by Arkady
I was struck in the back with a sharp corner and grabbed the railing. I was enraged. It was Volodia Pochkin and Eddie Amperian, who were carrying a coordinate-measuring apparatus that weighed half a ton up to their floor.
“Oh, Sasha?” said Eddie, as friendly as could be. “Hello, Sasha.”
“Sasha, make way!” hollered Volodia, backing up. “Swing it around, swing it around!”
I seized him by the collar.
“Why are you at the Institute? How did you get here?”
“Through the door, through the door! Let go…!” said Volodia. “Eddie, more to the right. Can’t you see it’s not getting through?”
I let him go and darted off to the vestibule. I was burning with administrative wrath. “I’ll show you,” I grated, jumping four steps at a time. “I’ll show you how to goof off. I’ll show you how to let anyone in without checking him out!”
The In and Out macro-demons, instead of tending to their business, were playing roulette, shaking with a gambling frenzy and phosphorescing feverishly. Under my very eyes, “In,” oblivious of his duties, took a bank of some seventy billion molecules from “Out.” I recognized the roulette at once. It was my roulette. I made the thing for a party and kept it behind the cabinet in Electronics, and the only one who knew about it was Victor Korneev, A conspiracy. I decided. I’ll blast them all. And all the time gay, rosy-cheeked colleagues kept coming and coming through the vestibule.
“Some wind! My ears are stuffed…”
“So you left too?”
“It’s a bore… Everyone got a big laugh. I’d be better off doing some work, I thought to myself. So I left them a double and went.”
“You know, there I was dancing with this girl and I could feel I was getting furry all over. Downed some vodka—it didn’t help.”
“And what if you use an electron beam? Too much mass? Then we use photons…”
“Alexis, do you have an extra laser? Let me have one even if it’s a gas type…”
“Galka, where did you leave your husband?”
“I left an hour ago, if you must know. Right into a drift, up to my ears, almost buried me.”
It came to me that I wasn’t making it as watchman. There was no sense in taking the roulette from the demons anymore; all that was left was to go and have a tremendous row with the provocateur Victor, and let come what may thereafter. I shook my fist at the demons and hauled myself up the stairs, trying to visualize what would happen if Modest Matveevich should look in at the Institute now.
On the way to the director’s reception room, I stopped at the Shock and Vibration Hall. Here they were taming a released jinn… The jinn, huge and purple with rage, was flinging himself about in the open cage, which was surrounded with Gian Ben Gian shields and closed from above with powerful magnetic fields. Stung with high-voltage discharges, he howled, and cursed in several dead languages, leaped about, and belched tongues of flame. Out of sheer excitement he would start building a palace and would immediately destroy it. Finally he surrendered, sat down on the floor shuddering with each shock, moaned piteously, and said, “Enough, leave off! I won’t do it any more… Oi, oi, oi… I am all quiet now…”
Calm, unblinking young men, all doubles, stood by the discharge-control console. The originals, on the other hand, crowding around the vibration stand, were glancing at their watches and uncorking bottles.
I went over to them.
“Ah, Sasha!”
“Sasha pal, I hear you are on watch today… I’ll be over to your section later…”
“Hey there, somebody, make up a glass for him—my hands are loaded…”
I was stunned and didn’t notice how a glass appeared in my hand. Corks fired into Gian Ben Gian shields, icy champagne flowed, hissing and sparkling. The discharges silenced, the jinn stopped whining and started sniffing the air. In the same instant the Kremlin clock started striking twelve.
“Friends! Long live Monday!”
The glasses clinked together. Later someone said, looking the bottle over, “Who made the wine?”
“I did.”
“Don’t forget to pay tomorrow.”
“How about another bottle?”
“Enough, we’ll catch cold.”
“That’s a good jinn, this one. A bit nervous, maybe.”
“One does not look a gift horse…”
“That’s all right, he’ll fly like a doll, hold out for the forty maneuvers, and then he can go peddle his nerves.”
“Hey, guys,” I said timidly. “It’s night out there and it’s a holiday. How about going home…”
They looked at me, patted me on the back, told me, “It’s OK, you’ll get over it,” and moved in a body toward the cage. The doubles rolled away one of the shields and the originals surrounded the jinn in a businesslike manner, took him in powerful grips by his hands and feet and started carrying him toward the vibro stand. The jinn was timidly begging for mercy and diffidently promising all the riches of the tsars. I stood alone to the side and watched them attaching microsensors to the various parts of his body. Next I felt one of the shields. It was huge, heavy, dented with potholes from the ball lightning strokes, and charred in several places. Gian Ben Gian’s shields were constructed out of seven dragon hides glued together with the bile of a patricide, and rated for direct lightning hits. Attached to each shield with upholstery tacks were metallic inventory tags. Theoretically, the outer sides of the shields should have depicted all the famous battles of the past and the inner sides all the great battles of the future. In practice, the face of the shield I was studying showed something like a jet attacking a motorized column, and the inner side was covered with strange swirls reminiscent of an abstract painting.
They started shaking the jinn on the vibro-stand. He giggled and squealed, “It tickles…! Ai, I can’t stand it!” I returned to the corridor. It smelled of Bengal fire. Girandoles swirled under the ceiling, banging into walls; rockets, trailing streams of colored smoke, streaked overhead. I met Volodia Pochkin’s double carrying a gigantic incunabulum bound with brass bands, two doubles of Roman Oira-Oira collapsing under a ponderous beam, then Roman himself with a stack of bright blue folders from the archives of the Department of Unassailable Problems, and next a wrathful lab technician conveying a troop of cursing ghosts in crusader cloaks, to be interrogated by Junta. Everyone was busy and preoccupied…
The labor legislation was being flagrantly ignored and I began to feel that I had lost all desire to struggle against this law-breaking, because, tonight at twelve o’clock on New Year’s Eve, plowing through a blizzard, they came in, these people who had more interest in bringing to a conclusion, or starting anew, a useful undertaking than stunning themselves with vodka, mindlessly kicking with their legs, playing charades, and practicing flirtations in various degrees of frivolity. Here came people who would rather be with each other than anywhere else, who couldn’t stand any kind of Sunday, because they were bored on Sunday. They were magi, Men with a capital M, and their motto was “Monday begins on Saturday.” True, they knew an incantation or two, knew how to turn water into wine, and any one of them would not find it difficult to feed a thousand with five loaves. But they were not magi for that. That was chaff, outer tinsel. They were magi because they had a tremendous knowledge, so much indeed that quantity had finally been transmuted into quality, and they had come into a different relationship with the world than ordinary people. They worked in an Institute that was dedicated above all to the problems of human happiness and the meaning of human life, and even among them, not one knew exactly what was happiness and what precisely was the meaning of life. So they took it as a working hypothesis that happiness lay in gaining perpetually new insights into the unknown and the meaning of life was to be found in the same process. Every man is a magus in his inner soul, but he becomes one only when he begins to think less about himself and more about others, when it becomes more interesting for him to work than to recreate himself in the ancient meaning of the word. In all probabil
ity, their working hypothesis was not far from the truth, for just as work had transformed ape into man so had the absence of it transformed man into ape in much shorter periods of time. Sometimes even into something worse than an ape. We constantly notice these things in our daily life. The loafer and sponger, the careerist and the debauchee, continue to walk about on their hind extremities and to speak quite congruently (although the roster of their subjects shrinks to a cipher). As to tight pants and infatuation with jazz, there was an attempt at one time to use these factors as indices of apeward transformation, but it was quickly determined that they were often the property of even the best of the magi.
However, it was impossible to conceal regression at the Institute. It presented limitless opportunities to transform man into magus. But it was merciless toward regressors and marked them without a miss. All a colleague had to do was to give himself over to egotistical and instinctive behavior (and sometimes just thinking about it), and he would notice in terror that the fuzz on his ears would grow thicker. That was by way of warning. Just as a police whistle warns of a fine, or a pain warns of a possible trauma. Then everything depended on oneself. Quite often a man could not contend with his sour thoughts, that’s why he was a man—the passing stage between neanderthal and magus. But he could act contrary to these thoughts, and then he still had a chance. Or he could give in, give it all up (“We live only once,” “You should take all you can out of life,” “I am no stranger to all that’s human”), but then there was only one thing to do: leave the Institute as soon as possible. There, on the outside, he could still remain at least a decent citizen, honestly if flabbily earning his pay. But it was difficult to decide on leaving. It was cozy and pleasant at the Institute, the work was clean and respected, the pay was not bad, the people were wonderful, and shame would not eat one’s eyes out. So they wandered about, pursued with compassionate glances, through the halls and the labs, their ears covered with gray bristles, aimless, losing clarity of speech, growing more stupid under one’s very eyes. Still, you could pity them, you could try to help and hope to revert them to human aspect.
But there were others. With empty eyes. Those knowing with certainty on which side their bread was buttered. In their own way they were not stupid. In their own way they were not bad judges of human nature. They were calculating and unprincipled, knowledgeable of all the weaknesses of man, clever at turning any bad situation into a good deal for themselves, and tireless at that occupation. They shaved their ears painstakingly and kept inventing the most marvelous means for getting rid of their hairy coverings. Quite often, they succeeded in attaining considerable heights and great success in their basic purpose—the construction of a bright future in a single private apartment or on a single private suburban plot, fenced off with barbed wire from the rest of humanity.
I returned to my post in the director’s reception room, dumped the useless keys into the box, and read a few pages from the classic work of J.P. Nevstruev, Mathematical Equations in Magic. The book read like an adventure novel, as it was stuffed with posed and unsolved problems. I began to burn with a desire to work and almost decided to chuck my watch responsibilities so I could go to my Aldan, when Modest Matveevich called.
Chewing crunchily, he inquired, “Where are you, Privalov? I’m calling for the third time. It’s disgraceful!”
“Happy New Year, Modest Matveevich,” I said.
He chewed in silence for some time and replied in a lower tone, “The same to you. How’s the watch going?”
“I just finished my tour of the building,” I said. “All is normal.”
“There wasn’t any auto-combustion?”
“None at all.”
“Power off everywhere?”
“Briareus broke a finger,” I said.
He was worried. “Briareus? Wait a while… Ah, yes, inventory number fourteen-eighty-nine… Why?”
I explained.
“That was a correct solution,” said Modest Matveevich. “Continue standing watch. That’s all here.”
Immediately after Modest Matveevich, Eddie Amperian, from Linear Happiness, called, and politely asked me to calculate the optimal coefficients of freedom from care for those working in positions of responsibility. I agreed and we worked out a time of meeting for two hours later in Electronics. After that, Oira-Oira’s double came in and asked for the safe keys in a colorless voice. I refused. He insisted. I chased him out.
In a minute, Roman himself came running.
“Give me the keys.”
I shook my head. “I won’t.”
“Give me the keys!”
“Go take a steambath. I am the person materially accountable.”
“Sasha! I’ll carry it off!”
I grinned and said, “Help yourself.”
Roman glared at the safe and strained his whole body, but the safe was either spellbound or screwed to the floor.
“What do you want in there, anyway?” I asked.
“Documentation on RU-Sixteen,” said Roman. “How about it? Let’s have the keys!”
I laughed, and reached for the box with the keys. In the same instant a piercing scream sounded somewhere above us. I jumped up.
Chapter 4
Woe! I am not a robust fellow;
The vampire will have me in one swallow…
A.S. Pushkin
“It’s hatched,” said Roman, calmly looking at the ceiling.
“Who?” I was ill at ease, as the cry was feminine.
“Vibegallo’s monster,” said Roman. “More precisely, his zombi.”
“Why was there a woman’s cry?”
“You’ll soon see,” said Roman.
He took me by the hand, jumped up, and we streaked through the floors. Piercing the ceilings, we wedged into floors like a knife into frozen butter, then worked through with a sucking sound, burst out into the air, and again charged the next floor. It was dark between the ceilings and floors, and small gnomes mixed with mice scattered away from us with frightened squeals. In the labs through which we flew colleagues were staring upward with worried faces.
We pushed our way through a crowd of the curious that had accumulated at the Maternity Ward, and saw an entirely nude Professor Vibegallo at the table. His bluish-white skin gleamed wetly, his beard hung limply in a cone, wet hair plastered his forehead, on which a functional volcanic boil erupted flames. His empty, translucent eyes wandered aimlessly about the room, blinking sporadically.
Professor Vibegallo was eating. Steaming on the table in front of him was a large photographic tray, filled to the brim with bran, Not paying any special attention to us, he scooped the bran with his palms, kneaded it into a lump, and conveyed it into his mouth orifice, liberally sprinkling his beard with stray bits. With this he crunched, smacked, grunted, and slurped, bent his head to the side, and squinted his eyes as though experiencing an unbearable pleasure. From time to time he became agitated and without interrupting his swallowing and chewing, grasped the rim of the tub with bran and the pails with slops, which stood by him on the floor, and pulled them closer and closer. At the other end of the table, Stella, a young undergraduate witch with clean pink ears, pale and tear-stained, was cutting loaves into huge slabs and handing them to Vibegallo with outstretched hands, turning her face away. The center autoclave was open and overturned, and a greenish puddle oozed around it.
Vibegallo suddenly said indistinctly, “Hey, wench let’s have some milk! Pour it right here in the bran, I mean. S’il vous plaît, I mean.”
Stella hurriedly picked up a pail and splashed its contents into the tray.
“Eh!” exclaimed Professor Vibegallo. “The dish is small! You, girl…what’s your name…pour it right into the tub. I mean, we’ll eat right out of the tub…”
Stella started pouring pailfuls into the tub, and the professor, grasping the tray like a spoon, took to ladling the bran into his maw, which suddenly opened incredibly wide.
“Will somebody please call him!” Stella cried pit
eously. “He’ll eat it all up in no time.”
“We’ve already called,” said someone in the crowd. “You’d better move away from him. Come on over here.”
“Will he come? Will he?”
“He said he was leaving. Putting on galoshes, I mean, and going out. We’re telling you—move away from him.”
Finally I understood what was going on. That was not Professor Vibegallo. It was the newborn zombi, the model of Man, unsatisfied stomachwise. I thanked God, for I thought the professor had had a stroke as a result of intensive overwork.
Stella moved back cautiously. They took her by the shoulders and drew her into the crowd. She hid behind my back, grasping my elbow, and I immediately squared my shoulders, though I still did not comprehend what it was all about and why she was so frightened. The zombi gorged himself. A stunned silence filled the lab—full of people, but the only sound was that of him, slurping and snuffling like a horse, and scrubbing on the tub walls with the tray. We looked on. He slid off the chair and submerged his head in the tub. The women looked away. Lilya Novosmekhova was ill and they escorted her out into the hall. Then the clear voice of Eddie Amperian was heard.
“All right. Let’s be logical. In a minute he’ll finish the bran, then he’ll eat the bread. And then?”
There was movement in the front ranks. The crowd backed toward the door. I began to comprehend.
Stella said in a thin little voice, “There are still the herring heads.”
“A lot?”
“Two tons.”
“Hmm, yes,” said Eddie. “And where are they?”
“They were supposed to be supplied by conveyor. But I tried it and it’s broken,” said Stella.
“By the way,” said Roman loudly, “it’s now been two minutes since I’ve been trying to pacify him and entirely without effect.”
“I, too,” said Eddie.
“For that reason,” said Roman, “it would be a very good thing if one of the less squeamish among you got busy with fixing the conveyor. As a palliative. Are there any other adepts here? I see Eddie. Anybody else? Korneev! Victor Pavlovich, are you here?”
