"I don't listen to the radio," said Merlin. "I have my own methods." He shook the hem of his mantle and rose a meter above the floor.

"The chandelier," I said. "Be careful."

Merlin looked at the chandelier and began, completely out of context, "I cannot forget, dear sirs, how last year, I and Sir Chairman of theRegional Soviet, comrade Pereyaslavski.."

Oira-Oira yawned agonizingly, and I felt very dejected too. Merlin probably would have been worse than Vibegalo, if he weren't so archaic and self-a.s.sured. Due to someone's absentmindedness, he had succeeded in promoting himself into a directorship of the Department of Prophecies and Forecasting, because in all of his forms he had written about his unremitting struggles with Yankee imperialism even as far back as the early Middle Ages, and attaching to them notarized copies of the appropriate pages from Mark Twain. Subsequently, he was transferred to his proper place as director of the weather bureau and now, even as a thousand years ago, he occupied himself with foretelling atmospheric phenomena-- both by magical means and on the basis of the behavior of tarantulas, the increase in rheumatic pains, and the tendency of Solovetz pigs to lie down in the mud or to arise therefrom. As a matter of fact, the basic sources of his prognoses were the crudest intercepts of radio forecasts, carried out by means of a simple detector receiver, which, it was rumored, he stole in the twenties from a Solovetz exhibit of the work of young technicians. He was a great friend of Naina Kievna, and the two of them spent their time together collecting and broadcasting rumors about the appearance of a gigantic hairy woman in the forests, and the capture of a co-ed by a snowman from Elbrus.

It was also said that, from time to time, he took pad in the night vigils at Bald Mountain with H.M. Viy, Brutus, and other hooligans.

Roman and I kept quiet and waited for him to disappear. But he, wrapping himself in his mantle, made himself comfortable under the chandelier, and droned on with his tale about how he and comrade Pereyaslavski traveled about the region on a tour of inspection. The entire story, which had become obnoxious to everybody, was pure hoc.u.m, a graceless and gratuitous paraphrase of Mark Twain. He spoke of himself in the third person, while occasionally, in confusion, called the chairman King Arthur.

"And so, the Chairman of the Regional Soviet and Merlin set off on their journey and came to the beekeeper, Hero of Labor, Sir Otshelnilcov, who was a good knight and a renowned collector of honey. And Sir Otshelnikov reported on the success of his labors and treated Sir Arthur with bee venom for his arthritis. And so, Sir Chairman stayed there for three days, his arthritis quieted down, and they set out on their way, and on the way Sir Ar... Chairman said, 'I have no sword.'

"'No matter,' said Merlin. 'I will find you a sword.' And they came to a large lake, and Arthur saw an arm rise out of the lake...

The telephone then rang, and I seized the receiver with joy.

"h.e.l.lo," I said. "h.e.l.lo, I'm listening."

Something was mumbling in the receiver while Merlin droned on in his nasal voice, "And by the Lezhnev lake they met Sir Pellinor. However, Merlin arranged it so that Pellinor did not notice the chairman. ..

"Sir citizen Merlin," I said. "Could you be a bit quieter? I can't hear anything.

"h.e.l.lo," I said again into the phone.

"Who's there?"

"Whom do you want?" I said, as a matter of habit.

"You will mark that down for me. You are not in a side show, Privalov."

"My fault, Modest Matveevich. Privalov on watch, at your service."

"All right. Report."

"Report what?"

"Listen, Privalov. You are again behaving like I don't know what. Whom are you talking with? Why are there others at your post? Why are there people in the Inst.i.tute after the end of the working day?"

"It's Merlin," I said.

"Throw him out!"

"With pleasure," I said. (Merlin, who was obviously eavesdropping, became covered with spots, said, "Bo-o-or," and melted away.) "With pleasure or without pleasure-- that does not concern me. b.u.t.there was a signal received here that the keys entrusted to you are piled in a heap on the table instead of being locked up in a box."

Vibegallo must have informed him, I thought.

"Why are you silent?"

"It will be done."

"Acknowledge in that form," said Modest Matveevich. "Vigilance must be kept high. Are you up to it?"

"I'm up to it."

Modest Matveevich said, "That's all from here," and hung up.

"Well, all right," said Oira-Oira, b.u.t.toning, his green coat. "I'm off to open cans and uncork bottles. Be well, Sasha. I'll come by again later."

Chapter 2.

I went, descending into dark corridors and ascending again. I was alone; I called out but no one answered; 1 was alone in that vast house, as Convoluted as a labyrinth.

Guy de Maupa.s.sant Dumping the keys in my jacket pocket I set off on my first round.

Taking the front staircase, which to my memory was used only once when the most august personage from Africa came to visit, I descended into the limitless vestibule decorated with a multi-century acc.u.mulation of layers of architectural excesses, and peered into the gatehouse window. Two Maxwell macro-demons were oscillating about in its phosph.o.r.escent gloom. They were playing at the most stochastic of all games - pitch-and-toss. They occupied all their free time with this diversion. Looking more like poliomyelitis virus colonies under an electron microscope than anything else, they were huge, indescribably inept, lethargic, and dressed in worn liveries. As befit Maxwell demons, they opened and closed doors throughout all their life. They were experienced, well-trained exemplars, but one of them, the one in charge of the exit door, had reached retirement age, which was comparable to the age of the galaxy, and now and then reverted into second childhood, malfunctioning ignominiously. Thereupon, someone from Technical Maintenance would put on a driving suit, enter the gatehouse with its argon atmosphere, and bring the oldster back to reality.

Following instructions, I cast a spell on both of them, that is, I crossed the information channels and locked the input-output peripherals to myself. The demons did not react, being otherwise absorbed. One was winning, and, correspondingly, the other was losing, which greatly disturbed them, since it upset the statistical equilibrium. I covered the window with a shutter and circled the vestibule. It was damp, dark, and full of echoes.

The Inst.i.tute was obviously old, but apparently the building had been started at the vestibule. Bones of shackled skeletons whitened in moldy corners; somewhere water dripped in rhythmic splashes; statues in rusty armor and unnatural poses stood about in niches; shards of ancient idols were piled up to the right of the entrance, with a pair of plaster legs in boots crowning the lot. Looking sternly down from blackened portraits near the ceiling were the venerable images of old men, whose features bore obvious resemblances to Feodor Simeonovich, comrade Giacomo, and other masters. All this archaic junk should have been thrown out long ago, windows should have been cut into the walls and daylight let in, but it was all registered and inventoried, and forbidden to be sold off, by Modest Matveevich personally. Bats and flying dogs rustled in the capitals of the columns and in the gigantic chandelier, hanging from the blackened ceiling.

With these, Modest Matveevich waged a never-ending struggle. He doused them with turpentine and creosote, dusted them with powder, sprayed them with hexachloroethane. They died by the thousands and pro-created by the tens ofthousands. They mutated, and talking and singing variants appeared among them, while the descendants of the more ancient breeds now subsisted surely on pyrethrins, mixed with ehlorophoss. The Inst.i.tute cinephotographer, Sanya Drozd, swore that he saw a vampire that looked as much like the personnel director as two peas in a pod.

Someone moaned and rattled chains in a deep niche, which exuded an icy stench. "You will kindly stop that," I said severely.

"What is that-- some kind of mysticism? You ought to be ashamed!" The niche became quiet. I straightened the crooked rug with an executive mien and mounted the stairway.

As is well known, the Inst.i.tute from the outside appeared to have two stories. In reality, it had at least twelve. I had simply not gone above the twelfth floor, because the elevator was constantly under repair, and I still hadn't learned to fly. The front with ten windows was also an optical illusion, like most fronts. The Inst.i.tute stretched at least a kilometer to the right and left of the vestibule, but nonetheless all the windows decidedly faced on the same crooked street and the same grain storehouse.

This amazed me thoroughly. At first I pestered Oira-Oira to explain to me how this could be reconciled with cla.s.sical, or at least relativistic, concepts of s.p.a.ce. I didn't understand a thing from the explanations, but gradually I became adjusted to the whole thing and ceased to be amazed. I am now fully convinced that in some ten or fifteen years any schoolboy will find his way around the general theory of relativity more easily than a contemporary expert. To achieve this, it is not at all necessary to comprehend how the s.p.a.ce-time curvature comes about, hut only to have such a concept inculcated in us from early childhood, so that it can become habitual.

The entire first floor was occupied by the Department of Linear Happiness. This was the kingdom of Feodor Simeonovich; here was the smell of apples and pine forests, here worked the prettiest girls and the handsomest young men. Here there were no gloomy perverts, experts, and adepts in black magic; here no one tore out his hair, hissing and grimacing in pain; no one muttered cutses that sounded like indecent street rhymes; no one boiled live toads and crows at midnight at the full moon on the eve of John the Baptist Day or evil-omen days. Here they worked on the basis of optimism. Here everything possible was done within the framework of white, submolecular, and infraneuron magic in order to raise the spiritual tone of each individual as well as of entire human collectives. Here they condensed and dispersed throughout the world the happiest good-natured laughter; developed, tested, and implemented behavioral and relational models that strengthened friendship and dissolved strife; distilled and sublimated extracts of grief palliatives, which did not contain a single molecule of alcohol or other narcotics. Currently they were preparing for the field trials of a portable disrupter of evil, and were designing new versions of the rarest alloys of intelligence and goodwill.

I unlocked the door to the central room and stood on the threshold admiring the working of the gigantic Children's Laughter Still, which bore some resemblance to a Van de Graaff generator. In contrast to the generator, however, it operated in complete silence and there was a lovely smell around it. According to instructions, I had to turn off two large switches on the control panel, so that the golden glow in the room would fade, so that it would grow dark and still. In short, the instruction said I must turn off all power in this production section. I didn't even hesitate, but backed out into the corridor and locked the door behind me. To de-energize anything in the laboratories of Feodor Simeonovich seemed to be pure sacrilege.

I went slowly along the corridor, studying the sketches on the doors to the laboratories, and met Tichon, the house brownie, at the corner. He drew and nightly changed the sketches. We exchanged handshakes. Tichon was a pleasant grayish brownie from the Ryazan oblast, exiled to Solovetz by Viy for some infraction: It seems he either didn't greet someone properly, orrefused to eat a boiled viper. . . . Feodor Simeonovich welcomed him, cleaned him up, cured him of chronic alcoholism - and he made his home here on the first floor. He drew superbly, in the style of Bidstrup, and was renowned among his local peers for good sense and sober comportment.

I was about to go up to the second floor, but remembered the vivarium and directed my steps to the bas.e.m.e.nt. The vivarium supervisor, a middle-aged emanc.i.p.ated vampire by the name of Alfred, was drinking his tea.

Seeing me, he attempted to hide the teapot under the table, broke the gla.s.s, reddened, and hid his eyes. I felt sorry for him.

"Congratulations on the coming New Year," I said, pretending that I didn't notice anything.

He coughed, covered his mouth with his palm, and replied thickly, "Thank you, and the same to you."

"Everything in order?" I asked, surveying the rows of cages and stalls.

"Briareus broke a finger," said Alfred.

"How did he do that?"

"Just like that. On his eighteenth right hand. He was picking his nose, turned clumsily-- they are very ungainly, these hekatocheires-- and broke it."

"So we need a veterinarian," I said.

"He'll be all right. It's not his first time."

"No, we can't leave it at that. Let's go and see."

We went into the depths of the vivarium, by the perch of the harpies, who looked at us with sleep-dulled eyes, by the Lernean hydra, who was dour and silent at this time of year. . . . The hekatoeheires-- hundred-armed and fiftyheaded twins, the firstborn of Heaven and Earth-- were housed in a large concrete cave guarded with heavy iron rods. Gyes and Cottus slept curled up in knots, from which protruded bluish shaved heads with closed eyes arid hairy, flaccid arms. Briareus was rocking to and fro. He was sitting on his haunches with his hand, supported by seven others, stuck out into the pa.s.sage. With his ninety-two other hands, he held on to the iron rods and propped up his heads. Some of the heads were asleep.

"How is it?" I said sympathetically. "Does it hurt?"

The waking heads set up a clamor in h.e.l.lenic Greek and woke up a head that knew Russian.

"It's awful, how it hurts," it said. The rest stopped talking and stared at me.

I looked the finger over. It was dirty and swollen and not broken. It was simply sprained. In our gymnasium we fixed such a trauma without benefit of a doctor. I grasped the finger and jerked it toward me with all my might.

Briareus howled with all of his fifty throats and fell back.

"There, there," I said, wiping my bands with a handkerchief. 'it's all over. ..."

Briareus, sniveling through all his noses, peered at his finger. The near heads eagerly stretched their necks, biting the ones in front on the ears in their impatience, so they would not obstruct their view. Alfred was grinning.

'it would do him good to have his blood let," he said, with a long-forgotten expression, then sighed and added, "Problem is, what sort of blood does he have? Must be something just for show. Not a very viable specimen."

Briareus got up. All fifty heads smiled blissfully. I waved at him and started on my way back. I slowed up by Koschei the Deathless. The great evildoer lived in a comfortable private cage, with rugs and bookshelves. The walls were hung with portraits of Gengbis Khan, Himmler, Catherine de Medicis, one of the Borgias, and another-- either that of McCarthy or Goldwater. Koschei himself, dressed in a colorful robe, stood with his legs crossed before a huge lectern, reading an offset copy of The Witches Court.

By way of self-accompaniment, his long fingers wove a sinister pattern: he was either turning a screw or sticking something in or ripping somethingoff. He was kept in indefinite preliminary confinement while an interminable investigation was being conducted into his innumerable crimes. He was highly prized in the Inst.i.tute, as he was concurrently employed in certain unique experiments and also as interpreter for Gorynitch the Dragon. (The latter was locked up in the boiler room, whence issued his metallic snoring and sleepy roarings.) I stood and thought about the fact that if some time in the infinitely remote future Koschei should be sentenced, then the judges, whoever they might be, would find themselves in a very strange situation; the death sentence could not be applied to a deathless criminal, and external imprisonment, considering the preceding term, he had served already.

Suddenly I was grabbed by my pants leg, and a besotted voice cried out, "What say, buddy, who'll go against us three?"

I succeeded in wrenching free. Three vampires in the adjoining roost regarded me greedily, pressing their purplish faces against the metallic screen, which was maintained at two hundred volts.

"Crushed my hand, tough guy!" said one.

"Don't grab," I said. "Looking for a drubbing?"

Alfred ran in, snapping his whip, and the vampires retreated into the darkness of their cage, where they immediately began cursing in the foulest of language and playing with homemade cards.

I said to Alfred, "Well enough. It seems everything is in order. I'll go along."

"Happy traveling," Alfred replied readily.

Going up the stairs, I could hear him clinking his teapot as he poured his tea. I looked into the mechanical section and checked the operation of the energy generator. The Inst.i.tute was not dependent on the city for its power. Instead, after refining the principle of determinism, it was decided to utilize the well-known Wheel of Fortune source of free energy. Only a small section of the brightly polished rim of the wheel could be seen above the cement floor. Its axis was located somewhere in infinity, so that the rim looked like a conveyor belt moving out of one wall and into the other.

At one time it was fashionable to write dissertations on the wheel's radius of curvature, hut inasmuch as all of these dissertations yielded results of extremely low accuracy, on the order of ten megapa.r.s.ecs, the Learned Council of the Inst.i.tute pa.s.sed a resolution to stop reviewing the papers on that subject, at least until such time as the creation of transgalactic means of communication would permit the expectation of raising the accuracy substantially.

Several demons from the plant department were playing at the wheel-- jumping on the rim, riding to the other wall, jumping off and running back at top speed. I called them to order decisively. "You will cut that out," I said. "This is not a sideshow, you know." They hid behind the transformer and set to bombarding me with spitb.a.l.l.s. I decided not to get involved with the whelps, walked along the control panels, and, verifying that all was well, ascended to the second floor.

Here everything was quiet, dark, and dusty. At the low half-open door, a feeble old soldier, dressed in a Preobrazhensk regimental uniform and tricornered hat, dozed, leaning on a long-barreled flintlock. Here was the home of the Defensive Magic Department, among whose personnel there hasn't been a living soul for quite some time. All our old men, with the possible exception of Feodor Simeonovich, had at one time or another given it their due of infatuation. Ben Beczalel had successfully employed Golem in palace revolutions; the clay monster, impervious to poisons and bribery, guarded the laboratory and the imperial treasury as well. Giuseppe Balsamo had founded the first airborne squadron on brooms, which gave a good account of itself in the Hundred Year War engagements. However, the squadron soon fell apart when some of the witches were married and the rest took off after the regiments as canteen-keepers. King Solomon caught and spellbound a gross of afreets and hammered them into an excellent anti-elephant destroyerfire-throwing brigade. Young Cristobal Junta brought a Chinese dragon conditioned against the Moors into Charles the Great's company, then upon learning that the Emperor was not campaigning against the Moors but the tribes of the Basques, he was enraged, and deserted.

Throughout the many-centuried history of wars, various magicians suggested the use of vampires (for night reconnaissance), basilisks (for striking the enemy with such terror that they would turn into stones), flying carpets (for dropping offal on enemy cities), living swords (for compensating inferiority in numbers), and much else. But, after World War I and after Big Bertha, poison gas, and tanks, defensive magic began to fade.

Resignations spread like wildfire through the Department. The last survivor was a certain Pitirim Schwartz, an erstwhile monk and inventor of the forked musket rest, who was selflessly laboring on the jinn bomber project. The essence of the project was to drop on the enemy cities bottles with jinns who had been held imprisoned no less than three thousand years. It is well known that jinns in their free state are capable only of destroying cities or constructing palaces. A thoroughly aged jinn, reasoned Schwartz, was not about to start building palaces, and therefore things would go badly for the enemy. A definite obstacle to the realization of this concept was an insufficient supply of bottled jinns, but Schwartz counted on overcoming this through the deep dragging of the Red and Mediterranean Seas. It was said that having heard about fusion bombs and bacteriological warfare, the old man lost his psychic equilibrium, gave away the jinns be had collected to various departments, and left to study the Meaning of Life with Cristobal Junta. No one ever saw him again.

When I stopped at the doorway, the soldier looked at me out of one eye and croaked, "It's not allowed to go in any farther," and dozed off again. I looked over the bare junk-laden room with shards of strange models and fragments of unprofessional drawings, paused by the door to poke my shoe at the folder bearing the smudged legend Absolutely Secret. Burn Before Reading, and went on. There was no power here to switch off, and as to auto-combustion, everything that could auto-combust had already done so years ago.

The same floor contained the book archives. This was a depressing area, not unlike the vestibule but considerably larger. As to its real size, the story went that a fairly good paved highway started about half a kilometer from the entrance and ran along the bookshelves with kilometer marks on posts. Oira-Oira had walked as far as the number 19, and the enterprising Victor Korneev, searching for technical doc.u.mentation on the sofa-translator, had obtained a pair of seven-league boots, and had run as far as the number 124. He would have gone farther, but his way was blocked by a squad of Danaides in stuffed vests, and armed with paving hammers.

Under the supervision of fat-faced Cain, they were breaking up the asphalt and laying some sort of pipes. Over and over, the Learned Council had raised the question about constructing a high-voltage line along the highway, for transmitting the data on wire, but every positive suggestion had been turned down for lack of funds.

The repository was stuffed with the most fascinating books in all the languages of the world, past and present, from Atlantian up to and including pidgin English. But I was most intrigued by the multi-volume edition of the Book of Fates. The Book of Fates was printed in three-and-a-half-point excelsior on the finest of rice paper and contained, in chronological order, data on 73,619,024,511 intelligent individuals.

The first volume began with Pithecanthropus Ayyoukh (Born 2 Aug. 965543 B.C.; died 13 Jan. 96522 B.C. Parents Ramapithecus; wife Rarnapithecus.

Children: male Add-Am; female Eihoua. Wandered as a nomad with a Ramapithecus tribe on the planes of Ararat. Ate, drank, and slept to his content. Drilled the first hole in a stone; devoured by a cave bear on one of the hunts). The last name-- in the last tome of the regular edition, which came out last year wasFrancisco-Gaetano-Augustine-Lucia-y-Manuel-yJosd-Miguel-y-Augustine-Gaetano-Fr ancisco-Trinidad and Maria Trinidad. (See): Portuguese. Anacephalon. Cavalier of the Order of the Holy Ghost; colonel of the guard.

From the editorial data it was evident that the Book of Fates was published in 1 (one) exemplar, and this last one was printed in the time of the Montgolfier Brothers. Apparently, in order to satisfy somehow the needs of contemporaries, the editorial board undertook the publication of extra irregular editions in which only the dates of birth and death were given. In one of these I found my own name. But due to the rush, errors had crept into these editions by the thousand, so that I saw to my amazement that I would die in 1611. In the eighth volume errata, they had not as yet reached my name. A special group in Prophecies and Forecasts served as consultants for the editing of the Book of Fates. The department was anemic, neglected, and unable to rid itself of the effects of the short-lived directorship of Sir Merlin. The Inst.i.tute repeatedly ran a compet.i.tion for the vacant post, and each time there was but one applicant-- Merlin himself.

The Learned Council conscientiously reviewed the application and safely voted it down-- by forty-three votes "against" and one "for." (In accordance with tradition, Merlin was a member of the Learned Council.) The Department of Forecasts and Prophecies occupied the whole third floor. I strolled past doors with the signs Coffee Grounds Group, Augurers Group, Pythian Group, Synoptic Group, Solitaire Group, Solovetz Oracle.

There was nothing to switch off, inasmuch as the department labored by candlelight. The notation Dark is the Water in Ye Clouds had already appeared in chalk on the Synoptic Group door. Every morning, Merlin, cursing the intrigues of detractors, erased this message with a wet rag, and every night it renewed itself. In general, it was entirely unclear to me as to what it was that maintained the credibility of the Department. From time to time its workers issued reports on rather strange themes such as: "On the Eye Expression of the Augur," or "Prediction Properties of Mocha Coffee Grounds, Vintage 1926." Once in a while the Pythian Group succeeded in predicting something correctly, but each time they appeared so startled and intimidated by their success that the effect was entirely dissipated.

Ja.n.u.s-U, a most sensitive individual, could not, as was often noted, control a wan smile each time he was present at the seminar sessions of the Pythians and Augurs.

On the fourth floor, I finally found something to do: I turned off the lights in the cells of the Department of Eternal Youth. There were no youths there, and its thousand-year oldsters, suffering from sclerosis, constantly forgot to switch off their lights when they left However, I suspected that the matter involved something more than just sclerosis. Many of them, to this day, feared a shock. They insisted on calling electricity "the pounder." In the sublimation laboratory, the listless model of a perpetual youth wandered yawning, hands in its pockets, among the long tables. Its gray two-meter-long beard dragged on the floor and kept catching in the chair legs. Just in case, I put away, in the cabinet, a bottle of aqua regia that was placed on top of a stool, and started toward my own place, the electronic section.

Here was my "Aldan." I admired it a bit for its compactness, beauty, mysteriousness, and soft highlights. The Inst.i.tute had rather diverse reactions toward us. Accounting, for example, met me with open arms, and the chief accountant, smiling avidly, loaded me at once with tedious computations of pay scales and productivity. Gian Giacomo, director of the Universal Transformations Department, was also overjoyed at first, but having become convinced that Aldan was incapable of calculating even the elementary transformation of a lead cube into a gold cube, cooled off toward my electronics and granted us only rare and sporadic a.s.signments. In contrast, there was no respite from his subordinate, and favorite pupil, Victor Korneev. Oira-Oira, too, was constantly on my back with hisskull-breaking problems in irrational mathematics. Cristobal Junta, who loved to be first in everything, regularly connected his central nervous system to the machine at night, so that the next day something in his head audibly hummed and clicked, while the derailed Aldan, in some manner incomprehensible to me, switched from the binary to the ancient hexadecimal system, and, on top of that, changed its logic, totally disregarding the principle of the excluded third. Feodor Simeonovich, on the other hand, amused himself with the machine like a child with a toy. He played tick-tack-toe with it for hours, taught it j.a.panese chess, and in order to make it more interesting, infused it with someone's immortal soul-- which was, incidentally, quite jolly and hard working. Ja.n.u.s Poluektovich (I don't remember anymore whether -A or -U) used the machine only once. He brought with him a small semitransparent box, which he connected to the Aldan. In approximately ten seconds of operation with this device, all the circuit breakers blew, and Ja.n.u.s Poluektovich apologized, took his box, and departed.

But, in spite of all these petty interruptions, in spite of the fact that the animated Alden sometimes printed out, "I am thinking, please don't interrupt," in spite of the insufficiency of spare suba.s.semblies, and the feeling of helplessness that took hold of me when it was required to conduct a logical a.n.a.lysis of the "incongruent transgression in the psi-field of incubal transformation," in spite of all that, it was devilishly interesting to work here, and I was proud of being so obviously needed. I carried out all the calculation in Oira-Oira's work on the heredity mechanisms of hi-polar homunculi. I constructed tables of the M-field potential around the sofa-translator in the ninth dimension. I carried the routine accounting for the local fish-products factory. I computed the conceptual design for the most economic transport of the Elixir of Children's Laughter. I even calculated the probabilities of solving the "Great Elephant," "Government House," and "Napoleon's Tomb" solitaires for the players in that group, and also did all the quadratures for Cristobal Joseevich's numerical solution method, for which accomplishment he taught me how to achieve nirvana. I was satisfied; there were not enough hours in the day, and my life was full of meaning.

It was still early-- just after six. I switched on Aldan and worked a while. At nine o'clock I caught myself, turned off the power with regret, and set off to the fifth floor. The blizzard was not about to quit. It was a true New Year's Eve storm. It howled and moaned in the old abandoned chimneys, it piled drifts in front of the windows, madly shook the infrequent street lamps.

I pa.s.sed through the territory of the Plant and Administration Department. The entrance to Modest Matveevich's reception room was interdicted with crossed six-inch girders, flanked by two huge afreets in turbans, full battle dress, and with naked sabers. Each had his nose, red and swollen from a head cold, pierced with a ma.s.sive gold ring on which hung a tin inventory tag. It stank of sulphur, burned fur, and antibiotics. I stayed for some time, examining them because afreets were a rare phenomenon in our lat.i.tudes. But the one on the right, unshaved and with a black patch over his eye, began to bore into me with the other eye. He had a bad reputation, allegedly with a cannibal past, so I hurried along. I could hear him slurping his nose and smacking behind me.

All the window ventilators were open in the Department of Absolute Knowledge, because the stench from Vibegallo's herring heads was seeping in.

Snow had drifted on the sills, and puddles stood under the radiators. I closed the ventilators and strolled past the virginally clean tables of the departmental staff. New writing sets, which had not seen any ink and were stuffed with cigarette stubs, graced the desks. Strange department, this.

Their motto was, "The comprehension of Infinity requires infinite time." I didn't argue with that, but then they derived an unexpected conclusion from it: "Therefore work or not, it's all the same." In the interests of notincreasing the entropy of the universe, they did not work. At least the majority of them. "En ma.s.se," as Vibegallo would say. In essence, their problem boiled down to the a.n.a.lysis of the curve of relative knowledge in the region of its asymptotic approach to absolute truth. For this reason, some of the colleagues were constantly busying themselves by dividing zero by zero on their desk calculators, while others were requesting a.s.signments in infinity. From there they returned looking energetic and well fed and immediately took a leave of absence for reasons of health. In the intervals between travels, they sauntered from department to department with smoking cigarettes, taking chairs by the desks of those who were working, and recounting anecdotes about the discovery of indeterminacy by L'hopital. They were easily recognized by their empty look, and their unique ears, which were perpetually nicked from constant shaving. During my half-year tenure in the Inst.i.tute, they submitted just one problem for Aldan, and it reduced to the same old division of zero by zero without any content of absolute truth.