I passed the premises of the Department of Buildings and Contents. The entrance to Modest Matveevich’s waiting room was blocked off with crisscrossed metal I beams, and standing at the sides, sabers at the ready, were two massive ifrits in turbans and full battle gear. Both of their noses, red and swollen from colds, were pierced with massive gold rings with a tin inventory number. There was a smell of sulfur, scorched wool, and streptocide ointment in the air. I lingered for a while, examining them, because in our latitudes ifrits are rare beings. But the one standing on the right, with unshaven cheeks and a black eye patch, began glaring at me with his one eye. There were bad rumors about him—supposedly he used to eat people—so I hurried on my way. I could hear him snuffling and smacking his lips behind my back.
In the premises of the Department of Absolute Knowledge all the small upper windows were open, because the smell of Professor Vybegallo’s herring heads was seeping in. There was snow heaped up on the windowsills and there were dark puddles under the radiators of the central steam heating system. I closed the windows and walked between the virginally clean desks of the department’s staff members. Standing on the desks were brand-new ink sets that had never seen ink, but there were cigarette butts spilling out of the inkwells. This was a strange department. Its motto was “The cognition of infinity requires an infinite amount of time.” I could hardly dispute that assertion, but the staff drew an unexpected conclusion from it: “And therefore it makes no difference whether you work or not.” So in the interest of not adding to the amount of entropy in the universe, they didn’t work. At least, most of them didn’t. Not en masse, as Vybegallo would have said. Reduced to essentials, their task consisted of analyzing the curve of relative cognition in the region of its asymptotic approximation of absolute truth. Therefore some members of the department were always occupied with dividing zero by zero on their desktop calculators, and others kept requesting study assignments to eternity. They returned from their trips cheerful and overfed and immediately took time off on health grounds. In the gaps between assignments they wandered around from department to department, sat on other people’s desks smoking cigarettes, and told jokes about evaluating indeterminate forms with L’Hopital’s rule. They were easy to recognize from the empty look in their eyes and the cuts on their ears from constant shaving. In the six months I’d been at the Institute they’d only come up with a single job for the Aldan, and that boiled down to the same old division of zero by zero and involved absolutely no truth quotient at all. Perhaps some of them also did some real work, but I didn’t know anything about it.
At half past ten I stepped onto Ambrosius Ambroisovich Vybegallo’s floor. Covering my face with my handkerchief and trying to breathe through my mouth, I headed straight for the lab known to the staff of the Institute as the Nursery. Here, according to Professor Vybegallo, models of the ideal man were born in retorts. Hatched out . . . er . . . so to speak. Comprenez-vous?
The laboratory was stuffy and dark. I switched on the light, illuminating the smooth, gray walls decorated with portraits of Aesculapius, Paracelsus, and Ambrosius Ambroisovich himself. Ambrosius Ambroisovich was depicted in a black cap set on noble curls, with some kind of medal gleaming illegibly on his chest. There had once been another portrait on the fourth wall, but now all that was left was a dark rectangle and three rusty, bent nails.
There was an autoclave standing in the center of the laboratory, and another, somewhat larger, in the corner. There were loaves of bread lying on the floor around the central autoclave, beside zinc buckets of bluish skim milk and a huge tub full of steamed bran. Judging from the smell, the herring heads were somewhere close by too, but I couldn’t figure out exactly where. The laboratory was silent except for the rhythmic popping sounds coming from inside the central autoclave.
Going across to that autoclave on tiptoe, I don’t know why, I glanced in through the viewing port. I was already feeling nauseous from the smell, and now I began to feel really bad, although I hadn’t seen anything particularly special—something white and formless slowly heaving in the green gloom. I switched off the light, went out, and carefully locked the door. “Smack him in the chops,” I recalled. I was troubled by vague presentiments. I had only just noticed the thick magic line drawn around the threshold, traced out in cramped cabalistic symbols. On looking closer I realized that it was a spell against a gaki, a hungry demon of hell.
With a feeling of some relief I took my leave of Vybegallo’s domain and began climbing up to the sixth floor, where Gian Giacomo and his colleagues dealt with the theory and practice of Universal Transformations. Hanging on the landing was a colorful poster in verse, appealing for the establishment of a communal library. The idea had come from the local trade union committee; the verse was mine:
You know where you need to look,
Dig until you’ve found the lot,
Every old magazine and book,
We want everything you’ve got.
I blushed and went on. As I set foot on the sixth floor, I immediately saw that the door of Vitka’s laboratory was slightly ajar and I heard hoarse singing. I crept stealthily toward it.
3
THEE for my recitative,
Thee in the driving storm even as now, the snow,
the winterday declining,
Thee in thy panoply, thy measur’d dual throbbing
and thy beat convulsive . . .
—Walt Whitman
Vitka had told me he was going to join a group of friends and he was leaving a double working in the lab. A double is a very interesting kind of thing. As a rule it is a rather specific copy of its creator. Let’s say someone has too much to handle—he creates himself a double, mindless and submissive, who only knows how to solder contacts or carry heavy weights, or write to dictation, but who does it well. Or say someone requires a model anthropoid for some kind of experiment—he creates himself a double, mindless and submissive, who only knows how to walk on the ceiling or receive telepathemes, but who does it well. Or take the simplest case. Let’s say someone wants to collect his pay, but he doesn’t want to waste any time, and he sends a double in his place, one who knows nothing except how to make sure no one jumps the line, sign the register, and count the money without leaving the cash desk. Of course, not everyone can create doubles. I still couldn’t, for instance. What I’d managed to produce so far didn’t know how to do anything, not even walk. And I’d be standing there in the line, and Vitka and Roman and Volodya Pochkin would all apparently be there, but there was no one to talk to. They just stood there like stones, not blinking or breathing, not shifting their feet, and there wasn’t even anyone to ask for a cigarette.
The genuine masters can create highly complex, multiprogrammed, self-teaching doubles. Roman sent one of those super models off in the car instead of me in the summer. And not one of the guys even guessed it wasn’t me. The double drove my Moskvich magnificently, swore when the mosquitoes bit him, and really enjoyed a good sing-along. When he got back to Leningrad he dropped everyone off at their homes, returned the rented car, paid the bill, and immediately disappeared in front of the very eyes of the astounded director of the car rental office.
At one time I used to think that A-Janus and S-Janus were a double and an original. But that wasn’t it at all. First, both directors had passports, diplomas, passes, and other essential documents. Not even the most complex doubles could possess any identity documents. At the sight of an official stamp on their photographs they flew into a rage and immediately tore the documents to shreds. Magnus Redkin had spent a lot of time studying this mysterious property of doubles, but the task was clearly beyond him.
In addition, the Januses were protein-based entities. To this day the philosophers and cyberneticists haven’t managed to agree whether doubles should be regarded as alive or not. Most of the doubles were organo-silicon structures; there were also germanium-based doubles, and just recently aluminium polymer doubles have become fashionable.
Finally, and
most important, neither A-Janus nor S-Janus was ever artificially created by anyone. They weren’t a copy and an original; they weren’t twin brothers. They were one man—Janus Polyeuctovich Nevstruev. Nobody in the Institute understood this, but they all knew it so well that they didn’t even try to understand.
Vitka’s double was standing leaning with his open palms on the lab table and staring fixedly at a small Ashby homeostat. At the same time he was purring a song set to a tune that was once popular:
For us Descartes or Newton would be gross misnomers,
Science for us is such a tight-closed book,
We daren’t even look.
We’re just plain ordinary astronomers
It’s only stars down from the sky we pluck
I’d never heard any doubles sing before, but you could expect anything at all from Vitka’s doubles. I remember one of them who even dared to wrangle with Modest Matveevich himself over the excessive consumption of psychic energy—and even the pitiful specimens I created, without any arms or legs, were pathologically afraid of Modest Matveevich. It was clearly instinctive.
Standing under a canvas cover in the corner to the right of the double was the TDK-80E translator, the useless product of the Kitezhgrad Magotechnical Plant. Beside the laboratory table was my old friend the sofa, its patched leather gleaming in the light of three spotlights. Perched on top of the sofa was a child’s bathtub full of water, and floating belly up in the water was a dead perch. The laboratory also contained shelves crammed with instruments and, right beside the door, a large green-glass carboy covered in dust. There was a genie sealed inside the carboy; you could see him swirling around inside with his eyes glittering.
Vitka’s double stopped watching the homeostat, sat down on the sofa beside the bath, and, fixing the same stony stare on the dead fish, sang the following verse:
In order to achieve nature’s pacification,
The absolute and total dissipation
Of dark mystification
You need an accurate, precise representation
Of the whole world’s complex concatenation . . .
The perch remained as it was. Then the double thrust his hand deep into the sofa and began breathing hard and straining as it twisted something inside there.
The sofa was a translator. It created around itself an M-field that, putting it simply, translated genuine reality into fairy tale reality. I had experienced the result that memorable night when I lodged with Naina Kievna, and the only thing that had saved me then was that the sofa was operating at a quarter power, on dark current, otherwise I would have woken up as some little Tom Thumb in thigh boots. For Magnus Redkin the sofa was the possible receptacle of the long-sought White Thesis. For Modest Matveevich, it was a museum exhibit, inventory number 1123, the improper appropriation and exploitation of which was prohibited. For Vitka it was instrument number 1. That was why Vitka stole the sofa every night, Magnus Fyodorovich jealously reported this to comrade Demin, the head of personnel, and Modest Matveevich directed his energies to putting an end to all of the foregoing. Vitka had carried on stealing the sofa until Janus Polyeuctovich intervened. Acting in close cooperation with Fyodor Simeonovich, with the support of Gian Giacomo, on the authority of an official letter from the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences signed in person by four academicians, the director had eventually managed to neutralize Redkin completely and shift Modest Matveevich slightly from his entrenched position.
Modest Matveevich declared that he, as the individual bearing material responsibility, wouldn’t hear of anything else but the sofa, inventory number 1123, being located in the premises specifically designated for it. And if that was not done, Modest Matveevich threatened, then be it on the heads of all of them, up to and including the academicians. Janus Polyeuctovich agreed to take it on his own head, and so did Fyodor Simeonovich, and Vitka quickly moved the sofa into his own laboratory. Vitka was a serious scientist, not like those idle loafers from the Department of Absolute Knowledge, and his intention was to transform all the water in the seas and oceans of our planet into living water. As yet, however, he was still at the experimental stage.
The perch in the bathtub began to stir and turned belly down. The double removed his hand from the sofa. The perch fluttered its fins apathetically, yawned, slumped over onto its side, and turned belly up again.
“Bastard!” the double said emphatically.
That immediately put me on my guard. It had been said with feeling. No lab double could have said it like that. The double stuck its hands in its pockets, slowly stood up, and saw me. We looked at each other for a few seconds. Then I inquired acidly, “Working, are we?”
The double stared at me stupidly.
“OK, drop it, drop it,” I said. “Your cover’s blown.”
The double said nothing. He stood there like stone, not even blinking.
“I’ll tell you what,” I said. “It’s well after ten already. I’ll give you ten more minutes. Tidy everything up, dump that carrion, and go off dancing. I’ll disconnect everything myself.”
The double thrust out its lips as if it were playing the flute and began backing away. It stepped back very carefully, rounded the sofa, and stood so that the lab table was between us. I glanced pointedly at my watch. The double muttered an incantation and a calculator, a fountain pen, and a pile of clean paper appeared on the desk. Bending his knees and floating into the air, the double began writing something, glancing warily at me from time to time. It was all very convincing, and it almost had me fooled for a moment. But in any case, I had a sure way of finding out the truth. As a rule, doubles are entirely insensitive to pain. I fumbled in my pocket, pulled out a small pair of sharp pincers, and advanced on the double, clicking them suggestively. The double stopped writing. Looking him hard in the eyes, I snipped off the head of a nail that was protruding from the tabletop and said: “Weeell?”
“Why couldn’t you just leave me alone?” Vitka asked. “Can’t you see when someone’s working?”
“You’re a double,” I said. “Don’t you dare make conversation with me.”
“Put away the pincers,” he said.
“You shouldn’t go playing the fool,” I said. “Some double you are.”
Vitka sat on the edge of the table and rubbed his ears wearily. “Nothing’s going right for me today,” he declared. “Today I’m an idiot. I created a double and it turned out absolutely brainless. Dropped everything, sat on the plywitsum, a real brute. I smashed it over the head, broke its arm off . . . And the perch just keeps on dying all the time.”
I went across to the sofa and glanced into the bathtub. “What’s wrong with it?”
“How should I know?”
“Where did you get it?”
“At the market.”
I picked the perch up by the tail. “What did you expect? It’s just an ordinary dead fish.”
“Blockhead,” said Vitka. “That’s living water.”
“Aha,” I said, and started wondering what advice to give him. I have only the vaguest idea about the effects of living water. Mostly from the fairy tale about Tsarevich Ivan and the Gray Wolf.
Every now and then the genie in the carboy would start trying to wipe away the dust on the outside of the glass with his hand. “You could at least wipe the bottle,” I said when I failed to come up with anything.
“What?”
“Wipe the dust off the bottle. He’s bored in there.”
“To hell with him, let him be bored,” Vitka said absentmindedly. He thrust his hand back into the sofa and twisted something in there again. The perch came to life.
“See that?” said Vitka. “When I give it maximum intensity, there’s no problem.”
“It’s a bad specimen,” I said, guessing in the dark.
Vitka pulled his hand out of the sofa and fixed his gaze on me.
“The specimen . . .” he said. “Is a bad one . . .” His eyes glazed over like a double’s. “Specimen specimini lupus est.”
“And then it was probably frozen,” I said, growing bolder. Vitka wasn’t listening to me.
“Where can I get a fish?” he said, gazing around and slapping his pockets. “I need a little fishie . . .”
“What for?” I asked.
“That’s right,” said Vitka. “What for? Since there isn’t any other fish,” he reasoned, “then why not change the water? That makes sense, doesn’t it?”
“Er, no,” I objected. “That won’t do it.”
“What will then?” Vitka asked eagerly.
“Clear out of here,” I said. “Get off the premises.”
“Where to?”
“Wherever you like.”
He clambered over the sofa and grabbed me by the lapels. “You listen to me, all right?” he said threateningly. “Nothing in the world is identical to anything else. Everything’s distributed according to the Gaussian curve. Water’s not like other water . . . This old fool forgot all about the dispersion of qualities . . .”
“Come on, old man,” I appealed to him. “It’s almost New Year’s! Don’t get so carried away.”
He let go of me and started fumbling about. “Where did I put it? What a dumb hick! Where did I stick it? Ah, there it is . . .”
He dashed across to the table, where the plywitsum was standing upright. The same one. I jumped back to the door and said imploringly, “Come to your senses! It’s after eleven already! They’re waiting for you! Vera’s waiting!”
“Naah,” he answered. “I sent them a double. A fine double, a good talker . . . The life and soul . . . tells jokes, stands on his hands, dances like a lunatic . . .” He twisted the plywitsum in his hands, figuring something out, weighing something up, screwing up one eye.
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