by Arkady
At the entrance to the director’s reception room, I met up with the gloomy Victor Korneev. He nodded at me glumly and started to pass me by when I caught him by the sleeve.
“Well?” said the rude Korneev, stopping.
“I am on watch, today,” I informed him.
“Too bad about you,” said Korneev.
“You really are a boor, Victor,” I said. “Here is where I part company with you.”
He tugged at the turtleneck of his sweater with a finger, and contemplated me with interest.
“Then what will you do?” he asked.
“I’ll find something,” I said, somewhat taken aback.
Suddenly, he came alive.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “Is this your first watch?”
“Yes.”
“Aha,” said Victor. “And how do you intend to proceed?”
“In accordance with instructions,” I replied. “I’ll cast the spell on the demons and lie down to sleep. That’s with regard to auto-combustion. And where are you off to?”
“Well, there’s company coming together over at Vera’s,” said Victor indefinitely. “And what’s this?” He took my list. “Oh, the Dead Souls…”
“I’ll not let anyone in,” I said, “neither the live nor the dead.”
“A correct decision,” said Victor. “The very essence of correctness. But keep an eye on my laboratory. I’ll have a double working there.”
“Whose double?”
“Mine, naturally. Who is going to give me his? I locked him in there; here, take the key, since you are on watch.”
I took the key.
“Listen, Victor. Up to ten o’clock or so, he can carry on, and then I’ll switch everything off. That is in accordance with the legislation.”
“All right, we’ll see about it then. Have you seen Eddie?”
“No, I haven’t,” I said. “And don’t snow me. Ten o’clock—all the power goes off.”
“Did I say anything against it? Power off and welcome. The whole town, for all I care.”
At which point the reception-room door opened and Janus Poluektovich came out into the hall.
“So,” he enunciated, seeing us.
I bowed respectfully. It was obvious from the expression on his face that he had forgotten my name.
“Please,” he said, handing me keys. “You are standing watch, if I am not mistaken… By the way”—he hesitated—“Did I talk to you yesterday?”
“Yes,” I said. “You came by the Electronics section.”
He nodded. “Yes, yes, indeed…we were talking about trainees…”
“No,” I contradicted respectfully. “Not quite. It was about your letter to Centracademprov. About the peripheral equipment.”
“Oh, so that’s it,” he said. “Well, all right… I wish you a quiet watch… Victor Pavlovich, may I have your attention a minute?”
He took Victor under the arm and led him off down the hall. I went into the reception room. There the second Janus Poluektovich was locking up the safes. Seeing me, he said, “So,” and resumed clicking his keys. This was Janus-A, as I had learned to distinguish somewhat between them. Janus-A looked somewhat younger, was a bit standoffish, always correct, and laconic. It was said that he worked hard, and the people who knew him had been insisting for a long time that this mediocre administrator was slowly but surely turning into an outstanding scientist. Janus-U, on the other hand, was always gentle, very attentive, and had the strange habit of unfailingly asking, “Were we talking yesterday?” It was hinted that he had begun to slip badly of late, although remaining a scientist of world renown. Nevertheless, Janus-A and Janus-U were one and the same man. That’s just the part that wouldn’t fit in my head. There seemed something arbitrary about that.
Janus-A clicked his last lock, gave me some of the keys, and left with a frigid farewell. I sat down at the reviewer’s table, laid the list in front of me, and rang up the Electronics Department. No one answered—apparently the girls had already left. It was fourteen hours and thirty minutes.
At fourteen hours and thirty-one minutes, the renowned Feodor Simeonovich Kivrin barged into the room breathing heavily, the parquet creaking under his weight. This was the great magus and wizard, who headed the Department of Linear Happiness. Feodor Simeonovich was famed for his incorrigible optimism and faith in a beautiful future. He had a very stormy past. During the reign of Ivan Vasilievich the Terrible, the retainers of Maliuta Skuratov burned him, joking and jesting, in a wooden steambath as a sorcerer; in the reign of Alexis Mikhailovich the Quiet, they beat him mercilessly with cudgels, and burned the entire collection of his manuscripts on his bare back; during the reign of Peter the Great, he rose at first as a learned chemist and mining expert, but somehow displeased the prince Romodanovsky and wound up condemned to hard labor at the Tula gun works, whence he fled to India, traveled a great deal, was bitten by poisonous snakes and crocodiles, easily transcended Yoga, returned to Russia at the height of the Pugachev rebellion, when he was accused of doctoring the insurgents, was de-nostriled, and exiled to Solovetz in perpetuity. At Solovetz he continued to have a myriad of difficulties until he was picked up by SRITS, where he soon became head of a department.
“Greetings!” he boomed, laying down before me the keys to his laboratories. “P-poor chap, h-how did you get stuck like that? Y-you should be celebrating on a night like this. I’ll call Modest Matveevich. Such n-nonsense; I’ll stand watch myself.”
It was evident that the idea had just bit him and he was all fired up with it.
“O.K. Where is his phone number? D-damnation, can’t even remember telephone numbers… One fifteen or five eleven…”
“No, no, Feodor Simeonovich, no thank you!” I exclaimed. “It’s not necessary. I was looking forward to getting some work done.”
“Ah, to work! That’s a different in-matter! That’s g-good, that’s g-great, you are a f-fine young man! M-me—I don’t know a damn thing about electronics… I sh-should study! Or else all this m-magic is nothing b-but words, old s-stuff, hocus-p-pocus, with psi-fields and primitivism…granddaddy imitators…”
Right there, without moving a step, he created two large pale yellow apples, gave me one, bit a half right out of the other, and proceeded to crunch on it juicily.
“D-damnation, made a wormy one again… How’s yours—good? That’s g-good… I’ll d-drop by to see you again l-later, Sasha, as I just d-don’t get this system of the management… Just give me t-time to nab some v-vodka and I’ll be by again… There is that twenty-ninth instruction in your machine… Either th-the machine is lying or I don’t understand something… I’ll bring you a d-detective story—Gardner’s. You do read English? G-good, the son-of a-gun writes really well! He has that P-Perry Mason, the tough lawyer, you know! Then I’ll give you something else from science-fiction, some A-Asimov or B-Bradbury…”
He went over to the window and said with immense delight, “B-blizzard, devil take it! I just l-love it!”
Cristobal Joseevich Junta came in, slim and elegant wearing a mink coat. Feodor Simeonovich turned around.
“Ah, C-Cristo!” he exclaimed. “B-behold, that cretin Kamnoedov j-jailed this young chap to stand w-watch on New Year’s Eve. Shall we liberate him? The two of us can stay here, r-reminisce on the old days, have a d-drink or two? W-why should he suffer? He should be out there, cutting capers with the girls…”
Junta placed the keys on the table and said negligently, “Association with girls brings pleasure only on those occasions when it is achieved through the surmounting of obstacles…”
“There you go!” roared Feodor Simeonovich. “Much blood, in-many songs have f-flowed for the charming ladies… How does that go again?… Only he attains his purpose who knows not the word for ‘fear’…”
“Exactly,” said Junta. “Further—I can’t stand charity.”
“He can’t stand ch-charity! And wh-who wheedled Odemantiev from me? Enticed this lab technician from me! Now you h
ave to put up a b-bottle of champagne, n-no less… No, listen, n-no champagne! Amontillado! You still have some left from the Toledo reserves?”
“They are waiting for us, Feodor,” Junta reminded him.
“T-true… I still have to f-find a tie…and felt boots… We won’t get a taxi. We’re off, Sasha. D-don’t get bored…”
“On New Year’s Eve, the watch in the Institute does not get bored,” Junta said softly, “especially a novice.”
They went toward the door; Junta let Feodor Simeonovich go first, and before exiting, looked at me out of the corner of his eye. Precipitately he traced Solomon’s Star with his finger on the wall. It glowed and began to fade like the trace on an oscilloscope. I spit thrice over my left shoulder.
Cristobal Joseevich Junta, head of the Meaning of Life Department, was a remarkable man but apparently completely heartless. Long ago, in his early youth, he was for a long time the Grand Inquisitor, and has to date retained some of the mannerisms. He carried out most of his unspeakable experiments either on himself or on his co-workers, and this had already been discussed in outraged tones in my presence at the union meeting. He was involved in studies of the meaning of life, but had not made any extraordinary progress, though he did obtain some interesting results when he proved, on a theoretical basis, that death is not an invariant attribute of life. That particular latest discovery was also the subject of outraged opposition at the philosophical seminar. Almost no one was allowed in his office, and disturbing gossip went about the Institute that he had a multitude of intriguing items there. They said that the corner was occupied by a magnificently executed stuffed figure of one of Cristobal Joseevich’s old friends, an S.S. führer, in full dress uniform, with monocle, ceremonial dagger, iron cross, oak leaves, and other such appurtenances. Junta was an excellent taxidermist. According to Cristobal Joseevich, so was the standartenführer. But Cristobal Joseevich was sooner. He liked to be a sooner in anything he undertook. Neither was a certain amount of skepticism foreign to him. A huge sign hung in one of his laboratories: Do we need ourselves? An uncommon man indeed.
At exactly three o’clock, and in accordance with the labor laws, the doctor of science, Ambrosi Ambruosovitch Vibegallo8 brought in his keys. He was dressed in felt boots with leather soles and a coachman’s parka whose collar could not contain his unkempt grayish beard. He cut his hair as though with a pot, so that no one ever saw his ears.
“Concerning…” he said, approaching. “I could be having something hatch out today. In the laboratory, that is. You should…eh…have it looked at. I have laid in supplies for him—that is, bread, maybe five loaves, a couple of buckets of steamed bran. So, then, when be finishes eating all that, he’ll start running about. So you, mon cher, you might give me a buzz.”
He laid down a bundle of warehouse keys, and stared at me with his mouth open as if struggling with some inner conflict. He had strange translucent eyes and there was birdseed in his beard.
“Where should I buzz you?” I asked.
I disliked the man thoroughly. He was a cynic and a fool to boot. The work he performed, for three hundred and fifty rubles a month, could boldly be called eugenics, but no one called it that—out of reluctance to get involved. This Vibegallo insisted that all the troubles that were came from unsatisfied desires, and if man was given everything, such as plenty of bread and steamed bran, then you’d not have a man, but an angel. He pushed this uncomplicated idea in tireless ways, waving classical tomes out of which he tore citations by their bloody roots, leaving out and extirpating anything that did not suit his purpose. At one time, the Learned Council fell back under the press of his overwhelming and primeval demagogy and the Vibegallo concept was included in the plan.
Acting strictly in line with the plan, diligently measuring his accomplishments in percentages of completion, never forgetting budgets and productivity as well as keeping an eye on practical applications, Vibegallo laid out three experimental models; model of Man, totally unsatisfied; model of Man, unsatisfied stomachwise; and model of Man, completely satisfied. The totally unsatisfied anthropoid matured first—he’d hatched two weeks before. The miserable creature, covered like Job with boils, half decomposed, tortured with all the known and unknown ailments, suffering from heat and cold simultaneously, wandered out into the hall, filled the Institute with the sounds of its inchoate complaints, and expired. Vibegallo was triumphant. Now one could consider it a proved fact that if a man was not fed and given water, was not doctored, then he could be considered to be unhappy—and might even die. As this one had.
The Learned Council was shocked. Vibegallo’s undertaking was turning out to have a very dark side. A commission was instituted to review his work. But he, in no way shaken, presented two depositions, from which it developed that three of his lab technicians took leave yearly to work in the local SOVKHOZ, and, secondly, that he, Vibegallo, had once been a prisoner of the tsar and was now a regular lecturer on popular topics both in the city auditorium and the environs. While the stunned commission was attempting to make sense of the logic in all this data, Vibegallo unhurriedly shipped four truckloads of herring heads from the fish-food factory (as a matter of proper communications with the production sector) intended for the maturing model of Man, unsatisfied stomachwise. The commission was composing a report, and the Institute was fearfully waiting the coming developments. Vibegallo’s neighbors on the same floor were taking leaves of absence at their own expense.
“Where shall I buzz you?” I asked.
“Buzz me? At home! Where else on New Year’s Eve? Morality is what we need. My good man, New Year’s Eve should be celebrated at home. That’s our way—n’est pas?”
“I know it’s your home. What’s the number?”
“Look it up in the book. Are you literate? Then look it up, in the book, that is. We have no secrets, like some others. En mase.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll buzz you.”
“Do buzz me, mon cher. And if he should start in biting, then you can put the clamps on him. Don’t be bashful. C’est la vie.”
I gathered my nerve and muttered, “We haven’t drunk our toast to the familiar relationship.”
“Pardon?”
“Never mind, I was just talking,” I said.
He looked at me for some time with his translucent eyes in which nothing at all was expressed, and then pronounced, “Well, if it’s nothing; then that’s good. Congratulations on the coming holiday. Be well. Au revoir, that is.” He pulled on his earmuffed cap and left.
I opened up the ventilator in a hurry. Roman Oira-Oira flew in wearing a green overcoat with a mutton collar, twitched his hump nose, and inquired, “Vibegallo was through?”
“He was through,” I said.
“Mmm, yes,” he said. “That’s some herring! Hold on to the keys. You know where he dumped one of the trucks? Right under Gian Giacomo’s windows. Directly under his office. A New Year’s gift. I think I’ll have a cigarette with you.”
He fell into the huge leather armchair, unbuttoning his coat, and lighted up.
“Consider this,” he said. “Given: The odor of herring marinade, intensity sixteen microlers, volume—” He looked around the room. “Say, but you can figure that yourself. The year is in transition, Saturn is in Libra… Refine!”
I scratched behind the ear.
“Saturn…why are you giving me Saturn…? What about the magistatum vector?”
“That, chum,” said Oira-Oira, “that you have to do yourself…”
I scratched behind the other ear, estimated the vector, and pronounced, stuttering, the acoustic enabler (incantation). Oira-Oira pinched his nose. I pulled two hairs out of my eyebrow (very painful and stupid) and polarized the vector.
The smell increased some more.
“Bad,” Oira-Oira rebuked. “Can’t you see that the ventilator is open?”
“Ah,” I said, “that’s right.”
I took divergence into account and also the rotation, attempted t
o solve the Stokes equation in my head, became confused, pulled two more hairs, breathing through the mouth, checked the smell, and recited the Auers incantation. I was prepared to pull another hair, when it became evident that the reception room was aired out in a natural way, and Roman advised me to close the ventilator and economize on my eyebrows.
“Mediocre,” he said. “Let’s try materialization.”
We were busy with materialization for a while. I made pears and Roman insisted that I eat them. I refused, and he ordered me to make more. “You’ll work until you’ll make something edible,” he kept saying. “This stuff you can give to Modest. As his name implies, he’s our human incinerator.” Finally, I concocted a real pear, large, yellow, soft as butter, and as bitter as genuine. I ate it and Roman allowed me to rest.
At this point, the baccalaureate of black magic, Magnus Feodorovich Redkin, brought in his keys, looking obese, customarily preoccupied, and hurt. He obtained his baccalaureate three hundred years ago for inventing the invisibility socks. Since then, he has been improving them over and over. The socks became culottes, and then pants, and now they are referred to as trousers. Still, he remained unable to make them work properly. At the last session of the seminar on black magic, when he made his serial presentation “On Certain Novel Aspects of the Redkin Invisibility Trousers,” he was once more overtaken by disaster. During the demonstration of the updated model, something in its inner workings stuck, and the trousers, with a bell-like click, became invisible themselves, instead of their wearer. It was most embarrassing. However, Magnus Feodorovich worked mostly on a dissertation whose subject sounded something like “The Materialization and Linear Naturalization of the White Thesis, as an Argument of the Sufficiently Stochastic Function Representing the Not Quite Imaginable Human Happiness.”