by Arkady
It was stuffy and dark in the lab. I turned on the lights. The illumination revealed smooth gray walls hung with portraits of Aesculapius, Paracelsus, and Ambrosi Ambruosovitch himself. He was depicted in a small black cap, with noble curls, and an indecipherable medal shining starlike on his chest.
An autoclave stood in the middle of the floor and another bigger one hulked in the corner. Around the central autoclave, piled on the floor, were loaves of bread, several galvanized pails with bluish slops, and a huge tank with steamed bran. Judging by the smell, the herring heads were also nearby, but I couldn’t discern where they were actually located. Silence reigned against a background of rhythmic clicks in the depths of the autoclave.
Not knowing why, I tiptoed over and looked into the viewing port. I was already nauseous from the smell, but now I felt really ill, though I didn’t see anything special: something white and shapeless slowly swaying in the greenish murk. I turned off the lights, went out, and diligently locked the door. I was troubled with vague premonitions. Only now I noticed that a thick black magic line with crude cabalistic signs was drawn around the doorsill. On looking closer, it became evident that it was conjuration against Gaki, the hungry demon of hell.
I left the domain of Vibegallo with some sense of relief and started my ascent to the sixth floor, where Gian Giacomo and his associates were occupied with the theory and practice of Universal Transformations. A colorful poster in verse hung on the stair landing, exhorting contributions to a general-interest library. The idea belonged to the local committee, but the verse was mine:
Search through your attic nooks
Your shelves and cabinets please scan
Bring Us the magazines and books
As many as you can.
I blushed and went on. Stepping onto the sixth floor, I saw at once that the door to Victor’s lab was half open, and husky singing impinged on my ears.
Chapter 3
Thee for my recitative
Thee in the driving storm even as now, the snow, the winter day declining, thee in thy panoply, thy measur’d dual throbbing and thy beat convulsive.
W. Whitman
A while back Victor said that he was going off to a party, leaving a double in the laboratory to work. A double—that’s a very interesting item. As a rule it’s a fairly accurate copy of its creator. Let’s say a man doesn’t have enough hands—he makes up a double that is brainless, mute, who knows only how to solder contacts, or lug weights, or take dictation, but knows how to do these things very well indeed. Or he needs a model anthropoid, also brainless and mute but capable only of walking on ceilings or taking telepathgrams and doing that well. Or again, take the simplest of cases. Say the man is expecting to receive his pay, but does not wish to lose time getting it, so he sends his double in his place, who knows only to keep anyone from getting in front of him in the queue, to sign his name in the record book, and to count the money before leaving the cashier. Of course, not everyone can create doubles. I, for one, was unable to do it. So far, whatever I put together couldn’t do a thing—not even walk. There you would be standing in line with ostensible Victor and Roman and Volodia Pochkin, but there would be no one you could talk to. They would stand like stone monuments, not shifting their weight, not breathing, not blinking, and there would be nobody to ask for a cigarette.
True masters can create very complex, multiprogrammed, self-teaching doubles. It was such a superdouble that Roman sent off in my place last summer in the car. None of my friends guessed that it was not me. The double drove the car very competently, cursed when the mosquitoes bit him, and sang joyfully in chorus. Having returned to Leningrad, he dropped everybody off, turned the car in all by himself, paid for it, and disappeared right then and there before the eyes of the stunned rental agent.
At one time I thought that Janus-A and Janus-U were an original and a double. However, it was not like that. First, both directors had a passport, a diploma, passes, and other necessary documents. The most complex of doubles, on the contrary, could not have any personal identifications. At the mere sight of a government stamp on their photographs they became enraged, and immediately tore the documents to shreds. Magnus Redkin studied this mysterious characteristic for a long time, but the problem was clearly too much for him.
Further, the Januses were protein-based beings. The argument between the philosophers and the cyberneticists as to whether doubles should be regarded as living or not has still not been resolved. Most doubles were silico-organic in structure, some were based on germanium, and lately doubles composed of alumopolymers were in fashion.
And finally, and most importantly, no one ever created either Janus-A or Janus-U artificially. They were not original and copy, nor brothers or twins; they were a single man—Janus Poluektovich Nevstruev. No one in the Institute could understand it, but they knew it so well that they did not even try to understand.
Victor’s double stood, palms braced on the laboratory table, and followed the working of a small Ashby homeostat with a riveted gaze. He accompanied himself with a soft little song to a once-popular tune:
“We are not Descartes or Newton
Science to us is a dark forest of wonders.
While we, normal astronomers—yes!
Snatch stars from the skies.”
I had never heard of doubles singing before. But you could expect anything from one of Victor’s doubles. I recollect one such, which dared argue about the excessive expenditure of psychic energy with Modest Matveevich himself. And this, while the scarecrows I constructed, without legs or arms, feared him to the point of convulsion, entirely by instinct.
In the corner, to the right of the double, stood the two-speed translator, TDX-8OE, under its canvas covering. It was the inadequate product of the Kitezhgrad magitechnic factory. Next to the table stood my old friend the sofa, its restitched leather gleaming in the glare of three spotlights. A baby bath, filed with water in which a dead perch floated belly up, sat on top of the sofa. Also in the laboratory were shelves loaded with instruments, and near the door, there was a large green bottle covered with dust. In the bottle was a sealed-up jinn, and one could see him moving about in there and flashing his little eyes.
Victor’s double quit examining the homeostat, sat down on the sofa next to the bath, ogled the dead fish with the same fixed stare, and sang the following verse:
“With the aim of taming nature
And scattering ignorance’s darkness
We postulate a view of world creation—yes!
And dully look at what goes which way and how.”
The perch maintained its status quo. Precipitately, the double plunged his arm deeply into the sofa and started to turn something there, puffing with great effort.
The sofa was a translator. It erected an M-field around itself, which, simply stated, converted normal reality into imaginary reality. I had experienced this myself on that memorable night when boarding with Naina Kievna, and the only thing that had saved me was that the sofa was operating at one quarter of its standard output; otherwise I would have ended up as Tom Thumb or something similar. For Magnus Redkin the sofa was a possible container of the White Thesis. For Modest Matveevich it was a museum exhibit, inventory number 1123, and any auctioning off was strictly forbidden. For Victor it was Device Number One. For this reason he stole it every night. Magnus Feodorovich, being jealous, reported this to Personnel Director Demin, while the activity of Modest Matveevich was reduced to exhortations to “note all that down.” Victor kept stealing the sofa until Janus Poluektovich took a hand—in close cooperation with Feodor Simeonovich, and with the active support of Gian Giacomo—relying on an official letter of the Academy Presidium signed personally by four academicians. They were able to neutralize Redkin completely, and press Modest Matveevich somewhat back from his entrenched position. The latter then announced that he, as the person officially accountable, didn’t want to hear any more about that matter and desired that the sofa, inventory number 1123, be placed
in its own special place. Should this not be done, Modest Matveevich threatened, then everyone, including the academicians, must blame themselves. Janus Poluektovich agreed to blame himself, so did Feodor Simeonovich, and Victor quickly lugged the sofa to his laboratory.
He was a serious worker, not one of those loafers from the Department of Absolute Knowledge, and he intended to transform all the water in the seas and oceans of our planet into life-giving water. To date, it is true, he was still in the experimental stage.
The perch in the bath stirred and turned belly down. The double took his arm out of the sofa. The perch moved its fins apathetically, opened its mouth as though in a yawn, fell over on its side, and turned belly up again.
“B-beast,” said the double with much expression.
I snapped to full alertness at once. This was said with emotion. No laboratory double could talk like that. The double put his hand in his pocket, got up slowly, and saw me. We looked at each other for a few seconds.
Then I inquired sarcastically, “Working, aren’t we?”
The double looked at me dully.
“Give it up,” I said. “All is clear.”
The double was silent. He stood like a stone and didn’t blink.
“I’ll tell you what,” I said. “It’s now ten-thirty. I am giving you ten minutes. Clean up, throw out the carrion, and run along to the dance. I’ll turn the power off myself.”
The double puckered his lips into a tube and started to back up. He did this very carefully, skirting the sofa, and stopped when the lab was between us. I looked at my watch demonstratively. He mouthed an incantation. A calculator, pen, and a stack of clean paper appeared on the table. The double bent his legs so that he hung seated in the air, and started to write, looking at me fearfully now and then. It was done so naturally that I began to doubt myself. But I had a sure method for establishing the truth of the matter. Doubles were, as a rule, completely insensitive to pain. Searching in my pocket, I drew out a pair of small diagonal pliers, and snapping them meaningfully, moved toward the double. He stopped writing.
Looking him steadily in the eye, I snapped the head off a nail sticking out of the table and said, “Well?”
“Why are you pestering me?” asked Victor. “Can’t you see a man is at work?”
“But you are a double,” I said. “Don’t you dare talk back to me.”
“Get rid of the pliers,” he said.
“Stop playing the fool,” I said. “Some double!”
Victor sat on the edge of the table and tiredly rubbed his ears.
“Nothing works for me today,” he informed me. “Today I am a dumbbell. Made a double and it came out totally brainless. Dropped everything, sat down on the umclidet…the animal… I hit him in the neck and hurt my hand…and even the perch croaks systematically.”
I went over to the sofa and looked in the bath.
“What’s the matter with him?”
“How do I know?”
“Where did you get it?”
“At the market.”
I picked up the perch by the tail.
“So what do you expect? It’s an ordinary dead fish.”
“Oaf,” said Victor. “That’s water-of-life, of course!”
“A-ah,” I said as I tried to figure out how to advise him. I had but a fuzzy understanding of the mechanism of the water-of-life. Basically all I knew was derived from the well-known fairy tale of Ivan the Tsarevitch and the Gray Wolf.
The jinn in the bottle kept moving about and every so often rubbed the glass, which was dusty on the outside, with the palm of his hand.
“You could wipe the bottle, you know,” I said, not having come up with anything at all.
“What?”
“Wipe the dust off the bottle. He’s bored in there.”
“To the devil with him! Let him be bored!” Victor said absentmindedly. He shoved his hand in the sofa, and again twisted at something in there. The perch revived.
“Did you see that?” said Victor. “When I give it the maximum potential—everything works.”
“It’s an unfortunate choice of sample,” I said, guessing.
Victor extracted his arm from the sofa and stared at me.
“Unfortunate…” he said. “Sample…” His eyes took on the aspect of the double. “Sample to sample lupus est…”
“Furthermore, it’s probably been frozen,” I said, growing bold.
Victor wasn’t listening.
“Where could I get a fish?” he said, looking around and slapping his pockets. “Just one little fish…”
“For what?” I asked.
“That’s right,” said Victor. “For what? If there isn’t another fish,” he pronounced thoughtfully, “why not take another water sample? Right?”
“Oh, but no,” I contradicted. “It’s no go.”
“Then what?” Victor asked eagerly.
“Trundle yourself out of here,” I said. “Leave the building.”
“Where to?”
“Wherever you like.”
He climbed over the sofa and hugged me around the chest.
“You listen to me, do you hear?” he said threateningly. “Nothing in the world is identical. Everything fits the Gaussian distribution. One water is different from another… This old fool didn’t reckon that there is a dispersion of properties.”
“Hey, friend,” I called to him. “The New Year is almost here; don’t get carried away!”
He let me go, and bustled about.
“Where did I put it…? What a dope…! Where did I stick it…? Ah, here it is…” He ran toward the stool, where the umclidet stood upright. The very same one.
I jumped back toward the door and said pleadingly, “Get your wits together! It’s going on twelve! They are waiting for you! Your sweet Vera is waiting!”
“Nah,” he replied. “I sent them a double. A good double, a hefty type…dumb as they come. Tells jokes, does handstands, dances with the endurance of an ox.”
He turned the umclidet in his hands, estimating something, looking, calculating, and squinting with one eye.
“Out—I’m telling you! Out!” I yelled in desperation.
Victor looked at me briefly, and I fell back. The fun was over with. Victor was in the condition of a magus who, enthralled by his work, would turn those in his way into spiders, wood lice, lizards, and other quiet animals. I squatted by the bottle with the jinn and looked.
Victor froze in the classical imprecation pose involving materialization (the “Matrikhor” position), and a pink fog rose over the table; batlike shades flitted about, the calculator vanished, the paper vanished, and suddenly the whole surface of the table was covered with vessels filled with a transparent liquid. Victor thrust the umclidet at the stool without looking, and grabbed one of the vessels and studied it with great absorption. It was obvious that he was not going anywhere, anytime soon. Quickly be removed the bath from the sofa, was at the shelf in one jump, and started dragging a cumbersome copper aquavitometer to the table. I arranged myself more comfortably, rubbed clear an observation window for the jinn, when voices sounded in the corridor, accompanied by the sound of running feet and slamming doors. I jumped up and charged out of the lab.
The feeling of nighttime emptiness and darkened quiet in the huge building had vanished without a trace. Lights blazed in the corridor. Someone ran helter-skelter on the stairs; someone yelled, “Valka! The potential is falling! Get to the battery room!” Someone was shaking his coat out on the landing, flinging snow in all directions. Coming straight at me, bending elegantly and looking pensive, was Gian Giacomo, followed by a trotting gnome carrying a huge portfolio under his arm and a walking stick in his teeth. We bowed to each other. The great prestidigitator smelled of good wine and French scent. I didn’t dare stop him and he went through the locked door into his office. The gnome pushed through the portfolio and stick in his wake, but dived into a radiator himself.
“What the hell?” I cried, and ran to the stairs.
The Institute was stuffed to the gills with colleagues. It seemed there were even more of them than on a working day. In offices and laboratories the lights were full on, doors were wide open. The usual business hum pervaded the Institute: there was the crack of discharges, the many-toned voices dictating numbers or pronouncing incantations, the staccato pounding of calculators and typewriters. Above it all was the rolling and victorious roar of Feodor Simeonovich: “That’s good! That’s great! You are a good man, old buddy. But who’s the imbecile who plugged in the generator?”