit up a cigarette, blowing the smoke down between his knees under the desk. In the front row the masters and bachelors listened with their customary close attention, preparing their questions and comments. Some were smiling sarcastically; others looked perplexed. Sedlovoi’s research supervisor nodded approvingly after each phrase. I began looking out the window, but there was nothing to see but the same boring old emporium and occasional boys running by with fishing rods.

I livened up a bit when the speaker declared that he had finished his introduction and now he would like to demonstrate his machine in action.

“Interesting, interesting,” said the master academician, who had woken up. “Righty-ho… Will you go yourself?”

“Well, you see,” said Sedlovoi, “I’d prefer to stay here to provide clarification in the course of the journey. Perhaps someone here would…?”

Everyone there shrank back, obviously remembering the mysterious fate of the traveler who had journeyed to the edge of the flat Earth. One of the masters offered to send his double. Sedlovoi said that wouldn’t be interesting, because doubles were rather insensitive to external stimuli and would be poor transmitters of information. Someone in the back rows asked what kinds of external stimuli there might be. Sedlovoi said the usual ones: visual, olfactory, tactile, acoustic. Then someone else in the back rows asked what kind of tactile stimuli would predominate. Sedlovoi shrugged and said that depended on how the traveler behaved in the places he reached.

Someone in the back rows said, “Ah…” and no more questions were asked. The speaker gazed around helplessly. Everyone in the audience was looking somewhere else, anywhere but at him. The master academician kept repeating good-naturedly, “Well? Well then? You young people! Well? Who will it be?”

I got to my feet and walked up to the machine without speaking. I simply can’t bear the sight of a speaker dying the death; it’s just too shameful, too pitiful and painful.

Someone in the back rows called out, “Sashka, what are you doing? Get a grip!” Sedlovoi’s eyes glittered.

“May I?” I asked.

“By all means, most certainly!” Sedlovoi muttered, grabbing hold of my finger and dragging me toward the machine.

“Just a moment,” I said, freeing myself gently. “Will it take long?”

“Just as long as you want!” exclaimed Sedlovoi. “You just tell me what you want, and that’s what I’ll do… And anyway, you’ll be driving yourself! It’s all very simple.” He grabbed hold of me and dragged me toward the machine again. “You steer with these handlebars. Here’s the reality-clutch pedal. This is the brake. And this is the accelerator. Do you drive a car? That’s fine then! This control key… Which way do you want to go—into the future or the past?”

“The future,” I said.

“Ah,” he said, and I thought he sounded a little disappointed. “Into the described future… All those science fiction novels and utopias. Well of course, that’s interesting too. Only don’t forget that the future is bound to consist of discrete elements; there must be huge gaps of time that haven’t been filled in by any authors. But then, that doesn’t matter… All right then, you press this key twice. Once now, to start, and the second time when you want to come back. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said. “But what if something goes wrong with it?”

“It’s absolutely safe!” he said with a flutter of his hands. “The very instant anything goes wrong with it, if so much as a single speck of dust gets in between the contacts, you’ll come straight back here.”

“Be bold, young man,” said the master academician, “and you’ll be able to tell us what lies out there in the future, ha-ha-ha…”

I clambered into the saddle, feeling very stupid and trying not to catch anyone’s eye.

“Press it, press it,” the speaker whispered urgently.

I pressed the key. It was obviously some kind of starter. The machine jerked, snorted, and began trembling gently.

“The shaft’s bent,” Sedlovoi whispered in annoyance. “Never mind, never mind… Engage the gear. That’s it. And now the accelerator, step on it.”

I pressed on the accelerator, at the same time smoothly releasing the clutch. The world started to fade away. The last thing I heard in the hall was the master academician’s voice asking, “And how exactly are we going to observe his progress?” And then the hall disappeared.

2

At first the machine progressed in short leaps and bounds, and it was all I could do to stay in the saddle by wrapping my legs around the frame and clinging to the arched steering bar as tightly as possible. Out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed magnificent spectral buildings, dull yellow plains, and a cold, cheerless sun shining through gray mist from close to its zenith. Then I realized that all the juddering and shuddering was because I’d taken my foot off the accelerator and the engine wasn’t providing enough power (exactly the same as with a car), so the machine was moving along in jerks, and in addition every now and then it kept running into the ruins of ancient and medieval utopias. I pushed the accelerator down a bit, the machine immediately started moving smoothly, and at last I was able to make myself more comfortable and take a look around.

I was surrounded by a spectral world. Immense buildings of multicolored marble with decorative colonnades towered up among little village-type houses. All around me fields of grain swayed to and fro although there was not a breath of wind. Plump herds of transparent beasts grazed on grass, and handsome gray-haired shepherds sat on little hillocks. They were all, every single one, reading books and ancient manuscripts. Then two transparent men appeared beside me, struck poses, and began talking. They were both barefoot and wrapped in pleated tunics, with wreaths on their heads. One had a spade in his right hand and a scroll of parchment in his left. The other was leaning on a mattock and toying absentmindedly with a huge copper inkwell dangling from his belt. They spoke strictly in turn and at first I thought they were talking to each other. But very soon I realized they were talking to me, although neither of them had even glanced in my direction. I started listening.

The one with the spade was expounding at monotonous length the fundamental political principles of the wonderful country of which he was a citizen. This system was exceptionally democratic, and any coercion of citizens was quite out of the question (he repeated this several times with special emphasis); everyone was rich and free of care, and even the lowliest of plowmen had at least three slaves to his name. When he halted to catch his breath and lick his lips, the other one, with the inkwell, started speaking. He boasted that he had just worked his three hours as a ferryman on the river, hadn’t taken a penny from anyone because he didn’t even know what money was, and now was on his way to devote himself to composing poetry in a shady nook by a babbling brook.

They spoke for a long time—judging by the speedometer, it must have been several years—and then they disappeared and there was no one. The motionless sun shone through the spectral forms of the buildings. Suddenly, flying machines with webbed wings like pterodactyls began drifting slowly across the sky high above the earth. For a moment I thought they were all on fire, then I noticed that the smoke was coming out of large conical funnels. They flew over me, flapping their wings ponderously, ashes came showering down, and someone up there dropped a knobbly log of wood on me.

Changes began taking place in the magnificent buildings around me. There were just as many columns, and the architecture remained as sumptuously absurd as ever, but new patterns of color appeared. I think the marble was replaced by some more modern material, and the blind-eyed statues and busts on the roofs were replaced by gleaming devices that looked like the dish antennae of radio telescopes. There were more people on the streets, and a huge number of cars appeared. The herds of beasts and the reading shepherds had disappeared, but the fields of grain carried on swaying, even though there was still no wind. I pressed on the brake and came to a halt.

Looking around, I realized that the machine and I were standing on the belt of a moving sidewalk. Swarming all around me were people of the most varied possible kinds. For the most part, though, these people were somehow unreal—far less real than the powerful, complex, almost soundless machines. So when one of the machines accidentally ran into a person, there wasn’t any actual collision. The machines didn’t interest me much, no doubt because each of them had an inventor inspired to a state of semitransparency sitting on its frontal casing and expounding the structure and function of his creation at great length. Nobody was listening to the inventors, and they themselves didn’t seem to be addressing anyone in particular.

It was more interesting to watch the people. I saw great hulking fellows in overalls walking along arm in arm, swearing and roaring out tuneless songs with badly written verse for words. Now and then I saw people only partially dressed, perhaps with nothing but a green hat and a red jacket on their naked bodies, or with elegant shoes but bare legs and ankles. The other people there didn’t seem concerned, and I stopped feeling embarrassed when I recalled that some authors are in the habit of writing things like “The door opened and on the threshold appeared a slim, sinewy man in a shaggy cap and dark glasses.” There were also some people dressed normally, although their clothes were cut in an odd fashion, and here and there, elbowing their way through the crowd, there were suntanned men with beards in long, spotless white robes with a rough hoe or some kind of yoke in one hand and an easel or pencil case in the other. The robe-wearers looked bewildered, and they shied away from the multilegged machines and gazed around them with a hunted expression.

Apart from the muttering of the inventors, it was fairly quiet. Most of the people weren’t saying anything, but on the corner two youths were fiddling with some mechanical device. One was saying firmly, “Design concepts can’t just stand still. That is a law of social development. We shall invent it. We shall definitely invent it. Despite the bureaucrats like Chinushin and the reactionaries like Tverdolobov.” The other youth was saying, “I’ve figured out how to make use of the wear-resistant tires of polystructural fiber with degenerate amine bonds and incomplete oxygen groups. But I still don’t know how to use the subthermal neutron regeneration reactor. Misha! Misha! What are we going to do about the reactor?” Glancing at their device, I had no difficulty in recognizing it as a bicycle.

The sidewalk brought me out into an immense square crammed with spaceships of the most varied designs with people packed tightly around them. I got off the moving sidewalk and lifted the machine off after me. At first I couldn’t understand what was going on. Music was playing, speeches were being made, and here and there, towering up above the crowd, curly-haired, rosy-cheeked youths struggled to restrain the long locks of hair that kept falling across their foreheads as they declaimed poetry with deep feeling. The poetry was either familiar or quite awful, but as they listened the eyes of the multitude overflowed with the grudging tears of men, the bitter tears of women, and the lucid tears of children. Rugged men embraced each other tightly, twitching the taut muscles on their temples and slapping each other on the back. Since many of them were not dressed, the slapping sounded like clapping. Two smart-looking lieutenants with tired, kind-looking eyes dragged a nattily dressed man past me with his arms twisted behind his back. The man was squirming and shouting something in broken English. He seemed to be betraying everybody he could think of and explaining who had paid them to plant a bomb in the engine of a starship and how they did it. A few boys clutching little volumes of Shakespeare glanced around stealthily as they stole across to the thruster nozzles of the nearest astroplane. The crowd didn’t notice them.

I soon realized that one half of the crowd was saying good-bye to the other half. It was a bit like a general mobilization. From the speeches and conversations I gathered that the men were setting out into space, some for Venus, some for Mars—and some, with expressions of detached resignation on their faces, were even going to other stars or as far as the center of the galaxy. The women were staying behind to wait for them. Many of them were standing in a line to a massive, ugly building that some called the Pantheon and others called the Refrigerator. I realized I had arrived just in time. If I had been just an hour late, there would have been no one left in the city but women frozen for a thousand years. Then my attention was caught by a tall, gray wall bounding the square on its western side. There were swirling clouds of black smoke rising up from behind it.

“What’s that over there?” I asked a beautiful woman in a head scarf who was wandering dejectedly toward the Pantheon-Refrigerator.

“The Iron Wall,” she answered without stopping.

I grew more and more bored with every minute that passed. Everyone was crying and the orators had all gone hoarse. Beside me a youth in sky-blue overalls was saying good-bye to a girl in a rose-pink dress. The girl said in a monotonous voice, “I wish I were stardust; I’d form a cosmic cloud and envelop your ship…” The youth listened to her words. When the sound of the combined orchestras thundered out above the roar of the crowd, my nerves couldn’t take any more and I jumped into the saddle and stepped on the accelerator. I just had time to see the starships, planet cruisers, astroplanes, ion ships, photon ships, and star gliders go roaring up into the sky above the city before everything except the gray wall was enveloped in phosphorescent mist.

After the year 2000 the gaps in time began, and I flew through time without any matter. It was cold in those places, with only the occasional eruption of an explosion and a bright glow flaring up behind the gray wall. Now and then the city surrounded me again, and every time its buildings became taller, the spherical domes became more transparent, and there were fewer starships on the square. Smoke rose uninterruptedly from behind the wall. I stopped for a second time when the final star glider had disappeared from the square. The sidewalks were moving, but there were no noisy young fellows in overalls. No one was swearing. A few colorless individuals strolled along the streets in twos or threes, dressed either strangely or meagerly.

As far as I could tell, they were all talking about science. They intended to bring someone back to life, and a professor of medicine, an intellectual with the build of an athlete who looked very unusual dressed in nothing but a waistcoat, was expounding the reanimation procedure to a lanky biophysicist, whom he introduced to everyone they met as the initiator and main executor of this scheme. They were preparing to drill a hole through the Earth somewhere. The project was being discussed right there in the street by a large knot of people, and schemata were sketched out in chalk on walls and on the sidewalk. I tried listening, but it turned out to be so incredibly boring, as well as being interspersed with attacks on some reactionary I’d never heard of, that I hoisted the machine onto my shoulders and left. I wasn’t surprised in the least that discussion of the project immediately halted and everybody started doing something useful. But the moment I stopped, a citizen of indeterminate professional status began spouting verbiage, launching out of the blue into a discourse on music. Listeners came running up immediately, gawping at him and asking questions that revealed their profound ignorance.

Suddenly a man came running down the street, shouting. Chasing after him was a spiderlike machine. According to the shouts of its quarry, it was “a self-programming cybernetic robot with trigenic quator feedback that has slipped out of sync… Oh no, it’s going to tear me limb from limb!” But curiously enough, no one even turned a hair. Apparently no one really believed in the revolt of the machines.

Two other spiderlike machines, not as big and not as ferocious looking, leaped out of a side street. Before I even had time to gasp, one of them had polished my shoes and the other had washed and ironed my handkerchief. A big white tank with winking lights on caterpillar tracks trundled up to me and sprayed me with perfume. I was just about to get out of there when there was a thunderous roar and a huge rusty rocket tumbled down out of the sky into the square. People in the crowd started talking:

“It’s Dream Star!”

“Yes, so it is!”

“But of course it is! It set out 218 years ago and everyone’s forgotten about it, but thanks to the Einsteinian contraction of time that results from movement at near-light speeds, the crew has only aged two years!”

“Thanks to what? Ah, Einstein… Yes, yes, I remember. We did that in our second year at school.”

A one-eyed man with his left arm and right leg missing clambered out of the rocket with some difficulty.

“Is this Earth?” he asked irritably.

“It is! It is!” the people in the crowd replied, with smiles beginning to blossom on their faces.

“Thank God for that,” said the man, and everyone glanced at each other. Either they didn’t understand what he meant or they were pretending they didn’t.

The maimed astropilot struck a pose and launched into a speech in which he appealed to every last member of the human race to fly to the planet of Willee-Nillee in the Eoella star system of the Small Magellanic Cloud to liberate their brothers in reason, who were groaning under the tyrannical yoke of a bloodthirsty cybernetic dictator. The roar of thruster nozzles drowned out his words as two more rockets, also rusty, landed in the square. Women covered in hoarfrost came running out of the Pantheon-Refrigerator. The crowd began pressing together. I realized I’d arrived in the age of returns, and hastily stepped on the accelerator.

The city disappeared and didn’t reappear for a long time. The wall was still there, with fires blazing and lightning flashing behind it with depressing monotony. It was a strange sight: absolute emptiness with just a wall in the west. But at long last a bright light dawned again and I immediately halted.

On every side the land stretched out, deserted but flourishing. Fields of grain swayed and plump herds roamed, but there was no sign of any educated shepherds. I could see the familiar transparent-silver domes on the horizon, the viaducts and spiral slipways. To the west the wall towered up as before.

Someone touched my knee and I started. Standing beside me was a small boy with deep-set, blazing eyes. “What do you want, kid?” I asked.

“Is your device defective?” he inquired in a melodic voice.

“You should speak more politely to grown-ups,” I replied in a didactic tone.

He looked very surprised, then his face lit up. “Ah yes, now I remember. If my memory does not deceive me, that was the way things used to be in the Era of Compulsory Courtesy. Insofar as direct forms of address disharmonize with your emotional rhythms, I am willing to adopt any rhythmic formulae to address you.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say to that. He squatted down in front of the machine, touched it in various places, and spoke several words that I didn’t understand at all. He was a really great kid, very clean and healthy and well groomed, but he seemed far too serious for his age to me.

There was a deafening explosion behind the wall and we both turned toward it. I saw a terrible scaly hand with eight fingers clutch at the crest of the wall, strain, release its grip, and disappear.

“Tell me, kid,” I said, “what’s that wall for?”

He gave me a serious, bashful look. “It’s called the Iron Wall,” he said. “Unfortunately, I am not familiar with the etymology of those two words, but I know that it separates two worlds—the World of the Humane Imagination and the World of Fear of the Future.” He paused and then added, “I am not familiar with the etymology of the word fear either.”

“Interesting,” I said. “Can’t we take a look? What’s the World of Fear like?”

“Of course you can. There’s the communications port. Satisfy your curiosity.”

The communications port looked like a low archway closed off by an armor-plated door. I walked up to it and laid a hesitant hand on the bolt.

The boy called after me: “I am obliged to warn you that if anything happens to you in there, you will have to appear before the United Council of the Hundred and Forty Worlds.”

I opened the door a little way. Zap! Boom! Ke-rang! Wheeeee! Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da! All five of my senses were traumatized simultaneously. I saw a beautiful, long-legged, naked blonde with an obscene tattoo between her shoulder blades, blasting away with two automatic pistols at an ugly man with dark hair. Splashes of red spurted out of him every time he was hit. I heard the thunder of explosions and the bloodcurdling roar of monsters. I smelled the indescribable stench of rotten, burning nonproteinaceous flesh. The incandescent blast of a nearby nuclear explosion scorched my face, and my tongue caught the repulsive taste of protoplasm dispersed through the air. I staggered back and frantically slammed the door shut, almost trapping my head in it. The air here tasted sweet and the world looked beautiful. The boy had disappeared. I took a little while to recover my wits, then suddenly felt frightened in case that lousy little sneak might have gone running to complain to his United Council. I made a dash for the machine.

Again the twilight of time without space closed in around me, but I kept my eyes fixed on the Iron Wall. I was burning up with curiosity. In order not to waste any time, I jumped forward a million years. Thickets of atomic mushrooms sprouted up behind the wall, and I was glad when the light dawned once again on my side of it. I braked and then groaned in disappointment. The massive Pantheon-Refrigerator still towered up close by. A rusty spherical starship was descending from the sky. There was no one to be seen. The fields of grain were swaying to and fro. The sphere landed, the pilot in sky blue I’d seen only recently got out of it, and the girl in rose pink appeared on the threshold of the Pantheon, covered in red bedsores. They dashed toward each other and clasped hands. I looked away—I was beginning to feel rather awkward. Standing close by was a slightly embarrassed-looking old man, indifferently fishing goldfish out of an aquarium. The sky-blue pilot and the rose-pink girl launched into a long joint disquisition.

I got off the machine to stretch my legs and only then noticed that the sky above the wall was unusually clear. I couldn’t hear any rumble of explosions or crackle of shots. I took heart and set off toward the communications port.

On the other side of the wall the land stretched out in an absolutely level plain, divided all the way to the horizon by the deep gash of a trench. On the left of the trench I couldn’t see a single living soul, and the surface was covered with low metal domes that looked like the manhole covers of sewers. On the right of the trench were several horsemen prancing along the line of the horizon. Then I noticed a stocky, dark-faced man in metal armor sitting on the edge of the trench with his legs dangling into it. He had something that looked like a submachine gun with a very thick barrel hanging on a long strap around his neck. The man was chewing slowly and spitting constantly. He looked at me without any particular interest. I looked at him too, holding the door open, unable to bring myself to speak. His appearance was simply too strange. Abnormal, somehow. Wild. Who could tell what sort of man he was?

After he’d taken a good look at me, he drew a flat bottle out from under his armor, tugged the cork out with his teeth, took a swig, spat into the trench again, and spoke in a hoarse voice, in English: “Hello! You from the other side?”

“Yes,” I replied, also in English.

“And how’s it going out there?”

“So-so,” I said, closing the door just a little. “And how’s it going out here?”

“It’s OK,” he said phlegmatically, and fell silent.

I waited for a while and then asked what he was doing there. He answered me reluctantly at first, but then he warmed to his subject. Apparently on the left side of the trench humanity was living out its final days under the oppressive yoke of relentlessly ferocious robots. The robots there had become cleverer than humans and seized power. They enjoyed all the good things of life and had driven people underground and set them to work on assembly lines. On the right of the trench, on the land that he was guarding, people had been subjugated by aliens from a neighboring universe. They had also seized power, then established a feudal society and made unrestricted use of the right of the first night. The aliens lived it up, but a few crumbs also came the way of those who were in their good graces. Twenty miles farther along the trench there was a region where people had been enslaved by aliens from Altaic, intelligent viruses who infected a person’s body and then made him or her do whatever they wanted. Even farther to the west there was a large Galactic Federation colony. The people there were enslaved too, but their life wasn’t all that bad, because His Excellency the vice regent kept them fed so that he could recruit the personal bodyguards of His Majesty the Galactic Emperor A-u the 3,562nd from among them. There were also areas that had been subjugated by intelligent parasites, intelligent plants, and intelligent minerals, and even Communists. And finally, somewhere far away in the distance, there were regions enslaved by someone else, but no serious person would ever believe the tales that were told about them.

Our conversation was interrupted at this point by several saucer-shaped devices flying low across the flat plain, raining down bombs that swirled and tumbled through the air. “Here we go again,” the man growled, then he lay back with his legs pointing toward the detonations, raised his gun, and opened fire on the horsemen prancing along the horizon.

I got out of there fast, slamming the door shut and slumping back against it, then listening for a while to the bombs screeching, roaring, and rumbling. The pilot in sky blue and the girl in rose pink still hadn’t managed to bring their dialogue to a conclusion, and the indifferent old man, having caught all the goldfish, was looking at them and wiping his eyes with a handkerchief. I took another cautious peep through the door. The huge fireballs of explosions were slowly expanding above the plain. The metal covers were being thrown open one by one and pale, ragged people with savage, bearded faces were climbing out of them, holding iron bars at the ready. The horsemen in armor had galloped up and were cutting my recent conversation partner to pieces with their long swords. He was screaming and fending them off with his submachine gun. A gigantic tank was crawling along the trench toward me with its cannon and machine guns firing. The saucer-shaped flying devices came diving back out of the radioactive clouds.

I closed the door and carefully pulled the bolt shut.

Then I went back to my machine and got into the saddle. I wanted to fly on another million years and take a look at the Earth as it was dying, the way Wells had described it. But just then for the first time something in the machine jammed: I couldn’t get the clutch to separate. I pressed it once, twice, then kicked the pedal with all my might. Something snapped and jangled, the swaying fields of grain stood erect, and I seemed to wake up. I was sitting on a demonstration stand in a small lecture hall in our Institute, and everyone was looking at me in awe.

“What’s wrong with the clutch?” I asked, gazing around to find the machine. The machine wasn’t there. I’d come back alone.

“Never mind that!” cried Louis Sedlovoi. “Thank you very, very much! You really bailed me out there… And it was very interesting, wasn’t it, comrades?”

The audience buzzed its agreement that yes, it was interesting.

“But I’ve read all of it somewhere,” one of the masters sitting in the front row said doubtfully.

“But of course you have! Of course!” exclaimed Sedlovoi. “After all, he was in the described future!”

“There weren’t very many adventures,” said the battleships players in the back rows. “Nothing but talk and more talk.”

“Well, I’m not to blame for that,” Sedlovoi said firmly.

“Pretty serious talk, though,” I said, climbing down off the stand. I remembered my swarthy conversation partner getting hacked to pieces and suddenly felt unwell.

“But I suppose there are a few interesting bits,” said one of the bachelors. “That machine… Remember it? With the trigenic quator feedback… You know, I like that.”

“Well, gentlemen,” said Pupkov-Zadny, “we seem to have already commenced our discussion. But does anyone have a question for the speaker?”

The fastidious bachelor immediately asked a question about the multiple temporal transmission (he was interested in the coefficient of volumetric expansion) and I slipped out of the room.

I felt very strange. Everything seemed so material, so solid and substantial. When people walked by I could hear their shoes squeaking and feel the draft from their movements. Everyone was very taciturn, everyone was working, everyone was thinking—no one was chatting or reading poetry or declaiming passionate speeches. Everyone knew that a lab is one thing and a trade union meeting is another thing altogether, and a public rally is something else again. And when I saw Vybegallo coming toward me, shuffling his leather-soled felt boots along the floor, I even felt a surge of something like sympathy for him, because he had the usual grains of boiled millet stuck in his beard, because he was picking his teeth with a long, thin nail, and he walked past without saying hello. He was a living, material, visible boor; he didn’t brandish his hands in the air or strike academic poses.

I dropped in on Roman, because I was dying to tell someone about my adventure. He was standing over his lab table clutching his beard in his hand and looking at a small green parrot lying in a petri dish. The parrot was dead, its eyes glazed over with a dull, lifeless white film.

“What happened to it?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said Roman. “It’s expired, as you can see.”

“How did a parrot end up in here?”

“I find that rather remarkable myself,” said Roman.

“Maybe it’s artificial?” I suggested.

“No, it’s a genuine, honest-to-goodness parrot.”

“Vitka must have sat on the plywitsum again.”

We leaned down over the parrot and began inspecting it carefully. There was a ring on one of the black legs tucked in close to its body.

“‘Photon,’” Roman read. “And then some figures… One nine zero five seven three.”

“I see,” said a familiar voice behind us.

We turned around and drew ourselves erect.

“Hello,” said S-Janus, coming across to the table. As he emerged from the door of his lab at the back of the room he looked somehow tired and very sad.

“Hello, Janus Polyeuctovich,” we chorused with all the deference we could muster.

Janus caught sight of the parrot and said “I see” again. He picked the small bird up very carefully and gently, stroked its bright red crest, and said quietly: “What happened then, my little Photon?”

He was about to say something else, but he glanced at us and stopped. We stood there watching as he walked slowly across to the far corner of the lab like an old man, opened the door of the electric furnace, and lowered the little green corpse into it.

“Roman Petrovich,” he said. “Would you please be so kind as to throw the switch?”

Roman did as he was asked. He looked as though he had been struck by an unusual idea.

S-Janus stood over the furnace for a moment, hanging his head, then he carefully scraped out the hot ashes, opened the window, and scattered them to the wind. He looked at the window for a while, then told Roman he would be expecting him in his office in half an hour and went out.

“Strange,” said Roman, staring at the door.

“What’s strange?”

“Everything’s strange,” said Roman.

The appearance of this dead green parrot that Janus Polyeuctovich clearly knew very well seemed strange to me too, and so did the rather too unusual ceremony of cremation and scattering the ashes to the wind, but I was impatient to tell Roman about my journey into the described future, so I started. Roman listened very absentmindedly, gazing at me with a blank expression and nodding in all the wrong places, then suddenly he said, “Carry on, carry on, I’m listening,” and dived under the table. He dragged out the wastepaper basket and started rummaging through the crumpled sheets of paper and scraps of recording tape.

When I finished telling my story, he asked, “Hasn’t this Sedlovoi ever tried traveling into the described present? I think that would be much more amusing.”

While I was pondering this suggestion and admiring Roman’s quick wit, he turned the basket over and tipped its contents out onto the floor.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. “Lost a dissertation?”

“You know, Sashka,” he said, gazing at me with unseeing eyes, “this is a remarkable business. Yesterday I was cleaning the furnace and I found a singed green feather. I threw it in the wastepaper basket, but today it’s not there.”

“Whose feather?” I asked.

“You know, green birds’ feathers are extremely rare items in this part of the world. But the parrot that was just cremated was green.”

“That’s nonsense,” I said. “You found the feather yesterday.”

“That’s just the point,” said Roman, putting the rubbish back in the basket.

3

They worked on the Aldan all night. When I turned up in the computer room the next morning the engineers were sitting around on the floor in a sleepy fury, monotonously reviling Cristóbal Joséevich. They called him a Scythian, a barbarian, and a Hun who had invaded the field of cybernetics. They were so desperate that for a while they even listened to my advice and tried to follow it. But then their boss, Sabaoth Baalovich Odin, turned up and they immediately dragged me away from the machine. I walked over to my desk, sat down, and began observing Sabaoth Baalovich’s efforts to assess the nature of the damage.

He was very old but sturdy and sinewy, with a suntan, a shiny bald patch, and smoothly shaved cheeks, dressed in a blindingly white suit of raw silk. He was a man everyone regarded with profound respect. I myself had once seen him reprimand Modest Matveevich for something or other in a low voice, and the fearsome Modest had stood there in front of him, leaning forward ingratiatingly and intoning, “Very well… I’m sorry. It won’t happen again…”

Sabaoth Baalovich radiated a monstrously powerful energy. It had been observed that in his presence clocks began running fast and the tracks of elementary particles curved by a magnetic field straightened out again. And yet he wasn’t a magician. Or at least not a practicing magician. He didn’t walk through walls, he never transgressed anyone, and he never created doubles of himself, although he did a quite exceptional amount of work. He was the head of the Technical Service Department, he knew all of the Institute’s equipment inside and out, and he was one of the consultants at the Kitezhgrad Magotechnical Plant. He was also involved with the most unexpected matters of all kinds that were far removed from his immediate professional area.

I had learned Sabaoth Baalovich’s story only recently. In ancient times S. B. Odin had been the foremost magician in the entire world. Cristóbal Junta and Gian Giacomo were pupils of his pupils. His name was used for exorcising evil spirits and sealing genies into bottles. King Solomon wrote him rapturously enthusiastic letters and built shrines in his honor. He seemed omnipotent. And then somewhere in the middle of the sixteenth century he really did become omnipotent. By implementing a numerical solution to an integral-differential equation of supreme perfection that had been derived by some Titan before the Ice Age began, he acquired the ability to perform any miracle. Every magician has his limitations. Some are incapable of ridding themselves of the growth in their ears. Others have completely mastered the unified Lomonosov-Lavoisier law but are powerless in the face of the second law of thermodynamics. Still others—there are not very many of these—can, for instance, stop time, but only in Riemannian space and not for long. Sabaoth Baalovich was all powerful. He could do anything at all. And yet he was unable to do anything at all. Because the limiting condition of the equation of perfection was that no miracle may cause any harm to anyone. To any rational being. Not here on Earth nor in any other part of the universe. And no one, not even Sabaoth Baalovich, could even imagine a miracle like that. So S. B. Odin abandoned magic forever and became the head of the Technical Service Department at NITWiT.

Once he arrived in the room the engineers soon got their act together. They started moving with greater purpose and cut out the malicious witticisms. I took out my current business file and was just getting down to work when Stella, the pretty young witch with the snub nose and gray eyes who was Vybegallo’s trainee, turned up to collect me to work on the Institute’s wall newspaper. Stella and I were on the editorial board and wrote the satirical poems, the moral fables, and the captions for the drawings. And in addition to that, I did the clever drawing of a mailbox requesting comments, with winged letters flying toward it from every direction.

The actual artistic designer of the wall newspaper was my namesake, another Alexander Ivanovich, with the surname of Drozd, a film technician who had somehow ended up at the Institute. He was a specialist in headlines. The newspaper’s senior editor was Roman Oira-Oira, and his deputy was Volodya Pochkin.

“Sasha,” said Stella, gazing at me with her honest gray eyes. “Let’s go.”

“Where?” I asked, although I already knew where.

“To do the newspaper.”

“What for?”

“Roman asked us specially, because Cerberus is getting nasty about it. He says there’s only two days left and nothing’s ready yet.” Cerberus Psoevich Demin, comrade head of the Personnel Department, was the managerial supervisor of our newspaper, our head slave driver and censor.

“Listen,” I said, “why don’t we do it tomorrow?”

“I can’t tomorrow,” said Stella. “I’ll be on a plane to Sukhumi. To record baboons. Vybegallo says I have to record the group leader, because he’s the most important… He’s afraid to go near him himself, because the leader’s very jealous. Come on, Sasha, let’s go.”

I sighed, put away my work, and followed Stella, because I can’t write poems on my own; she always provides the first line and the basic idea, and I think that’s the most important thing in poetry. “Where shall we do it?” I asked as we walked along. “In the trade union committee room?”

“The committee room’s occupied—they’re busy reprimanding Alfred. For his tea. But Roman said we could use his place.”

“What do we have to write about? Is it the bathhouse again?”

“Yes, and a few other things. The bathhouse, Bald Mountain. We have to hold Khoma Brut up to public shame.”

“Our Khoma Brut is not too cute,” I said.

“Et tu, Brute,” said Stella.

“That’s an idea,” I said. “We should develop that.”

The newspaper was laid out on the table in Roman’s lab—an immense sheet of virginally white Whatman paper. Lying beside it, surrounded by jars of gouache, airbrushes, and copy for the newspaper, was our artist and film technician Alexander Drozd, with a cigarette glued to his lower lip. His shirt, as always, was unbuttoned, and we could see the little bulge of his hairy belly.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hi,” said Sasha. There was a burst of music. He was fiddling with a portable radio.

“All right, what have we got here?” I asked, raking up the copy.

There wasn’t very much of it. There was a lead article, “The Forthcoming Holiday.” There was a brief piece from Cerberus Psoevich, “The Results of an Investigation into the Implementation of the Directors’ Instructions Concerning Labor Discipline During the Second Half of the First Quarter and the First Half of the Second Quarter.” There was an article by Professor Vybegallo, “Our Duty Is a Duty to Our Sponsored Enterprises and Farms in the Town and the District.” There was one by Volodya Pochkin, “On the All-Union Electronic Magic Conference.” There was a contribution from some brownie, “When Will They Scavenge the Steam Heating on the Fourth Floor?” There was an article from the chairman of the cafeteria committee, “Neither Flesh nor Fowl”—six single-spaced typed pages. It began with the words “Man needs phosphorous like the air he breathes.” There was a piece by Roman about the work of the Department of Unsolvable Problems. There was an article from Cristóbal Junta for the section Our Veterans. It was called “From Seville to Granada, 1547.” There were a few more short texts criticizing the following: the lack of proper order in the mutual-help fund; ineptitude in the work of the volunteer fire brigade; the toleration of gambling in the vivarium (written by the Little Humpbacked Horse, who’d lost a week’s ration of oats playing chemin de fer with Koschei the Deathless). There were a few caricatures. One of them showed Khoma Brut in a state of sartorial disarray with a bright purple nose. Another took a dig at the bathhouse—a blue naked man freezing solid under an icy shower.

“This is all dead boring,” I said. “Maybe we don’t need any poems?”

“Yes we do.” Stella said with a sigh. “I’ve already tried laying out the copy this way and that way, but there’s always some empty space left.”

“Sasha here can draw something. A few ears of wheat, or some pansies… How about it, Sasha?”

“You do some work,” said Drozd. “I’ve got the masthead to do.”

“Big deal,” I said. “Three words to write.”

“Against the background of a starry sky,” said Drozd impressively. “And a rocket. And all the headlines for the articles. And I haven’t had any lunch yet. Or breakfast.”

“Then go and get something to eat,” I said.

“I can’t afford to,” he said irritably. “I bought a tape recorder. Secondhand. Instead of wasting time on this nonsense, why don’t you conjure me up a couple of sandwiches? With butter and jam. Better still, create me a ten-spot.”

I pulled out a ruble and showed it to him from a distance. “When you’ve done the masthead, you can have it.”

“For keeps?” Drozd asked keenly.

“No. As a loan.”

“Makes no difference anyway,” he said. “Just bear in mind that I’m at death’s door. I’ve started getting spasms. My hands and feet are turning cold.”

“He’s lying,” said Stella. “Sasha, let’s sit down at that table over there and write our poems.”

We sat down at a separate little table and set out the caricatures in front of us. We looked at them for a while, hoping for inspiration. Then Stella said, “Watch out for folks like Khoma Brut, they’ll soon relieve you of your loot!”

“Loot?” I asked. “Did he snatch some money, then?”

“No,” said Stella. “He created a disturbance and got into a fight. I was just rhyming.”

We waited for a while again, but I still couldn’t come up with anything but “Khoma Brut will filch your loot.”

“Let’s think about this logically,” I said. “We have Khoma Brut. He got drunk. Got into a fight. What else did he do?”

“Pestered some girls,” said Stella. “Broke a window.”

“OK,” I said. “What else?”

“Used bad language.”

“That’s odd,” Sasha Drozd piped up. “I used to work with this guy Brut in the cinema club. Just an ordinary guy. Perfectly normal.”

“And?” I said.

“That’s it.”

“Can you give us a rhyme for Brut?” I asked.

“Loot.”

“We’ve got that already,” I said.

“OK, then try boot.”

Stella declaimed, “Comrades, you see before you Khoma Brut. Let’s flog him hard and then put in the boot.”

“That’s no good,” said Drozd. “That’s incitement to physical violence.”

“Hoot,” I said.

“Comrades, you see before you Khoma Brut,” said Stella. “His pranks would make a jackass honk and hoot.”

“Your words are enough to make anyone hoot,” said Drozd.

“Have you done that masthead yet?” I asked.

“No,” said Drozd capriciously.

“Get on with it, then.”

“They’ll shame our glorious Institute,” said Stella. “These drunken hooligans like Brut.”

“That’s good,” I said. “We’ll put that at the end. Make a note of it. That’ll be the moral, fresh and original.”

“What’s original about it?” Drozd asked simplemindedly. I didn’t bother to answer him.

“And now,” I said, “We have to describe what he got up to. How about ‘Drank himself drunk, stank like a skunk, then did a bunk, the great lousy lunk’?”

“That’s terrible,” said Stella, sounding disgusted.

I propped my head up on my hands and began peering at the caricature. Drozd ran his brush across the Whatman paper, with his backside sticking up into the air. Encased in their super-tight jeans his legs were curved into an arc. I had a flash of inspiration.

“Knees backward bent!” I said. “The song.”

“‘The little cricket sat there with its sharp knees backward bent,’” said Stella.

“That’s right,” said Drozd, without turning around. “Even I know that one. ‘And all the guests go crawling home, their weak knees backward bent.’”

“Hang on, hang on,” I said. I was feeling inspired. “He fights and curses black as hell, but see where he is sent; they take him downtown to a cell, his drunk knees backward bent.”

“That’s not too bad,” said Stella.

“Get the idea?” I asked. “Another couple of stanzas, and we put in the refrain ‘Knees backward bent’ everywhere. ‘His drunken head was in a whirl… He chased after a pretty girl…’ That kind of thing.”

“His head is spinning more and more, but he will not relent,” said Stella. “He tried to break down someone’s door with his knees backward bent.”

“Brilliant!” I said. “Write it down. Did he really try to break down a door?”

“He did, he did.”

“Excellent!” I said. “Right, just one more verse.”

“He chased after the pretty girls with his knees backward bent,” said Stella thoughtfully. “We need the first line.”

“Swirls,” I said. “Twirls. Hurls. Furls.”

“Curls,” said Stella. “No blade has ever touched his curls.”

“True enough,” put in Drozd. “That’s right. You’ve hit on an artistic truth there. He’s never shaved or washed in his life.”

“Maybe we should think up the second line first?” suggested Stella. “Bent. Element. Increment…”

“Tent,” I said, “Spent.”

“Vent,” said Drozd.

We sat there in silence again for a long time, gazing stupidly at each other and moving our lips silently. Drozd tapped his brush against the edge of a cup filled with water.

“‘No blade has ever touched his curls,’” I said at last. “‘His words are an affront. He chased after the pretty girls with his knees backward bent.’”

“Affront doesn’t really rhyme,” said Stella.

“‘But he will not relent,’ then.”

“We already did that.”

“Where? Ah yes, we did that.”

“As stripy as a tent,” suggested Drozd.

At this point we heard a light scratching sound and turned around to look. The door to Janus Polyeuctovich’s laboratory was slowly opening.

“Just look at that!” Drozd exclaimed in astonishment, freezing with his brush in his hand.

A small green parrot with a bright red crest on its head came creeping out through the crack.

“A parrot!” exclaimed Drozd. “It’s a parrot! Here, chick, chick, chick!”

He started making movements with his fingers as if he were crumbling bread onto the floor. The parrot looked at him with one eye. Then it opened its black beak, as hooked as Roman’s nose, and cried hoarsely: “Rrreactor! Rrreactor! Derrritrinitation! Rrresist!”

“He’s really lovely!” exclaimed Stella. “Catch him, Sasha.”

Drozd started moving toward the parrot, then stopped. “He probably bites,” he said warily. “Look at that beak on him.”

The parrot pushed off from the floor, flapped its wings, and started fluttering rather awkwardly around the room. I watched it in astonishment. It looked very much like the one I’d seen the day before. Its twin brother, in fact. But parrots are a dime a dozen, I thought.

Drozd waved it away with his brush.

The parrot landed on the balance beam of the laboratory scales, shuddered as it settled down, and called out quite clearly, “Prrroxima Centaurrri! Rrrubidium! Rrrubidium!”

Then it ruffled up its feathers, pulled its head back into its shoulders, and veiled its eyes with a white film. I think it was trembling. Stella quickly created a piece of bread and jam, pinched off the crust, and held it under its beak. The parrot didn’t react. It was obviously feverish, and the pans of the scales were shuddering and jangling against the upright.

“I think it’s ill,” said Drozd. He absentmindedly took the sandwich out of Stella’s hand and started eating it.

“Guys,” I said, “has anyone ever seen any parrots in the Institute before?”

Stella shook her head. Drozd shrugged.

“There are too many parrots around all of a sudden,” I said. “There was that one yesterday too.”

“Janus must be experimenting with parrots,” said Stella. “Antigravity or something like that.”

The door to the corridor swung open and Roman Oira-Oira, Vitka Korneev, Edik Amperian, and Volodya Pochkin crowded in. The room got noisy. Korneev had slept well and was feeling very cheerful; he started looking through the copy and insulting the authors’ style in a loud voice. The mighty Volodya Pochkin, as deputy editor with primary responsibility for policing and law enforcement, grabbed hold of the thick back of Drozd’s neck, doubled him over, and began jabbing his nose at the wall newspaper, chanting, “Where’s the masthead? Where’s the masthead, Drozdyllo?” Roman demanded to see our finished poems. And Edik, who had nothing to do with the newspaper, went across to the cupboard and starting rattling various pieces of equipment around inside it. Suddenly the parrot screeched: “Solarrr jump! Solarrr jump!” and everybody froze.

Roman stared hard at the parrot. The same expression I’d already seen appeared on his face, as though he’d been struck by an unusual idea. Volodya Pochkin let go of Drozd and said, “Hey, look at that, it’s a parrot!” The crude Korneev slowly reached out his hand to grab the parrot around the body, but the bird slipped through his fingers and Korneev only caught its tail.

“Leave it alone, Vitka,” Stella shouted angrily. “What do you think you’re doing, tormenting a dumb animal like that?”

The parrot began to roar. Everyone crowded around it. Korneev held it like a pigeon. Stella stroked its little crest, and Drozd gently fingered the feathers on its tail. Roman looked at me. “Curious,” he said. “Isn’t it?”

“Where did it come from, Sasha?” Edik asked politely.

I nodded briefly in the direction of Janus’s lab.

“What would Janus want with a parrot?” asked Edik.

“Are you asking me?” I said.

“No, it was a rhetorical question,” Edik said seriously.

“What would Janus want with two parrots?” I asked.

“Or three,” Roman added quietly.

Korneev turned toward us. “Where are the others?” he asked, looking around curiously.

The parrot in his hand fluttered its wings feebly, trying to peck at his finger.

“Let it go,” I said. “You can see it’s not well.”

Korneev shoved Drozd out of the way and sat the parrot back on the balance. The parrot bristled its feathers and stretched out its wings.

“Never mind the bird for now,” said Roman. “We’ll sort that out later. Where’s the poem?”

Stella quickly rattled off everything we’d written so far. Roman scratched his chin, Volodya Pochkin began snorting unnaturally, and Korneev rapped out a command: “Execution. With a large-caliber machine gun. When will you ever learn how to write poems?”

“Write them yourself,” I said angrily.

“I can’t write poems,” said Korneev. “I wasn’t born a Pushkin. I’m more of a natural Belinsky.”

“You’re more of a natural cadaver,” said Stella.

“I beg your pardon!” said Vitka insistently. “I want a literary criticism section in this paper. And I want to write the critical articles. I’ll demolish the lot of you! I’ll remind you what you wrote about the dachas!”

“What was that?” asked Edik.

Korneev quoted verbatim, speaking slowly:

“That’s right, isn’t it? Confess!”

“What of it,” I said. “Pushkin had some poor poems too. They don’t even print them in full in the school anthologies.”

“I know them, though,” said Drozd.

Roman turned toward him. “Are we going to have a masthead today or not?”

“We are,” said Drozd. “I’ve already done the letter T.”

“What letter T? What do we want a T for?”

“You mean I shouldn’t have?”

“You’ll be the death of me,” said Roman. “The newspaper’s title is For Progressive Magic. Can you show me any letter T in that?”

Drozd stared at the wall, moving his lips silently. “How did that happen?” he said at last. “Where did I get the letter T from? There was a letter T!”

Roman became furious and ordered Pochkin to sit everyone back down in their right places. Stella and I were put under the command of Korneev. Drozd feverishly set about transforming the T into a stylized letter F. Edik Amperian tried to slip out with a psychoelectrometer, but he was set upon and coerced into mending the airbrush that was needed to paint the starry sky. Then it was Pochkin’s own turn. Roman instructed him to type out the copy again, correcting the style and spelling as he went along. Roman himself began pacing around the laboratory, looking over everybody’s shoulders.

For a while the work fairly raced along. We managed to write and reject several versions of the bathhouse theme: “Our bathhouse must be getting old, / The water there is always cold”; “If cleanness is your cherished dream, / Beware this dismal, icy stream”; “Two hundred colleagues—that’s a lot / Demand a shower that’s steaming hot.”

Korneev swore outrageously, like a genuine literary critic. “Learn from Pushkin!” he dinned into our heads. “Or at least from Pochkin. You have a genius sitting beside you and you’re not even capable of imitating him! ‘Down the road there comes a ZIM, and that’ll be the end of him.’ What sheer physical power those lines possess! What clarity of feeling!”

We made clumsy attempts to return the abuse. Sasha Drozd got as far as the letter A in the word Progressive. Edik mended the airbrush and tested it on Roman’s research notes. Volodya Pochkin spewed out curses as he tried to find the letter T on the typewriter. Everything was going quite normally.

Then Roman suddenly said, “Sasha, take a look over here.”

I looked. The parrot was lying under the balance with its legs drawn in. Its eyes were covered with a whitish film and its crest was drooping limply.

“It’s dead,” Drozd said in a sad voice.

We crowded around the parrot again. I had no particular ideas in my head, or if I did, they were somewhere deep in my subconscious, but I reached out a hand, picked up the parrot, and looked at its legs.

Immediately Roman asked me, “Is it there?”

“Yes,” I said.

There was a white metal ring on the black folded leg, and engraved on the ring was the word “Photon” and the figures “190573.” I gave Roman a bewildered glance. We must have looked a bit odd, because Vitka Korneev said, “Right, then, tell us everything you know.”

“Shall we?” asked Roman.

“This is crazy,” I said. “It must be some kind of trick. They’re doubles of some kind.”

Roman inspected the little corpse closely again. “No,” he said. “That’s just it. This is no double. It’s the absolutely genuine original article.”

“Let me take a look,” said Korneev.

Korneev, Volodya Pochkin, and Edik gave the parrot a thoroughgoing examination and declared unanimously that it wasn’t a double and they couldn’t understand why that bothered us so much. “Take me, for instance,” said Korneev. “I’m not a double either. Why aren’t you amazed by that?”

Roman looked around at Stella, who was just dying of curiosity, Volodya Pochkin, standing there with his mouth wide open, and Vitka, with a mocking grin on his face. Then he told them everything—how the day before yesterday he’d found a green feather in the electric furnace and thrown it into the wastepaper basket; how yesterday the feather wasn’t in the basket, but on the table (this very same table) there was a dead parrot, a perfect copy of this one, and also not a double; how Janus had recognized the dead parrot, been upset, and burned it in the aforementioned electric furnace, and then for some reason had thrown the ashes out of the window.

For a while no one said a word. Drozd, who hadn’t paid much attention to Roman’s story, shrugged. It was clear from his face that he didn’t understand what all the fuss was about, and that in his opinion there were much weirder things going on at the Institute. Stella too seemed disappointed. But the trio of masters had understood everything perfectly, and their faces clearly expressed protest.

Korneev said firmly, “You’re lying. And clumsily at that.”

“It’s still not the same parrot,” said the polite Edik. “You must be mistaken.”

“It’s the same one,” I said. “Green, with a ring.”

“Photon?” asked Volodya Pochkin in a public prosecutor’s voice.

“Photon. Janus called it his little Photon.”

“And the numbers?” asked Volodya.

“The numbers too.”

“Are the digits the same?” Korneev asked menacingly.

“I think they are,” I replied uncertainly, glancing in Roman’s direction.

“Can you be more precise?” demanded Korneev. He put his big red hand over the parrot. “So tell me what these numbers here are.”

“One nine…” I said. “Uh, uh… zero two, isn’t it? Six three.” Korneev glanced under his hand. “Wrong,” he said. “And you?” he asked Roman.

“I don’t remember,” Roman said calmly. “I think it was zero five, not zero three.”

“No, I said, “it was zero six. I remember, there was a little flourish on it.”

“A flourish,” said Pochkin derisively. “You Sherlock Holmeses and Nat Pinkertons! Now you’re fed up with the law of causality.”

Korneev put his hands in his pockets. “That’s a different matter,” he said. “I don’t insist that you’re lying. You’ve just got things confused. Parrots are all green, many of them are ringed, this pair came from the ‘Photon’ series. And you’ve got memories like sieves. Like all cheap versifiers and editors of wall newspapers.”

“Like sieves?” Roman asked.

“Like a grater.”

“Like a grater?” Roman queried, with a strange smile.

“Like an old grater,” Korneev explained. “Rusty. Like a net. With wide mesh.”

Still smiling his strange smile, Roman took a notebook out of his breast pocket and started turning the pages.

“All right,” he said, “rusty, with wide mesh. Let’s see now… One nine zero five seven three,” he read out.

The three masters dashed toward the parrot, and their foreheads clashed together with a dry crunch.

“One nine zero five seven three,” Korneev read out from the ring in a crestfallen voice. The effect was very impressive. Stella squealed out loud in delight.

“So what?” said Drozd, still working on his masthead. “I once had a lottery ticket with a number that matched and I went dashing to the savings bank to claim my car. But then it turned out—”

“Why did you write down the number?” asked Korneev, peering at Roman. “Is that a habit of yours? Do you write down all the numbers you see? Maybe you’ve got the number of your watch written down too?”

“Brilliant!” said Pochkin. “Well done, Vitka. You’ve hit the bull’s-eye. Shame on you, Roman! Why did you poison the parrot? That was very cruel!”

“Idiots!” said Roman. “Who do you think I am, Vybegallo?”

Korneev skipped across to him and inspected his ears.

“Go to hell!” said Roman. “Sasha, just look at these fools!”

“Guys,” I said reproachfully, “what kind of joke is this? Who do you take us for?”

“What else can we do?” asked Korneev. “Someone’s lying here. It’s either you or all the laws of nature. I believe in the laws of nature. Everything else changes.”

But he soon gave up arguing, sat down at one side, and started thinking. Sasha Drozd calmly carried on painting his masthead. Stella looked at them by turns with frightened eyes. Volodya Pochkin was rapidly scribbling down formulas and crossing them out.

Edik was the first to speak. “Even if there are no laws being broken,” he said in a reasonable tone, “it’s still very strange for a large number of parrots to appear unexpectedly in the same room, and their death rate is highly suspicious. But I can’t say I’m very surprised, bearing in mind that we’re dealing with Janus Polyeuctovich here. Does it not seem to you that Janus Polyeuctovich himself is an extremely curious individual?”

“It does,” I said.

“I think so too,” said Edik. “What’s he actually working on, Roman?”

“That depends which Janus you mean. S-Janus is working on contact with parallel spatial dimensions.”

“Hmm,” said Edik. “That’s not likely to help us much.”

“Unfortunately not,” said Roman. “I keep wondering how to connect the parrots with Janus too, but I can’t come up with anything.”

“But he is a strange person, isn’t he?” asked Edik.

“Yes, no doubt about it. Starting with the fact that there are two of them but only one of him. We’ve gotten so used to the idea we don’t even bother to think about it.”

“That’s what I was trying to say. We hardly ever talk about Janus—we respect him too much. But I’m sure every one of us must have noticed at least one strange thing about him.”

“Strange thing number one,” I said, “a love of dying parrots.”

“OK,” said Edik. “Next?”

“You petty gossips,” said Drozd with dignity. “I asked him to lend me some money once.”

“And?” said Edik.

“He gave it to me,” said Drozd, “But I forgot how much he gave me and now I don’t know what to do.”

He stopped. Edik waited for a while for him to continue, then said, “Do you know, for instance, that every time I’ve worked with him at night he’s gone off somewhere at exactly midnight and come back five minutes later, and every time I’ve had the impression he was trying to get me to tell him what we’d been doing before he left?”

“That’s exactly right,” said Roman. “I know all about that. I noticed a long time ago that at precisely midnight his memory is simply wiped clean. And he’s perfectly aware of this defect of his. He’s apologized to me several times and told me it’s a reflex reaction caused by a serious concussion.”

“His memory’s absolutely useless,” said Volodya Pochkin, crumpling up the piece of paper with his calculations and tossing it under the table. “He’s always asking if he saw you yesterday or not.”

“And what you spoke about if he did see you,” I added.

“Memory, memory,” Korneev muttered impatiently. “What’s his memory got to do with it? That’s not the problem. What’s this work he’s doing on parallel spatial dimensions?”

“First we have to collect the facts,” said Edik.

“Parrots, parrots, parrots,” Vitka continued. “Could they really be doubles after all?”

“No,” said Volodya Pochkin. “I did all the calculations. They don’t match any of the criteria for doubles.”

“Every night at midnight,” said Roman, “he goes into that laboratory of his and locks himself in for literally just a few minutes. One time he was in such a hurry to get in there, he didn’t even close the door.”

“And what happened?” asked Stella in a hushed voice.

“Nothing. He sat down in an armchair for a while and came back out. And he immediately asked if we’d been talking about anything important.”

“I’m off,” said Korneev, getting up.

“Me too,” said Edik. “We’ve got a seminar.”

“Me too,” said Volodya Pochkin.

“No,” said Roman. “You sit there and type. I’m leaving you in charge. Stella, you take Sasha and write your poems. I’m going out. I’ll be back in the evening, and the newspaper had better be ready.”

They went out, leaving us there to work on the newspaper. At first we tried to think up ideas, but pretty soon we wore ourselves out and realized we couldn’t do it. So we wrote a short poem about a dying parrot.

When Roman got back the newspaper was ready. Drozd was lying on the table scarfing down sandwiches and Pochkin was explaining to Stella and me why what had happened with the parrot was absolutely impossible.

“Well done, all of you,” said Roman. “An excellent wall newspaper. And what a masthead! Such a fathomless starry sky! And so few typing errors! Where’s the parrot?”

The parrot was lying in a petri dish, the very same dish in the very same place where Roman and I had seen it the day before. I even gasped in surprise.

“Who put it here?” asked Roman.

“I did,” said Drozd. “Why?”

“Never mind,” said Roman. “It can stay there. OK, Sasha?”

I nodded.

“Let’s see what happens to it tomorrow,” said Roman.

4

But next morning I had my own responsibilities to attend to. The Aldan was fixed and ready to do battle, and when I arrived in the computer room after breakfast there was already a short line of doubles standing at the door with lists of jobs for it to tackle. I began by vengefully banishing Cristóbal Junta’s double after writing on its sheet of paper that I couldn’t read the writing. (Cristóbal Joséevich’s handwriting really was hard to read, because he wrote in Gothic letters.) Fyodor Simeonovich’s double had brought a program written personally by Fyodor Simeonovich. It was the first one that he had written without any advice, prompting, or instructions from me. I read it through carefully and was pleased to discover that it had been written competently, economically, and even with a certain originality. After correcting a few minor errors I passed the program on to my girls. Then I noticed the pale-faced bookkeeper from the fish processing plant languishing in the line. He looked rather frightened and uncomfortable, so I spotted him straightaway.

“It doesn’t seem right, though,” he mumbled, squinting warily at the doubles. “The comrades are waiting—they were here before me.”

“Don’t worry, they’re not comrades,” I reassured him.

“Well, citizens—”

“They’re not citizens either.”

The accountant turned absolutely white and, leaning down toward me, said in a faltering whisper, “You know, I noticed they weren’t blinking… And that one in blue—I don’t think he’s breathing either.”

I’d already dealt with half the line when Roman phoned. “Sasha?”

“Yes?”

“The parrot’s gone.”

“What do you mean, gone?”

“Just gone.”

“Maybe the cleaning woman threw it out?”

“I asked her. She didn’t. She never even saw it.”

“So maybe the brownies are up to their silly tricks?”

“Right outside the director’s laboratory? Hardly.”

“True enough,” I said. “What about Janus himself?”

“Janus hasn’t come in yet. I don’t think he’s even back from Moscow.”

“Then what are we supposed to make of all this?” I asked.

“I don’t know. We’ll have to wait and see.”

Neither of us said anything.

“Will you call me?” I asked. “If anything interesting comes up?”

“Of course. Absolutely. Cheers, old buddy.”

I forced myself not to think about the parrot, which in the final analysis was none of my business. I dealt with all the doubles, checked all the programs, and started work on a certain lousy job that had been hanging over me for ages. This lousy job had been given to me by the Absolutists. At first I’d told them it didn’t make any sense and it had no solution, like all the rest of their problems. But then I’d consulted Junta, who had a very subtle understanding of these things, and he’d given me a few pieces of encouraging advice. I’d made a start on the job many times already and then set it aside, but this time I saw it through. It came out very elegantly. But at the very moment when I finished it and leaned back in my chair to survey the solution from a distance, Junta arrived in a dark fury. Looking down at my feet, he inquired in a chilly, unpleasant voice exactly when I’d stopped being able to read his handwriting. He informed me that it sounded very much like sabotage to him, and in Madrid in 1936 he used to have people put up against the wall for doing things like that.

I looked at him fondly. “Cristóbal Joséevich,” I said. “I did solve it after all. You were absolutely right. Incantational space really can be convoluted according to any four variables.”

He finally raised his eyes and looked at me. I must have looked really pleased, because he relented and growled, “May I please take a look?”

I gave him the sheets of paper, he sat down beside me, and we worked through the problem together from beginning to end, savoring with great delight two extremely elegant transformations, one of which he had suggested to me and the other of which I had found for myself.

“Our heads seem to work quite well, Alejandro,” Junta said at last. “We possess an artistic quality of thought. What do you think?”

“I think we did very well,” I said sincerely.

“I think so too,” he said. “We’ll publish this. No one would be ashamed to publish it. This is not hitchhiking galoshes or pants of darkness.”

In an excellent mood now, we began analyzing Junta’s new problem, and he soon got around to saying that even before then he sometimes used to think he was pobrecito, and he could tell I was a mathematical ignoramus the very first moment he laid eyes on me. I agreed with him fervently and suggested it was probably time for him to retire and I ought to be thrown out of the Institute on my backside and put to work as a lumberjack, because I was no good for anything else. He protested. He said a pension was out of the question for him, he ought to be made into fertilizer, and I shouldn’t be allowed within a kilometer of a logging camp—where, after all, a certain intellectual ability was required—I ought to be placed as an apprentice to a junior ladler in the sewage brigade of a cholera ward. We were sitting there with our heads propped in our hands, indulging in self-abasement, when Fyodor Simeonovich glanced into the room. As far as I could make out, he was impatient to find out what I thought of the program he’d written.

“Program!” said Junta with a bilious laugh. “I haven’t seen your program, Teodoro, but I’m sure it’s brilliant in comparison to this.” He handed Fyodor Simeonovich the sheet of paper with his problem, grasping it squeamishly between his finger and thumb. “Feast your eyes on that squalid specimen of wretched mediocrity.”

“My dear fellows,” said Fyodor Simeonovich, perplexed, once he’d puzzled out the handwriting. “This is one of Bezalel’s problems. Cagliostro proved that it has no solution.”

“We know it doesn’t have a solution,” said Junta, instantly bristling. “What we want to know is how to go about solving it.”

“Your reasoning is rather strange, Cristó… How can you look for a solution when there isn’t one? It doesn’t make much sense.”

“I beg your pardon, Teodoro, but it is your reasoning that’s rather strange. What does not make sense is searching for a solution when there already is one. What we’re talking about here is how to deal with a problem that has no solution. This is a matter of fundamental principle, which I can see is unfortunately beyond your grasp as a mere practitioner without theoretical grounding. I believe I was mistaken to enter into discussion of this subject with you.”

Cristóbal Joséevich’s tone was highly insulting, and Fyodor Simeonovich got very angry. “I tell you what, my dear fellow,” he said. “I can’t discuss the matter with you in this tone in front of this young man. You surprise me, it’s pedagogically incorrect. If you wish to continue, please step out into the corridor with me.”

“At your service,” replied Junta, straightening up like a spring and snatching at a nonexistent sword hilt on his hip.

They walked out ceremoniously, proudly holding their heads up high and not looking at each other. The girls started giggling. I wasn’t particularly frightened either. I sat down in front of the sheet of paper that had been left with me, taking my head in my hands, and for a while I was vaguely aware of Fyodor Simeonovich’s deep bass rumbling in the corridor, punctuated by Cristóbal Joséevich’s chilly but furious interjections.

Then Fyodor Simeonovich roared, “Be so good as to step into my office!”

“By all means,” rasped Junta. They were speaking very formally by this time. The voices faded into the distance.

“A duel! A duel!” the girls twittered. Junta had the dashing reputation of a swashbuckling duelist and quarrel-monger. They said he used to take his opponent to his laboratory, offer him a choice of rapiers, swords, or battle-axes, and then start jumping around on the tables like Jean Marais, overturning all the cupboards. But there was no reason to be afraid for Fyodor Simeonovich. It was perfectly obvious that they would spend half an hour in his office staring at each other across the desk in gloomy silence, then Fyodor Simeonovich would heave a sigh, open up his traveling chest, and fill two glasses with the Elixir of Bliss. Junta would flare his nostrils, twirl his metaphorical mustache, and drink it. Fyodor Simeonovich would promptly fill the glasses again and shout for some fresh cucumbers from the laboratory.

Just then Roman called and asked me in a strange voice to come up to his lab straightaway. I ran up the stairs.

Roman, Vitka, and Edik were already in the lab. And there was a green parrot there too. Alive. He was sitting on the beam of the balance, as he had the day before, surveying everyone in turn, first with one eye and then with the other, rummaging in his feathers with his beak and evidently feeling just fine. By contrast, the scientists weren’t looking too good. Roman was stooped dejectedly over the parrot, sighing fitfully every now and then. Pale-faced Edik was gently massaging his temples with an expression of acute distress on his face, as if he were racked by migraine. And Vitka was sitting backward on a chair, swaying to and fro like a little boy playing at horses and muttering something unintelligible with his eyes rolling insanely.

“The same one?” I asked in a low voice.

“The very same,” said Roman.

“Photon?” Suddenly I wasn’t feeling too good either.

“Yep.”

“And the number matches?”

Roman didn’t answer.

Edik said in a pained voice, “If we knew how many feathers the parrot has in its tail, we could have counted them again and taken into account the feather that was lost the day before yesterday.”

“Maybe I should send for Brehm?” I suggested.

“Where’s the corpse?” asked Roman. “That’s what we have to start with! Tell me, detectives, where’s the corpse?”

“Corrrpse,” screeched the parrot. “Cerrremony! Corrrpse overboarrrd! Rrrubidium!”

“What the hell is he saying?” Roman asked angrily.

“‘Corpse overboard’ sounds like a typical pirate expression,” Edik explained.

“And rubidium?”

“Rrrubidium! Rrreserves! Verrry grrreat!” said the parrot.

“There are very great reserves of rubidium,” Edik translated. “I wonder where, though.”

I leaned down and started studying the ring. “Perhaps it isn’t really the same one?”

“Then where’s the first one?” asked Roman.

“That’s a different question,” I said. “That’s a bit easier to explain.”

“Explain it then,” said Edik.

“Hang on,” I said. “First let’s decide if it’s the same one or not.”

“I think it is,” said Edik.

“I don’t think it is,” I said. “See, there’s a scratch here on the ring, by the number three—”

“Numberrr thrrree!” said the parrot. “Numberrr thrrree! Harrrd to starrrboard! Vorrrtex! Vorrrtex!”

Vitka suddenly roused himself. “I’ve got an idea,” he said.

“What is it?”

“Associative interrogation.”

“How do you mean?”

“Hang on. Everybody sit down, keep quiet, and don’t interrupt. Roman, do you have a tape recorder?”

“I’ve got a dictaphone.”

“Give it to me. Only everybody keep quiet. I’ll make him talk, the rotten swine. He’ll tell me everything.”

Vitka drew up a chair, sat down facing the parrot with the dictaphone in his hand, hunched over, looked at the parrot with one eye, and barked: “Rubidium!”

The parrot started and almost fell off the beam. It flapped its wings to regain its balance and responded, “Rrreserves! Rrritchey Crrrater!”

We looked at each other.

“Rrreserves!” Vitka barked.

“Verrry great! Verrry grrreat. Rrritchey’s rrright! Rrritchey’s rrright! Rrrobots! Rrrobots!”

“Robots!”

“Crrrash! Burrrning! Atmospherrre’s burrrning! Withdrrraw! Drrramba! Withdrrraw!”

“Dramba!”

“Rrrubidium! Rrreserves!”

“Rubidium!”

“Rrreserves! Rrritchey Crrrater!”

“Short circuit,” said Roman. “A closed circle.”

“Hang on, hang on,” muttered Vitka. “Just a moment…”

“Try something to do with something else,” Edik advised him.

“Janus!” said Vitka.

The parrot opened its beak and sneezed.

“Jaaanus,” Vitka repeated sternly.

The parrot stared thoughtfully at the ceiling.

“There’s no letter r,” I said.

“That’s probably it,” said Vitka. “OK then… Nevstrrruev!”

“Overrr, overrr!” said the parrot. “Sorrrcerrror! Sorrrcerrror! Trrraveler herrre! Trrraveler herrre!”

“That’s no pirate’s parrot,” said Edik.

“Ask him about the corpse,” I suggested.

“Corpse,” Vitka said unwillingly.

“Burrrial cerrremony! Hurrrry! Hurrrry! Addrrress! Addrrress! Verrrbiage! Worrrk! Worrrk!”

“He must have had some interesting owners,” said Roman. “What are we going to do?”

“Vitya,” said Edik, “I think he’s using spaceflight terminology. Try something simple, more commonplace.”

“Hydrogen bomb,” said Vitka.

The parrot lowered its head and cleaned its claw with its beak.

“Railroad! Train!” said Vitka.

The parrot said nothing.

“We’re not getting anywhere,” said Roman.

“Dammit,” said Vitka, “I can’t think of anything else commonplace with a letter r in it. Table, window, ceiling… Oh! Trrranslator!”

The parrot glanced at Vitka with one eye. “Korrrneev, rrreally!”

“What?” asked Vitka. It was the first time I’d ever seen Vitka disconcerted.

“Korrrneev’s a boorrr! Rrrude. Superrrb rrresearcher! Rrridiculous jesterrr! Rrremarkable!”

We giggled. Vitka looked at us and said vengefully: “Oirrra-Oirrra!”

“Grrray-haired,” the parrot responded promptly. “Harrrd fought! Grrratifying!”

“Something’s not right here,” said Roman.

“What isn’t?” said Vitka. “That sounds spot on to me… Prrrivalov!”

“Prrrimitive prrroject! Prrrimitive! Harrrdworking!”

“He knows all of us, my friends,” said Edik.

“Frrriends,” the parrot echoed. “Peppercorrrn! Zerrro! Zerrro! Grrravitation!”

“Amperian,” Vitka said hurriedly.

“Crrrematorium! Perrrished prrrematurely!” said the parrot, then it thought a bit and added, “Amperrrmeter!”

“It doesn’t add up,” said Edik.

“Everything always adds up,” Roman said pensively.

Vitka clicked the catch and opened the dictaphone. “The tape’s finished,” he said. “Pity.”

“Know what I think?” I said. “The simplest thing would be to ask Janus. Whose parrot is it, where is it from, and all the rest.”

“But who’s going to ask?” Roman inquired.

No one volunteered, Vitka suggested listening to the recording, and we agreed. It all sounded very strange. At the sound of the first words from the dictaphone the parrot flew onto Vitka’s shoulder and began listening with obvious interest, interpolating occasional phrases like “Drrramba ignorrring urrranium,” “Corrrrect,” and “Korrrneev’s rrrude, rrrude, rrrude!”

When the recording came to an end, Edik said, “In theory we could compile a lexical dictionary and analyze it on the computer. But even without that some things are already quite clear. First, it knows all of us. That’s already amazing. Second, it knows about robots. And about rubidium. Where do they use rubidium, by the way?”

“It’s not used anywhere in the Institute,” said Roman.

“It’s something like sodium,” said Korneev.

“Rubidium’s one thing,” I said. “But how does it know about lunar craters?”

“Why do they have to be lunar?”

“Where on Earth do they call mountains craters?”

“Well, in the first place, there’s an Arizona crater, and in the second place, it’s not a mountain, it’s more like a depression or a trough.”

“Temporral trrrough,” declared the parrot.

“The terminology it uses is really extremely interesting,” said Edik. “I would hardly call it common usage.”

“That’s right,” said Vitka. “If the parrot spends all its time with Janus, then Janus is involved in some strange business.”

“Strrrange orrrbital trrransition,” said the parrot.

“Janus doesn’t work on space projects,” said Roman. “I’d know about it.”

“Maybe he used to, though?”

“No, he never used to either.”

“Some kind of robots,” said Vitka wearily. “Craters… Where did the craters come from?”

“Maybe Janus reads science fiction?” I suggested. “Out loud? To a parrot?”

“Yeah, OK…”

“Saturn,” said Vitka to the parrot.

“Dangerrrous attrrraction,” said the parrot. It thought for a moment and explained, “Crrrashed. Terrrible. Rrreckless.”

Roman stood up and began walking around the laboratory. Edik laid his cheek on the tabletop and closed his eyes. “But how did it turn up here?”

“The same as yesterday,” said Roman. “From Janus’s lab.”

“Did you see it happen?”

“Uh-huh.”

“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” I said. “Did it die or didn’t it?”

“How do we know?” said Roman. “I’m no vet. And Vitka’s no ornithologist. And maybe it isn’t really a parrot after all.”

“What, then?”

“How should I know?”

“It could be a complex induced hallucination,” said Edik, without opening his eyes.

I pressed a finger against one eye and looked at the parrot. I saw two parrots.

“I see two of it,” I said. “It’s not a hallucination.”

“I said a complex hallucination,” Edik reminded me.

I pressed a finger against each eye and went blind for a while.

“You know what,” said Korneev. “I declare that we are dealing with a violation of the law of cause and effect and therefore the only possible solution is that it’s all a hallucination, so we should all stand up, get in line, and sing as we march off to see the psychiatrist. Everybody up!”

“I’m not going,” said Edik. “I’ve got another idea.”

“What is it?”

“I won’t say.”

“Why not?”

“You’ll beat me up.”

“We’ll beat you up anyway.”

“Go ahead.”

“You don’t have any idea,” said Vitka. “You just imagine that you do. Off to the psychiatrist with you.”

The door from the corridor squeaked open and Janus Polyeuctovich walked into the laboratory. “I see,” he said. “Hello.”

We stood up. He went around us all and shook our hands.

“Is Photon in here again?” he said, catching sight of the parrot. “He’s not bothering you, is he, Roman Petrovich?”

“Bothering me?” said Roman. “Me? Why would he bother me? On the contrary.”

“Well, it is every day—” Janus Polyeuctovich began, and suddenly broke off. “What was it we were talking about yesterday?” he asked, rubbing his forehead.

“You were in Moscow yesterday,” said Roman in a respectful voice.

“Ah… yes, yes. Very well. Photon! Come here!”

The parrot soared across to Janus’s shoulder and said in his ear, “Grrrain! Grrrain! Sugarrr! Sugarrr!”

Janus Polyeuctovich smiled gently and went through into his laboratory. We looked at each other, stunned.

“Let’s get out of here,” said Roman.

“Psychiatrrrist! Psychiatrrrist!” Korneev muttered ominously as we walked down the corridor on the way to the sofa in his office. “Rrritchey Crrrater! Drrramba! Sugarrr!”

5

Vitka moved the canisters of living water down onto the floor, then we collapsed onto the sofa-translator and lit up. After a while Roman asked, “Vitka, did you switch off the sofa?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve got this crazy nonsense running round my head.”

“I turned it off and I blocked it,” said Vitka.

“OK, guys,” said Edik, “so why isn’t it a hallucination then?”

“Who says it isn’t?” asked Vitka. “I still suggest the psychiatrist.”

“When I was courting Maya,” said Edik, “I induced hallucinations that astounded even me.”

“What for?” asked Vitka.

Edik thought about it. “I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose I must have gotten carried away.”

“The question I’m asking is, why would anyone want to induce hallucinations in us?” said Vitka. “After all, we’re not Maya, thank God. We’re masters of magic. Who could overpower us? OK—Janus, Kivrin, Junta. Maybe Giacomo too.”

“Our Sasha’s a bit on the weak side,” said Edik apologetically.

“So what?” I asked. “I’m not the only one seeing things, am I?”

“We could check that out,” Vitka said pensively. “If we… well, you know…”

“Oh no,” I said. “That’s enough of that from you. There must be other ways, surely? Press on your eyeballs. Or give the dictaphone to an outsider. He can listen to it and say if there’s anything recorded on it or not.”

The masters of magic smiled pityingly. “You’re a good programmer, Sasha,” said Edik.

“But a maggot,” said Korneev. “Still a little larva.”

“Yes, Sashenka,” Roman sighed. “You can’t even imagine what a genuine, detailed, consistently induced hallucination is like.”

A dreamy expression appeared on the masters’ faces—they were obviously recalling sweet memories. I looked at them enviously. They smiled and screwed up their eyes. They winked at someone. Then Edik suddenly said, “Her orchids bloomed all winter long. Their scent was the very loveliest that I could invent…”

Vitka came to his senses. “Berkeleians,” he said. “Pitiful solipsists. ‘I dislike what I fancy I feel!’”

“Yes,” said Roman. “Hallucinations are not something we should be talking about. That’s too simpleminded altogether. We’re not children and we’re not old women. I don’t want to be an agnostic. What was that idea you had, Edik?”

“Me? Oh yes, I did have one. But it’s pretty primitive too. Matricates.”

“Hmm,” said Roman doubtfully.

“What are they?” I asked.

Edik reluctantly explained that in addition to the doubles I was so familiar with, there are also matricates—precise, perfect copies of objects or beings. Unlike doubles, matricates match their originals precisely, right down to their atomic structure. They can’t be told apart by the usual methods. You need special equipment, and it’s a very complicated and labor-intensive business. Balsamo had been awarded his master’s degree for proving that Philippe Bourbon, popularly known by the sobriquet “the Man in the Iron Mask,” was a matricate of Louis XIV created by Jesuits in secret laboratories in order to seize the throne of France. Nowadays matricates are produced using Richard Cirugue’s biostereographical method.

I didn’t have a clue who Richard Cirugue was, but I said straightaway that the idea of matricates could only explain the unusual similarity of the parrots. And nothing else. For instance, it still didn’t explain where yesterday’s dead parrot had gone to.

“Yes, that’s true,” said Edik. “I don’t insist on it. Especially since Janus has absolutely no connection with biostereography.”

“Exactly,” I said, growing bolder. “Then it would make better sense to hypothesize a journey into the described future. You know, like Louis Sedlovoi.”

“How’s that?” Korneev asked, not sounding particularly interested.

“Janus simply flies into some science fiction novel, collects the parrot out of it, and brings it back here. When the parrot dies, he goes flying off again to the same page and then… That explains why the parrots are so similar. It’s one and the same parrot, and it explains why it has that science fiction vocabulary. And apart from that,” I went on, feeling that all this really didn’t sound too stupid after all, “it might even explain why Janus keeps asking questions: every time he’s afraid he might not have come back to the right day… I reckon I’ve explained it all pretty neatly, don’t you?”

“And is there a science fiction novel like that?” Edik asked curiously. “With a parrot?”

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “But they have all sorts of animals in those starships of theirs. Cats and monkeys and children… And in the West they have an absolutely vast amount of science fiction, more than you could ever read.”

“Well, in the first case, a parrot out of Western science fiction is hardly likely to start talking Russian,” said Roman. “But the biggest problem is, we’ve got absolutely no idea how these space parrots, even if they’re out of Soviet science fiction, could know Korneev, Privalov, and Oira-Oira.”

“Not to mention,” Vitka drawled, “that it’s one thing to transfer a material body into an ideal world and quite another to transfer an ideal body into the real world. I doubt if you could find a writer who’s created an image of a parrot capable of independent survival in the real world.”

When I remembered the semitransparent inventors I couldn’t think of any objection to that.

“But anyway,” Vitka continued benevolently, “our wee Sasha is showing definite signs of promise. His idea has a certain noble insanity about it.”

“Janus wouldn’t have burned an ideal parrot,” Edik said with conviction. “An ideal parrot can’t even rot.”

“But why?” Roman suddenly said. “Why are we being so inconsistent here? Why Sedlovoi? Why would Janus copy Louis Sedlovoi? Janus has his own subject. Janus has his own research problems. Janus studies parallel spatial dimensions. Let’s make that our starting point!”

“Yes, let’s,” I said.

“Do you think Janus has managed to establish contact with some parallel spatial dimension?” asked Edik.

“He must have established contact a long time ago. Why don’t we assume that he’s gone further than that? Why don’t we assume that he’s working on the transfer of material bodies? Edik’s right: they’re matricates, they have to be matricates, because there has to be a guarantee that the transferred object is absolutely identical. He selects the transfer mode on an experimental basis. The first two transfers were unsuccessful— the parrots died. Today’s experiment seems to have succeeded.”

“Why do they speak Russian?” asked Edik. “And why would the parrots have the kind of vocabulary they do?”

“It means there’s a Russia there too,” said Roman. “But there they already mine rubidium in the Ritchey Crater.”

“The whole thing’s far too forced,” said Vitka. “Why parrots and not something else? Why not dogs or guinea pigs? Why not simply tape recorders, if it comes to that? And then again, how do these parrots know that Oira-Oira’s old and Korneev’s a superb researcher?”

“But rude,” I put in.

“Rude, but superb. And anyway, where did the dead parrot get to?”

“Listen to me,” said Edik. “This is no good. We’re going at it like dilettantes. Like those amateurs who write letters to magazines: ‘Dear scientists! This is the nth year I’ve heard a tapping under the ground in my basement. Can you please explain what causes it?’ We’ve got to be systematic. Where’s your piece of paper, Vitka? Let’s get it all down in writing.”

So we wrote everything down in Edik’s lovely handwriting.

First we accepted the postulate that what was happening wasn’t a hallucination, otherwise there simply wouldn’t have been any point. Then we formulated the questions to which the hypothesis we were seeking ought to provide the answers. We divided these questions into two groups, the “parrot” group and the “Janus” group. The “Janus” group was introduced on the insistence of Roman and Edik, who claimed they had a definite gut feeling that there was a connection between Janus’s oddities and the oddities of the parrot. They were unable to provide an answer to Korneev’s question about the precise physical meaning of the words gut and feeling, but they emphasised the point that in himself Janus represented an extremely curious subject for investigation—and so, like father, like parrot. Since I had no particular opinion about this, they were in a majority, and the final list of questions was as follows:

(I wanted to add “Why did the parrots die and what caused it?” but Korneev growled, “Why is the first sign of poisoning that the corpse turns blue, and what causes it?” and they didn’t write down my question.)

After that we thought very hard for a while, glancing constantly at the sheet of paper. I kept hoping for further inspiration from my noble insanity, but my thoughts simply evaporated into space, and the longer it went on, the more I inclined toward Sasha Drozd’s point of view that there were weirder things going on in the Institute. I realized that this cheap skepticism was simply the product of my own ignorance and lack of experience in conceptualizing the world in terms of different categories, but there was nothing I could do about it. Everything that was happening, so my reasoning ran, was only really amazing if we believed that the three or four parrots were all the same parrot. They really were so similar to each other that at first I’d been misled. It was quite natural. I’m a mathematician—I respect numbers, and when numbers match, especially six-digit numbers, I automatically assume that the numbered items match as well. But it was quite clear that they couldn’t all be the same parrot—that would violate the law of cause and effect, a law that I had no intention of abandoning because of a couple of lousy parrots, and dead ones at that. But if they weren’t all the same parrot, that reduced the scale of the entire problem.

So what if the numbers matched? So what if someone had thrown out the parrot when we weren’t looking? And what else was there? The vocabulary? What did a few words mean? There had to be some very simple explanation for that. I was just about to pronounce on the subject when Vitka said, “Guys, I think I’m onto something.”

None of us said a word. We just turned to look at him—all at the same time, in noisy agitation. Vitka stood up.

“It’s as simple as a pancake,” he said. “Flat, trivial, and banal. It’s hardly even worth telling you about it.”

We slowly stood up. I felt as if I was reading the final pages of a gripping detective novel. Somehow all my skepticism had completely evaporated.

“Countermotion!” Vitka declared.

Edik lay down. “Excellent!” he said. “Well done!”

“Countermotion?” said Roman. “I suppose… Aha…” he twiddled his fingers. “OK… Uh-huh… But what if…? Yes, that explains why it knows all of us.” Roman made a sweeping gesture of invitation. “So they’re coming from that direction.”

“And that’s why he asks what he was talking about yesterday,” put in Vitka. “And the science fiction terminology…”

“Wait, will you!” I howled. The final page of the detective story had turned out to be written in Arabic. “Hang on! What countermotion?”

“No,” said Roman regretfully, and I could see straightaway from Vitka’s face that he’d also realized countermotion wouldn’t do it. “It doesn’t work,” said Roman. “It’s like a film… Imagine a film—”

“What film?” I yelled. “Help me!”

“A film running backward,” Roman explained. “Get it? Countermotion.”

“Damn and blast,” Vitka said disappointedly, and lay down on the sofa with his hands clasped over his nose.

“No, it doesn’t work,” said Edik, also sounding regretful. “Don’t worry about it, Sasha, it doesn’t work anyway. Countermotion is defined as movement through time in reverse. Like a neutrino. But the problem is that if the parrot were a countermover, it would fly back to front and it wouldn’t die in front of our eyes but come to life… But it’s a good idea all the same. A countermoving parrot really could know something about outer space. It would live from the future into the past. And a countermoving Janus really couldn’t know what happened to him yesterday. Because our ‘yesterday’ would be his ‘tomorrow.’”

“That’s the point,” said Vitka. “I just wondered why the parrot described Oira-Oira as ‘gray-haired.’ And why Janus sometimes predicts what will happen the next day so cleverly and in such detail. Remember what happened at the firing range, Roman? It just seemed like they simply had to be from the future.”

“But tell me,” I said, “is countermotion really possible?”

“In theory it is,” said Edik. “After all, half the matter in the universe is moving through time in the opposite direction. But nobody’s ever dealt with it on a practical level.”

“Who needs it, and who could survive it?” Vitka asked morosely.

“But you must admit it would be a remarkable experiment,” observed Roman.

“Not an experiment, an act of self-sacrifice,” growled Vitka. “Say what you will, but countermotion’s mixed up in all this somehow… I’ve got a feeling in my gut.”

“Ah, the gut!” said Roman, and nobody else said anything.

While they were all keeping quiet, I was feverishly running over in my mind what we actually had. If countermotion was possible in theory, then in theory it was possible to violate the law of cause and effect. But not really violate it, because the law would remain valid separately for the normal world and for the countermover’s world… Which meant it was possible after all to assume that there weren’t three or four parrots but only one, always the same one. What did that give us? On the tenth it’s lying dead in a petri dish. Then they cremate it, convert it into ashes, and scatter them to the wind. But then on the morning of the eleventh it’s alive again. Not reduced to ashes at all, but quite unhurt. True, by the middle of the day it’s back in the petri dish again. That was awfully important. I could feel it was awfully important, that petri dish… The unity of place!… On the twelfth the parrot was alive again and asking for sugar… It wasn’t countermotion, it wasn’t a film shown backward, but there was more than a touch of countermotion about it all the same…

Vitka was right. For a countermover the sequence of events was as follows: the parrot is alive, the parrot dies, the parrot is cremated. From our viewpoint, leaving the details out of consideration, it was exactly the opposite: the parrot is cremated, the parrot dies, the parrot is alive… As if the film had been cut into three pieces and first they showed the third piece, then the second, and then the first… Like fractures in a continuum… Fractures in a continuum… Points of fracture…

“Guys,” I said in a faltering voice, “does countermotion definitely have to be continuous?”

It took them a while to react. Edik smoked his cigarette, blowing smoke up at the ceiling. Vitka lay on his stomach without moving, and Roman stared vacantly at me. Then his eyes opened wide.

“Midnight!” he said in a terrible whisper. Everybody jumped to their feet.

It was as if I’d scored the winning goal in the cup final. They threw themselves on me, slavered on my cheeks, thumped me on the back and the neck, tumbled me onto the sofa, and then tumbled onto it themselves.

“Well done!” shrieked Edik.

“That’s real brains for you!” roared Roman.

“And I had you down as a fool!” said the rude Korneev.

Then they settled down and after that everything went as smooth as grease.

First Roman announced out of the blue that now he knew the secret of the Tunguska meteorite. He wanted to tell us all straightaway, and we were delighted to agree, paradoxical as that might sound. We were in no hurry to move on to what interested us most of all! We felt like gourmets. We didn’t throw ourselves on our food. We breathed in the aromas; we rolled our eyes and smacked our lips; we walked around, rubbing our hands in anticipation…

“So, let us finally clear up the confused problem of the Tunguska marvel,” Roman said in a stealthy voice. “The people who have tackled this problem before us were absolutely devoid of imagination. All those comets, antimatter meteorites, spontaneously exploding nuclear-powered spaceships, all those cosmic clouds and quantum generators—they’re all just too banal, which means they don’t even come close to the truth. I always thought the Tunguska meteorite was an alien ship, and I always believed they couldn’t find the ship at the site of the explosion because it had long since left. Until today I used to think that the fall of the Tunguska meteorite was the ship’s takeoff, not its landing. And that rough hypothesis explained a great deal. The idea of discrete countermotion makes it possible to wrap up this problem once and for all…

“What happened on June 30, 1908, in the region of Podkamennaya Tunguska? In about the middle of July that year an alien ship entered the space of the solar system. But these were not the simple, artless aliens of science fiction novels. They were countermovers, comrades! People who had come to our world from a different universe in which time flows against ours. The interaction of the opposed timestreams transformed them from ordinary countermovers, who saw our universe like a film projected backward, into discrete countermovers. The precise nature of this discrete countermotion does not concern us here. The important thing is that their life in our universe became subject to a rhythmic cycle.

“If we assume for the sake of simplicity that their diurnal cycle was equal to the Earth day, then from our point of view their existence would appear as follows. During the first day, let’s say July 1, they live, work, and eat exactly as we do. But at precisely, let’s say, midnight, they and all their equipment move on, not into July 2 but back to the beginning of June 30—that is, not one moment forward but two days backward, as seen from our point of view. And in just the same way, at the end of June 30 they don’t move into July 1 but back to the beginning of June 29. And so on. When they got close to the Earth, our countermovers were amazed to discover, if they hadn’t discovered it earlier, that the Earth makes extremely strange leaps in its orbit, leaps that render astral navigation very difficult. And in addition, as they hung above the Earth on July 1 by our count of time, they discovered a mighty fire at the very heart of the gigantic Eurasian continent. They had seen its smoke in their telescopes already—on July 2, 3, and so forth as we count time. The cataclysm interested them in its own right, but their scientific curiosity was finally provoked when on the morning of June 30 by our count, they saw that there was no sign of any fire and the taiga lay stretched out below the ship like a calm green sea. The intrigued captain ordered the ship to land in the very spot where yesterday, by his count of time, he had personally observed the epicenter of a raging inferno. After that everything happened the way it was supposed to. The switches clicked, the screens flickered, the planetary engines roared to life as the k-gamma plasmoine was injected…”

“The what?” asked Vitka.

“K-gamma plasmoine. Or, let’s say, mu-delta ionoplast. The ship, engulfed in flame, plunged into the taiga and naturally set it on fire. That was the scene observed by the peasants from the village of Karelinskoye and other people who were later recorded by history as eyewitnesses. The conflagration was appalling. The countermovers glanced outside, shuddered, and decided to sit it out inside the heat-resistant refractory hull of the spaceship. Until midnight they listened anxiously to the roaring and crackling of the flames, then precisely at midnight everything went quiet. Naturally. The countermovers had entered a new day, June 29 by our reckoning of time. And when the brave captain, having taken massive precautions, finally decided to venture outside at about two in the morning, by the light of the powerful searchlights he saw the fir trees swaying calmly and was immediately attacked by clouds of the small bloodsucking insects known in our terminology as gnats or midges.”

Roman paused for breath and looked around at the rest of us. We were really enjoying this, and looking forward to dissecting the mystery of the parrot in exactly the same way.

“The subsequent fate of the countermoving aliens,” Roman continued, “need not interest us. Perhaps on about June 15 they quietly and unnoticeably lifted off from the strange planet without any fuss, this time using nonflammable alpha-beta-gamma antigravity, and went back home. Or perhaps every last one of them died from being poisoned by mosquito saliva, and their spaceship went on standing on our planet, sinking back into the abyss of time, and the trilobites crawled over it on the bottom of the Silurian sea. Maybe even sometime around the year 906 or 909 a hunter stumbled across it in the taiga and for a long time afterward kept telling his friends about it, but they quite naturally didn’t believe a word he said. In concluding my brief address, I should like to express my sympathy for the renowned explorers who have striven in vain to discover anything in the area of the Podkamennaya Tunguska River. Mesmerized by the obvious, they have only investigated what happened in the taiga after the explosion, but none of them has tried to find out what happened before it. Dixi.”

Roman cleared his throat and drank a mug of living water.

“Does anyone have any questions for the speaker?” Edik inquired. “No questions? Excellent. Let’s get back to our parrots. Who would like the floor?”

Everybody wanted the floor. And everybody started speaking at once—even Roman, who was a little bit hoarse. We grabbed the list of questions out of each other’s hands and crossed them out one after another, and after about half an hour we’d put together the following absolutely clear and comprehensively detailed picture of the observed phenomenon.

In 1841 a son was born to the family of the poor landowner and retired army ensign Polyeuctus Khrisanfovich Nevstruev. He was called Janus in honor of a distant relative, Janus Polyeuctovich Nevstruev, who had precisely foretold the day and even the hour at which the boy child would be born. This relative, a modest and retiring old man, had moved to the retired ensign’s estate shortly after the Napoleonic invasion, living in an outbuilding and devoting himself to scholarly pursuits. He was a little strange, as men of science are supposed to be, with many eccentricities, but he was absolutely devoted to his godson, always staying close by his side and insistently instilling in him knowledge from the fields of mathematics, chemistry, and the other sciences. In effect Janus Jr. spent hardly a single day without Janus Sr., which was why he failed to notice something that amazed everybody else: as the years passed, instead of growing more decrepit the old man seemed to become stronger and more vigorous. By the turn of the century old Janus had initiated young Janus into the ultimate secrets of analytical, relativistic, and universal magic. They carried on living and working side by side, taking part in all the wars and revolutions, enduring all the vicissitudes of history more or less valiantly, until finally they ended up in the National Institute for the Technology of Witchcraft and Thaumaturgy…

To be perfectly honest, this entire introductory section was pure literary improvisation. The only fact we knew for certain about Janus’s past was that J. P. Nevstruev was born March 7, 1841. We knew absolutely nothing about how and when J. P. Nevstruev had become the director of the Institute. We didn’t even know who had been the first to guess that S-Janus and A-Janus were one individual in two persons and let the secret slip. I’d heard about it from Oira-Oira, and believed it because I couldn’t understand it. Oira-Oira had heard about it from Giacomo, and he’d also believed it because he was young and the idea delighted him. Korneev had been told about it by a cleaning woman, and at the time he had decided that the fact in itself was so trivial it wasn’t worth puzzling over. And Edik had heard Sabaoth Baalovich and Fyodor Simeonovich talking about it at a time when he was still a junior lab assistant and believed in absolutely everything except God.

So we only had the vaguest possible idea of the Januses’ past. But we knew the future with absolute certainty. In the distant future A-Janus, who currently spent more time dealing with Institute affairs than with scientific research, would become absolutely fascinated by the idea of practical countermotion and devote his entire life to it. He would acquire a friend, a little green parrot called Photon who would be given to him by famous Russian space pilots. That would happen on May 19 in either 1973 or 2073—that was how Edik had deciphered the mysterious number 190573 on the ring. Probably soon after that A-Janus would finally be successful and transform himself into a countermover, along with the parrot Photon, who at the time of the experiment would naturally be sitting on his shoulder and begging for a lump of sugar. At that precise moment, if we had even the slightest understanding of countermotion, the human future would lose Janus Polyeuctovich Nevstruev, but the past of mankind would acquire two Januses, for A-Janus would be transformed into S-Janus and start slipping backward along the axis of time. They would meet every day, but not once in his life would it even enter A-Janus’s head to suspect anything, because he had been used to seeing the kind, wrinkled face of S-Janus, his distant relative and teacher, since he was a baby. And every midnight, at precisely zero hours, zero minutes, zero seconds, and zero tertia by the local time, A-Janus would move, like all of us, from one day’s night into the next day’s morning, while at the same moment, in an instant equal to a single microquantum of time, S-Janus and his parrot would skip from our present night to our yesterday morning.

That was why parrots numbers 1, 2, and 3, observed respectively on the tenth, eleventh and twelfth days of the month, had been so much alike: they were quite simply one and the same parrot. Poor old Photon! Perhaps he had simply succumbed to old age, or perhaps he’d caught a chill from a draft, but he’d fallen ill and come to die on his favorite balance in Roman’s lab. He had died, and his grieving master had given him a ritual cremation and scattered his ashes, and he’d done it because he didn’t know how dead countermovers behave. Or perhaps precisely because he did know.

We, of course, had observed this whole process like a film with its sequential parts transposed. On the ninth Roman finds Photon’s surviving feather in the furnace. Photon’s body no longer exists; he has already been burned tomorrow. The next day, the tenth, Roman finds it in a petri dish. S-Janus discovers the body in the same place at the same time and burns it in the furnace. The surviving feather remains in the furnace until the end of the day and at midnight it skips into the ninth. On the morning of the eleventh Photon is alive, although he is already ill. He dies before our very eyes under the same balance on which he will henceforth love to sit, and simpleminded Sasha puts him in the petri dish, where the dead bird will lie until midnight, when he’ll make the transition to the morning of the tenth and be found by S-Janus, cremated, and scattered to the wind, but one of his feathers will survive and lie there until midnight, then skip to the morning of the ninth, where Roman will find it. On the morning of the twelfth Photon is fit and lively, he gives Korneev an interview and asks him for sugar, but at midnight he will skip to the morning of the eleventh, fall ill, die, be placed in the petri dish, at midnight skip to the morning of the tenth, be cremated and scattered, but the feather will be left, and at midnight it will skip to the morning of the ninth, be found by Roman, and be thrown into the wastepaper basket. On the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, and so on, Photon will delight all of us by being bright and talkative, and we’ll pamper him and feed him sugar lumps and peppercorns, and S-Janus will come and ask if he’s interfering with our work. By means of associative questioning we will be able to learn many interesting things from him about humanity’s expansion into space and no doubt also something about our own personal future.

When we reached this point in our deliberations, Edik suddenly turned gloomy and declared that he didn’t like Photon’s remarks about his untimely death—to which the absolutely tactless Korneev remarked that the death of any magician is always untimely, but it comes to all of us anyway.

“But maybe,” said Roman, “he’ll love you more than the rest of us, so your death will be the only one he’ll remember.” Edik realized he still had a chance of outliving us all, and his mood improved.

However, the talk of death had set our thoughts running on melancholy lines. All of us, except Korneev of course, began feeling sorry for S-Janus. If you thought about it, his situation really was quite terrible. In the first place he was a model example of immense self-sacrifice in the name of science, because he was effectively deprived of any opportunity of benefiting from the fruits of his own ideas. And of course, he had no bright future to look forward to. We were moving toward a world of reason and brotherhood, but with every day that passed he moved further back toward the bloody Nicholas II, serfdom, the cannon fire in Senate Square, and—who could tell?—perhaps even Arakcheev, Biron, and the oprichnina.

And one awful day somewhere in the depths of time he would be met on the waxed floor of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences by a colleague in a powdered wig—a colleague who had already been looking at him rather strangely for a week—who would gasp, throw his hands up in the air, and mumble with eyes full of terror, “Herr Nefstrueff! How can it be, ven only yesterday ze Gazette definitely wrote zat you had passed avay from a stroke…” And he would have to make excuses about a twin brother or false rumors, all the time knowing perfectly well what this conversation meant…

“Stop that,” said Korneev. “Sloppy sentimentalists. He knows the future, doesn’t he? He’s already been in places we won’t reach for ages and ages. And perhaps he knows exactly when we’re all going to die.”

“That’s completely different,” Edik said sadly.

“It’s tough on the old man,” said Roman. “Let’s try to be a bit more gentle and kind with him. Especially you, Vitka. You’re always so rude to him.”

“Well, why does he have to keep pestering me?” Vitka growled. “What were we talking about, where did we see each other…”

“Now you know why he pesters you, so behave yourself.”

Vitka scowled and began demonstratively perusing the list of questions.

“We have to explain everything to him in more detail,” I said. “Everything that we know. We have to predict his immediate future for him.”

“Yes, damn it!” said Roman. “This winter he broke his leg. On the black ice.”

“We have to prevent it,” I said firmly.

“What?” said Roman. “Do you realize what you’re saying? His leg had mended ages before then.”

“But he hasn’t broken it yet,” Edik objected.

We sat there for a few minutes trying to work it all out. Then Vitka suddenly said, “Hang on! What about this, guys? There’s still one question we haven’t crossed out.”

“Which one?”

“What happened to the feather?”

“What happened to it?” said Roman. “It skipped to the eighth. And on the eighth I turned the furnace on and smelled something…”

“So what?”

“But I threw it in the wastepaper basket. On the eighth, the seventh, and the sixth I didn’t see it… Hmm… Where did it get to?”

“The cleaning woman threw it out,” I suggested.

“It’s a very interesting problem though,” said Edik. “Let’s assume no one burned it. What’s it going to look like in ages past?”

“There are even more interesting problems than that,” said Vitka. “For instance, what happens to Janus’s shoes when he wears them back to the day they were made at the Footman Factory? And what happens to the food he eats for supper? And in general…”

But we were already exhausted. We carried on arguing for a while, then Sasha Drozd arrived and shoved us, still arguing, off the sofa, switched on his Spidola, and started trying to borrow two rubles. “Oh, come on,” he whined.

“We haven’t got it,” we told him.

“Come on, you must have a couple left… Let me have it!”

We couldn’t carry on arguing like that, and we decided to go to lunch.

“In the final analysis,” said Edik, “our hypothesis isn’t really all that fantastic. Maybe S-Janus’s true story is far more amazing.”

Maybe it is, we thought, and went to the cafeteria.

I stopped by the computer room for a moment to let them know I was going to lunch. In the corridor I ran into S-Janus, who looked at me closely, smiled, and for some reason asked if we’d seen each other yesterday.

“No, Janus Polyeuctivich,” I said. “We didn’t see each other yesterday. You weren’t in the Institute yesterday. Early yesterday morning you flew to Moscow.”

“Ah yes,” he said. “I’d forgotten.”

He gave me such a kindly smile that I decided to do it. It was rather impertinent, of course, but I knew Janus Polyeuctovich had been well disposed toward me just recently, and that meant there couldn’t be any serious kind of incident between us now. I asked in a low voice, looking around cautiously, “Janus Polyeuctovich, would it be all right if I asked you a question?”

He raised his eyebrows and looked at me intently for a while, then, evidently recalling something, he said, “By all means. Just one?”

I realized he was right. There was no way I could fit everything into a single question. Was there going to be a war? Would I turn out all right? Would they find the recipe for universal happiness? Would the last fool ever die?

I said, “May I stop in to see you tomorrow morning?”

He shook his head, and I thought I detected a slight note of mockery in his answer. “No, that’s quite impossible. Tomorrow morning, Alexander Ivanovich, you will be summoned to the Kitezhgrad Plant, and I shall have to grant you a temporary reassignment.”

I felt stupid. There was something humiliating about this determinism that condemned me, an independent human being with freedom of will, to absolutely fixed actions that no longer depended on me. It had nothing to do with whether I wanted to go to Kitezhgrad or not. The point was that now I couldn’t die or fall ill or even turn testy and threaten to resign. I was foredoomed, and for the first time I understood the terrible meaning of that word. I had always known that it was bad to be foredoomed to be executed, for instance, or to go blind. But now it turned out that even to be foredoomed to the love of the most wonderful girl in all the world, or an absolutely fascinating voyage around the world, or a trip to Kitezhgrad (which I’d been wanting to visit for the last three months), could be extremely unpleasant too. I suddenly saw knowledge of the future in an entirely new light…

“It’s a bad idea to start reading a good book from the end, don’t you think?” said Janus Polyeuctovich, scrutinizing me quite openly. “And as far as your questions are concerned, Alexander Ivanovich, well… Try to understand, Alexander Ivanovich, that there’s not just one single future for everybody. There are many futures, and every action you take creates one or another of them… But you’ll come to understand that,” he said earnestly. “You’ll definitely come to understand it.”

And later I really did come to understand it.

But, then, that’s an entirely different story altogether.