Tale of the Troika s-2

by Arkady Strugatsky

  “I do,” the commandant confessed.

  “Whose requisition?”

  “Comrade Privalov from the Research Institute for Magic and Wizardry. There he is.”

  “Yes,” I said vehemently. “But my Black Box—it’s not a box, rather, it’s not only a box.”

  But Khlebovvodov paid no attention to me. He examined the case under the light, then leaned up into the commandant’s face and hissed:

  “Why are you spreading this bureaucracy around here? You can’t see what color it is? The rationalization was carried out before your very eyes, there’s the comrade representing science sitting in front of you, he’s waiting, waiting for the requisition to be carried out, it’s way past dinner time, it’s dark outside, and all you do is juggle numbers!”

  I felt a depression coming on and sensed that my future was about to become a dreary nightmare, irreparable and completely irrational. But I did not understand what was happening and only went on babbling that my box was not just a black box, or rather, not a box at all. I wanted to clear things up. The commandant was also muttering something very convincing, but Khlebovvodov threatened him with his fist and returned to his seat.

  “Lavr Fedotovich, the box is black,” he announced triumphantly. “There can be no mistake, I looked at it myself. And there is a requisition for it, and the representative is right here.”

  “It’s not the same box!” the commandant and I wailed in unison. But Lavr Fedotovich examined us thoroughly with his opera glasses and, obviously finding us lacking, decided to follow the will of the people and suggested that they get on with immediate utilization. There was no argument and all the responsible faces were nodding in agreement.

  “The requisition!” demanded Lavr Fedotovich.

  My requisition was laid before him on the green baize.

  “The resolution!”

  The resolution fell on the requisition.

  “The Seal!”

  The door of the safe creaked open, letting out a current of stale office smells, and the brass of the Great Round Seal gleamed before Lavr Fedotovich. And then I understood what was about to happen. Everything inside me went dead.

  “Don’t!” I begged. “Help!”

  Lavr Fedotovich took the Seal in both hands and raised it above the requisition. I gathered my strength and jumped up.

  “That’s the wrong box!” I howled at the top of my voice. “What is this? Eddie!”

  “Just a minute,” Eddie said. “Please stop and hear me out.”

  Lavr Fedotovich halted his inexorable movement.

  “A stranger?” he inquired.

  “Not at all,” said the commandant, panting. “A representative. From below.”

  “Then he does not have to be removed.” Lavr Fedotovich tried to renew the process of applying the Great Round Seal, but there was a problem. Something was interfering with the Seal. At first Lavr Fedotovich merely pushed on it, and then he rose and fell on it with his whole weight, but the Seal would not touch the paper—there was a space between the Seal and the paper, and the size of the space obviously did not depend on Comrade Vuniukov’s efforts. It seemed as though the space was filled with an invisible but very firm matter that prevented application. Lavr Fedotovich had apparently grasped the futility of his efforts and sat down, holding his elbows with his hands and looking at the Seal sternly, but without any surprise. The Seal hung motionless an inch above my requisition.

  The execution had been stayed, and I began to perceive my surroundings again. Eddie was saying something, beautifully and feverishly, about reason, economic reform, goodness, the role of the intelligentsia, and the governmental wisdom of those present. He was fighting the Seal, my dear good friend, saving me, fool that I was, from the disaster that I had brought on my own head. Those present were listening to him politely but with displeasure, and Khlebovvodov was squirming in his seat and looking at his watch. Something had to be done. I had to do something immediately.

  “And seventh of all, and finally,” Eddie was saying reasonably, “any specialist, and especially such an authoritative organization, should see, comrades, that the so-called Black Box is nothing more than a term used in information theory, and has nothing to do with the specific color or specific shape of some real object. Certainly there is no way that the term ‘Black Box’ could be applied to this Remington typewriter coupled with the simplest of electronic gadgets, which can be purchased in any electronics store, and it seems strange to me that Professor Vybegallo is burdening an authoritative organization with an invention that is no invention, and a decision that could undermine the organization’s authority.”

  “I protest,” said Farfurkis. “First of all, comrade representative from below violated all the rules of order for the meeting, took the floor, which no one had given him, and went over the time limit, on top of it. That’s point one (I was horrified to see that the seal had dropped by a fraction of an inch.) Furthermore, we can not allow the comrade representative to malign our best people, to blacken our honored professor and official scientific consultant, Professor Vybegallo, and to whitewash the black box, already passed on by the Troika. That’s point two. (The seal dropped another fraction of an inch.) Finally, comrade representative, you should be made aware that the Troika is not interested in any inventions. The object of the Troika’s work is unexplained phenomena, which is what the already examined and rationalized black box is, that is, the heuristic machine.”

  “We could be sitting here until nightfall,” Khlebovvodov added in a hurt voice, “if every representative got the floor.”

  The seal settled even lower. The space was no more than a tenth of an inch.

  “It’s not the same black box,” I said and lost a hundredth of an inch. “I don’t need this box! (Another hundredth.) Why the hell do I need that beat-up old Remington? I’m going to file a complaint.”

  “That is your right,” Farfurkis said generously and won another hundredth of an inch.

  “Eddie,” I begged.

  Eddie started talking again. He called on the spirits of Lomonosov and Einstein, he cited editorials in the central newspapers, he sang the praises of science and our wise organizers, but it was to no avail. Lavr Fedotovich was finally bored by this impediment, and interrupting the oration, he spoke only one word:

  “Unconvincing.”

  There was a heavy thud. The Great Round Seal had pierced my requisition.

  MISCELLANEOUS CASES

  We were the last ones to leave the meeting room. I was crushed. Eddie was leading me by the arm. He was also depressed, but under control. Old Edelweiss whirled around us, pulled by the weight of his contraption. He was whispering words of undying love to me, promising to wash my feet and drink the water, and demanded traveling expenses and a per diem. Eddie gave him three rubles and bade him look in the day after tomorrow. Edelweiss managed to sucker him out of another fifty kopecks for hazardous work conditions and disappeared. Then I felt better.

  “Don’t despair,” Eddie said. “All is not lost. I have a plan.”

  “What?” I asked weakly.

  “Did you pay attention to Lavr Fedotovich’s speech?”

  “I did. Why do you ask?”

  “I was checking to see whether or not he had any brains,” Eddie explained.

  “So, what’s the opinion?”

  “You saw for yourself that he does. He has brains, and I got them started. They had not been activated at all. Pure bureaucratic reflexes. But I convinced him that he had a real heuristic machine before him and that he was not Vuniukov, but a real administrator with a broad mind. As you see, there was some result. Of course, his psychic rigidity is enormous. When I removed the field, there were no signs of residual deformation. He remained just as he had been. But that was just a trial test. But now I’ll do the proper calculations, adjust the apparatus, and then we’ll see. I cannot believe that he can’t be changed. We’ll turn him into a decent man, and things will be good for us, and for everybody, and for him.�
��

  “I doubt it,” I said.

  “You see,” Eddie said, “the theory of positive humanization states that any creature that has at least an iota of reason can be made into a decent creature. It’s another matter that every case needs special methods. So we’ll look for the right approach. Everything will be all right.”

  We went out into the street. Snowman Fedya was waiting for us. He got up from the bench and the three of us went down First of May Street arm in arm.

  “Was it difficult?” Fedya asked.

  “Terrible,” said Eddie. “I’m tired of talking, tired of listening, and on top of that, I think I’ve become decidedly stupider. Fedya, is it noticeable that I’m stupider?”

  “Not yet,” Fedya replied shyly. “It’s usually apparent an hour or so later.”

  I said: “I’m hungry. I want to forget. Let’s go somewhere and forget. Drink some wine. Have some ice cream.”

  Eddie was all for it, and Fedya had no objections, but he did apologize for not drinking wine and having no taste for ice cream.

  The streets were crowded, but there was nobody just hanging around the way they do on summer evenings in big cities. The descendants of Oleg’s armies and Peter’s grenadiers sat quietly and culturedly on their stoops shelling seeds in silence. They ate watermelon seeds, sunflower seeds, and pumpkin seeds. They sat on carved stoops with patterns, carved ones with figures, and carved ones with balustrades or on stoops made of simple smooth boards. But they were marvelous stoops, and some were of museum quality, hundreds of years old; those had been taken under government custody and therefore disfigured by metal supports. Somewhere in the background an accordion was playing.

  Eddie, looking around with interest, was asking Fedya about life in the mountains. Fedya had developed an abiding love for Eddie and answered readily.

  “The worst thing,” Fedya was saying, “are the mountain climbers with guitars. You can’t imagine how terrible it is, Eddie, when in your own quiet mountains, where the only sound comes from avalanches, and then only occasionally, you suddenly hear someone start strumming away and singing about some guy whose love is lost in the misty mountains. It’s a disaster, Eddie. Some of us get sick from this, and the weaker ones actually die.”

  “At home I have a clavichord,” he continued dreamily. “Up on the peak I have a clavichord, on top of the glacier. I like to play it on moonlit nights, when it’s quiet and there’s no wind at all. Then the dogs in the valley can hear me and they howl along. Really, Eddie, tears come to my eyes when I think how beautiful it is and how sad. The moon, the music resounding in the distance, and the dogs howling, far far away.”

  “How do your friends feel about that?” Eddie asked.

  “They’re not there at that time of night. Only one boy usually stays, but he doesn’t disturb me. He’s lame. But this must be boring you.”

  “On the contrary, it’s fascinating.”

  “No. But you might like to know where I got the clavichord. Can you imagine, it was brought up by mountain climbers. They were setting some record or other, and they had to bring a clavichord up there. We’ve got a lot of strange things up on the peak. Some guy will decide to climb up there on a motorcycle—so we have a motorcycle, even if it’s damaged. We’ve got guitars, bicycles, various statues, antiaircraft guns. One record nut decided to climb to the top in a tractor, but he couldn’t find one. So he tried with a steamroller. You should have seen him struggling. So much effort! But he failed. He couldn’t get it up to the snow level. Five or ten more yards, and we would have had a steamroller, too. Ah, here’s Gabby, I’ll introduce you.”

  We had reached a café. On the brightly lit steps of the imposing stone entrance, right by the turnstile, Gabby the Bedbug was struggling. He was dying to get in, but the doorman would not let him. Gabby was having a fit, and consequently exuding an odor strongly reminiscent of Courvoisier cognac. Fedya quickly introduced us, put Gabby in a matchbox, and ordered him to sit still and be quiet. And the bedbug was quiet, but when we got into the café and sat down at an empty table, he lounged in his chair and beat his fist on the table, demanding a waiter. Naturally, he himself could not eat or drink anything in a café, but he demanded justice and a complete correspondence between the work of the waiters’ brigade and the lofty calling that the brigade was striving for. Besides, he was obviously showing off for Eddie. He already knew that Eddie had come to Tmuskorpion specifically to see him and offer him employment. Eddie and I ordered a home-style omelet, shrimp salad, and a bottle of dry wine. They knew Fedya well in the café, and they brought him a plate of grated raw potatoes, carrot tops, and cabbage stumps. Gabby got a plate of stuffed tomatoes, which he had ordered on principle.

  Having eaten the salad, I realized that I was insulted and injured, dog-tired, that my tongue refused to function, and that I had no desire to do anything. Besides that, I was jumpy, because in the crowd I could hear the squeaky “I’ll wash your feet and drink the water!” and “the thinker is insade it!” But old Gabby was in fine fettle and was enjoying showing Eddie his philosophical turn of mind, independent opinions, and tendency to universalize.

  “What senseless and unpleasant creatures!” he said, looking around the café with a superior air. “Truly, only such clumsy, cud-chewing animals are capable of creating the myth, born out of their inferiority complex, that they are the rulers of the earth. I ask you: How did this myth come about? For instance, we insects consider ourselves the rulers of the earth, and rightly so. We are numerous and ubiquitous, we multiply plentifully but do not waste precious time on senseless worries about posterity. We have sensory organs that you humans can only dream of. We can fall into anabiosis for centuries without any harm to ourselves. The more intelligent representatives of our class are famous as great mathematicians, architects, and sociologists. We have discovered the ideal system of society, we control gigantic territories, and we establish ourselves anywhere we want. Let us put the question this way: What can you humans—by the way, the most highly developed of the mammals—what can you do that we might want to do but can’t? You brag a lot about your ability to create tools and use them. Forgive me, but that is laughable! You’re like cripples who brag about their crutches. You build yourselves dwellings, tortuously, with such expenditures of effort, using unnatural forces like fire and steam, you’ve been building them for thousands of years, and never the same way twice, and still you can’t find a comfortable and rational form of dwelling. Even the pathetic ants, whom I truly despise for their crudeness and glorification of brute strength, solved that simple problem a hundred million years ago—and solved it once and for all. You brag that you are constantly developing, and without limit. We can only laugh. You are searching for something that has been found, patented, and in use since time immemorial, namely: a rational social order and a meaningful existence.”

  Eddie was listening with professional attention, and Fedya, chewing on a cabbage stump with his excellent teeth, spoke:

  “I’m a weak dialectician, of course, but I was brought up to believe that the human mind is nature’s greatest achievement. We in the mountains are used to fearing human wisdom and bowing down before it, and now that I have been educated to a certain degree, I never cease being amazed by the boldness and cleverness with which man has created and continues to create a second nature. The human mind is … is …” He shook his head and stopped talking.

  “Second nature!” the bedbug said sarcastically. “The third element, the fourth kingdom, the fifth estate, the sixth wonder of the world. A wise human could have asked what you need a second nature for. You’ve ruined one, and now you’re trying to replace it with another. I’ve said it before, Fedya: a second nature is a cripple’s crutches. As for reason, it’s not for you to talk or for me to listen. For a hundred centuries these skins stuffed with a nourishing mixture have been mouthing off about reason, and they still can’t agree what it is they’re talking about! They agree only on one point: no one but they themselves has rea
son. That’s really amazing! If a creature is small, if it’s easy to poison with some chemical or simply to squash with a finger, then they look down at it. Such a creature naturally has nothing more than instinct, a primitive irritability, the lowest form of nervous activity. Typical world view of conceited imbeciles. But, after all, they are rational and they have to establish a foundation for everything, so that they can squash insects without guilt pangs.

  “And look, Fedya, at their rationalization. Let’s say that a digger wasp lays her eggs in her nest burrow and goes off to look for food for her future young. What do those bandits do? The barbarians steal the eggs and then, reveling in idiotic pleasure, they watch the wretched mother cement up the empty hole. Therefore, the mother is stupid, does not see what she is doing, and therefore she only has instincts, blind instinct, you understand, and not reason—and if necessary, she can be squashed. Do you see how this is vile juggling with terminology? The a priori assumption is that the wasp’s main goal in life is to reproduce and protect her young, and therefore if she is incapable of fulfilling her major goal, then what is she worth? They, humans, they have the cosmos-shmosmos and photosynthesis-shmynthesis and the pathetic wasp has nothing but reproduction, and that only on a primitive instinctual level. Those mammals can’t even imagine that the wasp has a rich spiritual life, that in the short span of her life she wants to succeed in science and in art, those warm-blooded beasts can’t see that she simply doesn’t have the time or the desire to look back at her young, particularly since they are only senseless eggs.

  “Of course, wasps have their laws, their behavioral norms, their morals. Since wasps are rather thoughtless by nature when it comes to propagating their kind, the law, of course, stipulates certain punishments for not fulfilling parental obligations. Every decent wasp must follow a prescribed sequence of behavior. She must dig a pit, lay her eggs, bring back a number of paralyzed caterpillars, and block off the hole. This is inspected by silent observers, and a wasp must always assume that an inspector may be lurking behind the nearest rock. Of course, the wasp sees that the eggs have been stolen or that her food stores have been depleted. But she can’t lay the eggs over again and she has no desire to waste time gathering more food. Fully realizing the incongruity of her actions, she makes believe that she has noticed nothing and finishes the program to the very end, because the last thing she wants to do is make the rounds of the nine departments of the Committee for the Preservation of Appearances.