“Yes,” I said, “you stopped by the computer room.”
He nodded. “Yes, yes, that’s right . . . we had a talk about trainees.”
“No,” I interjected respectfully, “not exactly. It was about our letter to the Central Academic Supplies Committee. Concerning an electronic peripheral device.”
“Ah, that’s it,” he said. “Very well then, I wish you a peaceful night shift . . . Victor Pavlovich, could I see you for a moment?”
He took Vitka by the arm and led him away down the corridor, and I went into the waiting room, where the second Janus Polyeuctovich was locking the safes. When he saw me, he said, “I see,” and immediately started jangling his keys. It was A-Janus. I’d already learned something about how to tell them apart. A-Janus looked a bit younger; he was unsociable, always formally correct, and not very talkative. He was supposed to be a hard worker, and people who had known him for a long time said that this fair-to-middling administrator was slowly but surely developing into an outstanding scientist. S-Janus, on the other hand, was always soft-mannered and very attentive, and he had the strange habit of asking, “Wasn’t I talking to you yesterday?” They said he’d been going downhill pretty badly just recently, although he was still a scientist with a serious international reputation. And yet A-Janus and S-Janus were one and the same person. I just couldn’t get my head around that. It seemed too artificial somehow. I even suspected it was just a figure of speech.
A-Janus closed the final lock, handed me some of the keys, said good-bye coolly, and went out. I sat at the academic secretary’s desk, put my list down in front of me, and dialed my own number in the computer room. There was no answer—the girls must have gone already. It was 1430 hours.
At 1431 hours the great magician and sorcerer the famous Fyodor Simeonovich Kivrin came bursting into the waiting room, panting noisily and setting the parquet floor creaking. As the head of the Department of Linear Happiness, Fyodor Simeonovich was famous for his incorrigible optimism and faith in the bright future. His own past history was extremely turbulent. Under Ivan Vasilyevich—the czar Ivan the Terrible—the oprichniki of the minister of state security, Malyuta Skuratov, had jibed and joked as they burned him in a wooden bathhouse as a sorceror on the denunciation of his neighbor, a church sexton; under Czar Alexei Mikhailovich the Peaceful he was beaten mercilessly with rods, and the collected manuscripts of his works were burned on his bare back; under Czar Peter the Great he was initially elevated to the role of a specialist in chemistry and mining but somehow managed to displease Prince Romodanovsky and ended up in exile at the Tula Arms Plant, from where he fled to India, traveled around for a long time, was bitten by poisonous snakes and crocodiles, effortlessly mastered yoga, came back to Russia at the height of Pugachev’s rebellion, was accused of being the rebels’ healer, had his nostrils slit, and was exiled to Solovets in perpetuity. In Solovets he survived a whole heap of other misfortunes before he eventually became attached to NITWiT, where he soon became a head of department, and recently he had been doing a lot of work on the problems of human happiness, waging a dedicated struggle against those of his colleagues who believed that the basis of happiness was material abundance.
“Greetings to you!” he boomed, laying the keys to his laboratories in front of me. “Poor man, what have you done to deserve this? On a night like this you ought to be out having fun. I’ll call Modest, this is such nonsense, I’ll take the shift myself . . .”
I could see this idea had only just occurred to him and he was really taken by it.
“All right now, where’s his telephone number? Curses, I never remember telephone numbers . . . One-one-five or five-one-one . . .”
“Thank you, Fyodor Simeonovich,” I cried. “Please don’t bother! I’ve just settled in to get a bit of work done!”
“Ah, a bit of work! That’s a different matter. ’At’s good, ’at’s splendid, well done! Dammit, I know nothing at all about electronics . . . I must do some studying, get away from all this word magic, this old junk, hocus-pocus with psychofields, primitive stuff . . . Antiquated methods.”
And right there and then he conjured up two big apples, handed one to me, bit off half of the other, and began munching on it with relish.
“Curses, I’ve made a worm-eaten one again. How’s yours—is it all right? ’At’s good. I’ll come back and see you later, Sasha. I don’t really understand that system of computer commands properly . . . I’ll just have a glass of vodka and then come back . . . The twenty-ninth command of that machine of yours . . . Either the machine is lying, or I don’t understand . . . I’ll bring you a detective novel: Erle Stanley Gardner. You read English, don’t you? He writes well, the rascal, great stuff. He’s got this real hard-headed lawyer, Perry Mason. Do you know him? And then I’ll give you something else to read, some science fiction. Asimov, maybe, or Ray Bradbury . . .”
He went over to the window and exclaimed in delight. “A blizzard, dammit. How I love that!”
The slim and elegant Cristóbal Joséevich Junta came in, wrapping himself in a mink coat.
Fyodor Simeonovich turned around. “Ah, Cristó!” he exclaimed. “Just look at this, that fool Kamnoedov has locked a young boy in to keep watch on New Year’s Eve. Let’s let him off; the two of us can stay, we’ll remember the old times and have a drink, what do you say? Why should he have to suffer? He ought to be out dancing with the girls . . .”
Junta put his keys on the desk and said casually, “Association with girls affords pleasure only when it is attained through the overcoming of obstacles.”
“But of course!” boomed Fyodor Simeonovich. “‘Much blood is spilled and many songs are sung for ladies fair’ . . . How does that one of yours go? ‘Only he shall attain the goal who knows not the word fear . . .’”
“Precisely,” said Junta. “And anyway, I can’t stand charity.”
“He can’t stand charity! Who was it who begged Odikhmantiev from me? Enticed away a fine laboratory assistant, you did . . . You put up a bottle of champagne right now, nothing less . . . No, you know what, not champagne! Amontillado! Do you have any of the old Toledo stock left?”
“They’re waiting for us, Teodoro,” Junta reminded him.
“Ah yes, that’s right . . . I’ve still got to find a tie . . . and some felt boots. We’ll never get a taxi . . . We’re off then, Sasha, don’t get too bored now.”
“No one on duty in the Institute on New Year’s Eve ever gets bored,” Junta said in a low voice. “Especially new boys.”
They walked to the door. Junta let Fyodor Simeonovich out first and, before going out himself, he glanced sideways at me and carefully traced out a Star of Solomon on the wall with his finger. The star flared up and then began slowly fading away, like the trace of an electron beam on the screen of an oscilloscope. I spat three times over my left shoulder.
Cristóbal Joséevich Junta, the head of the Department of the Meaning of Life, was a remarkable man, but apparently quite heartless. In his early youth he had spent a long time as a grand inquisitor, but then he’d fallen into heresy, although to the present day he’d retained the habits of those times, and rumor had it that he’d found them very useful during the struggle against the fifth column in Spain. He performed almost all of his abstruse experiments either on himself or on his colleagues, as I had been indignantly informed at the general meeting of the trade union. He was studying the meaning of life, but he hadn’t made a great deal of progress so far, although he had produced some interesting results. For instance, he had proved, at least theoretically, that death was by no means a necessary attribute of life. People had expressed their indignation at this discovery, too—at the philosophy seminar.
He allowed almost no one to enter his office, and vague rumors circulated in the Institute about it being full of all sorts of interesting things. They said that standing in one corner was the magnificently stuffed body of an old acquaintance of Cristóbal Joséevich, an SS Standartenführer in full dress uniform, with
a monocle, dagger, Iron Cross, Oak Leaves, and other paraphernalia. Junta was a magnificent taxidermist and, according to Cristóbal Joséevich himself, so was the Standartenführer. But it was Cristóbal Joséevich who had gotten his hand in first. He always liked to get his hand in first, in everything he did. But he was not entirely without skepticism either. A huge poster hanging in one of his laboratories posed the question DO WE REALLY NEED OURSELVES FOR ANYTHING? A quite exceptional individual.
At exactly 3:00, in accordance with the labor regulations, doctor of science Ambrosius Ambroisovich Vybegallo brought me his keys. He was wearing felt boots soled with leather and a smelly sheepskin coat like a cab driver’s with his gray, dirty beard sticking out through its upturned collar. He wore his hair in a bowl cut, so no one had ever seen his ears.
“It, er . . .” he said as he came up to me. “It could just happen that one of mine will hatch out today. In my laboratory, that is. It, er . . . it would be a good idea to keep an eye out. I’ve left him plenty of supplies. It’s er . . . five loaves of bread, you know, some steamed bran, two buckets of skim milk. But when, er . . . he’s eaten all that lot, he’ll start kicking up a fuss, you know. So, mon cher, if anything happens, you . . . er . . . just give me a jingle, my good man.” He set a bunch of barn door keys down in front of me and opened his mouth in some perplexity, with his eyes fixed on me.
His eyes were transparent and he had grains of millet stuck in his beard.
“Where shall I jingle you?” I asked.
I disliked him very much. He was a cynic and he was a fool. The work that he carried out for his 350 rubles a month could quite easily have been called eugenics, but no one did call it that—they were afraid of provoking him. This Vybegallo had declared that all the misfortunes of the world were . . . er . . . the result of material, you know, deprivation, and that if you gave a man everything—bread, that is, and steamed bran—then he wouldn’t be a man, but an angel. He promoted this feeble idea in every possible way, brandishing volumes of classic texts and ripping quotations out of their living flesh with quite indescribable simplemindedness, mercilessly suppressing and expurgating everything that didn’t suit him.
Even the Academic Council had shuddered under the onslaught of this positively primordial, unrestrained demagogy, and Vybegallo’s theme had been included in the research plan. Acting strictly according to this plan, painstakingly measuring his achievements in terms of percentage plan fulfillment and never forgetting about operational economy, improving the efficiency of use of operating capital, and the issue of practical relevance to society, Vybegallo had developed three experimental models: the model of Man entirely unsatisfied, the model of Man gastrically unsatisfied, and the model of Man totally satisfied. The entirely unsatisfied anthropoid model had been ready first—it had hatched two weeks earlier. A pitiful being, covered with sores like Job, half decomposed, tormented by every disease in existence known and unknown, incredibly hungry, suffering from cold and heat at the same time, it had staggered out into the corridor, deafened the Institute with a series of loud, inarticulate complaints, and died. Vybegallo was triumphant. Now he could consider he had proved that if you didn’t give a man any food or drink or treat his ailments then he, you know . . . er . . . would be unhappy and he might even die. Like this model had died. The Academic Council was horrified. Vybegallo’s project had assumed an aspect of the macabre. But Vybegallo, not flustered in the slightest, had submitted two statements that demonstrated, first, that three lab assistants from his laboratory went out every year to work on the state farm sponsored by the Institute and, second, that he, Vybegallo, had been a prisoner under the old czarist regime, and now he regularly gave popular lectures in the municipal lecture hall and outlying districts. And while the dumbfounded commission struggled to grasp the logic of what was going on, he calmly shipped in four truckloads of herring heads from the Institute-sponsored fish processing plant (under the terms of a scheme for developing ties with industry) for the gastrically unsatisfied anthropoid, who was approaching a state of readiness. The commission wrote a report and the Institute waited fearfully for what would happen next. The other people on Vybegallo’s floor took unpaid leave.
“Where shall I jingle you?” I asked.
“Jingle me? At home, where else on New Year’s Eve? Moral fiber has to be maintained, my good man. The New Year should be seen in at home. That’s the way we see things, n’est-ce pas?” (Vybegallo loved to sprinkle his speech with isolated phrases in what he referred to as “the French dialect.”)
“At home, I know that, but what’s the number?”
“Ah, that . . . er . . . you look in the book. Can read, can’t you? You just look in the book, then. We’ve got no secrets, not like others I could mention. En masse.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll jingle you.”
“Do jingle, mon cher, do jingle. And if he starts to bite . . . er . . . then you just smack him in the chops, and don’t hold back. C’est la vie.”
I plucked up my courage and blurted out, “If I’m ton cher, perhaps we ought to drink to Bruderschaft?”
“Pardon?”
“Never mind, it’s nothing,” I said.
He looked at me for a while with those transparent eyes that expressed absolutely nothing at all, then said, “If it’s nothing, that’s all right, then. Happy New Year to you when it comes. Keep well. It . . . er . . . au revoir, then.”
He pulled on his cap with earflaps and left. I hastily opened the small top window.
Roman Oira-Oira breezed in wearing a green coat with a lambskin collar. He twitched his hooked nose and inquired, “Did Vybegallo just drop by?”
“He did,” I said.
“Yes indeed,” he said, “it’s the herrings. Take my keys. Do you know where he dumped one truckload? Under Gian Giacomo’s windows. Right under his office. A little New Year’s present. Might as well have a cigarette now that I’m here.”
He slumped into an immense leather armchair, unbuttoned his coat, and lit up.
“All right, try this one,” he said. “Given: the smell of salted herring water, intensity sixteen microchokes, cubic volume . . .” He looked around the room. “Well, you can work that out for yourself. The year’s on the turn, Saturn’s in the constellation of Libra . . . Get rid of that stench!”
I scratched myself behind one ear. “Saturn . . . Why are you telling me about Saturn? What’s the magistatum vector?”
“Well, brother,” said Oira-Oira, “that’s for you . . .”
I scratched behind my other ear, worked out the vector in my head, then stuttered and stammered my way through the acoustic operation (pronounced the incantation). Oira-Oira held his nose. I pulled two hairs out of my eyebrow and polarized the vector. The smell grew stronger again.
“That’s bad,” Oira-Oira said reproachfully. “What are you doing, sorcerer’s apprentice? Can’t you see the window’s open?”
“Ah,” I said, “that’s right.” I adjusted for the divergence and the curl of the vector, tried to resolve Stokes’s equation in my head, got confused, plucked another two hairs out of my eyebrow, breathing through my mouth, sniffed them, mumbled Auer’s incantation and was already plucking out another hair when I realized the waiting room had aired itself by natural means and Roman advised me not to waste any more of my eyebrows and close the window.
“Satisfactory,” he said. “Let’s try some materialization.” We worked on materialization for a while. I created some pears, and Roman insisted that I eat them. I refused, and then he made me create some more. “You’ll keep working until you create something edible,” he said. “And you can give these to Modest. He can digest stones.” Eventually I created a genuine pear—large, yellow, soft as butter, and bitter as quinine. I ate it and Roman allowed me to take a break.
Then fat Magnus Fyodorovich Redkin, bachelor of black magic, brought in his keys, as always preoccupied and greatly affronted. He’d been awarded his bachelor’s degree three hundred years earlier f
or inventing breeches of darkness, and he’d spent all his time since then making improvements to those breeches. The breeches of darkness had first been transformed into pantaloons of darkness, then into trousers of darkness, and just recently they’d become known as pants of darkness. But somehow he just couldn’t get them right.
At the most recent session of the black magic seminar, when he gave his regular paper “On Certain New Properties of Redkin’s Pants of Darkness,” he had suffered yet another fiasco. During the demonstration of the new, improved model something had gotten stuck in the button-and-braces mechanism and instead of making the inventor invisible the trousers had given a resounding click and become invisible themselves. It had been a very awkward moment.
For the most part, however, Magnus Fyodorovich was working on a dissertation under the title “The Materialization and Linear Naturalization of the White Thesis as an Argument for the Adequately Random Sigma Function of Incompletely Representable Human Happiness.” In this area he had produced substantial and significant results, from which it followed that humanity would be literally swimming in incompletely representable happiness, if only the White Thesis itself could be located and also—more important—if only we were able to understand what it is and where to look for it.
The only mention of the White Thesis is found in the journals of ben Bezalel, who supposedly isolated the Thesis as a byproduct of some alchemical reaction and, not having any time to waste on such petty matters, incorporated it into one of his devices as an auxiliary element. In one of his later memoirs, written in a dungeon, ben Bezalel noted, “And can you believe it? That White Thesis failed to justify my expectations. It failed. But when I realized the good that it could have done—I am talking about happiness for all people, as many as there are in existence—I had already forgotten where I installed it.”