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 for 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.”
The Institute possessed seven devices that once belonged to ben Bezalel. Redkin had stripped six of them down to the last bolt and not discovered anything special. The seventh device was the sofa-translator. But Vitka Korneev had appropriated the sofa, and Redkin’s simple soul had been filled with the very blackest of suspicions. He began following Vitka around. Vitka had immediately flown into a rage. They had argued and become sworn enemies, and still were to that very day. Magnus Fyodorovich was well disposed toward me as a representative of the precise sciences, but he disapproved of my friendship with “that plagiarist.”
Redkin was basically not a bad person, very hardworking, very tenacious, entirely devoid of self-interest and avarice. He had done a huge amount of work, assembling a gigantic collection of the most varied definitions of happiness. There were extremely simple negative definitions (“Happiness is not to be found in money”), extremely simple positive definitions (“Supreme satisfaction, total gratification, success, and good luck”), casuistic definitions (“Happiness is the absence of unhappiness”), and paradoxical definitions (“The happiest of all men are jesters, fools, idiots, and the unaware, for they know not the pangs of conscience, have no fear of ghosts and other ghouls and goblins, and are not tormented by fear of future calamities, nor are they deluded by hopes of boons to come”).
Magnus Fyodorovich put down his key on the table and, glancing distrustfully at us from under his brows, said, “I’ve found another definition.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s like a poem. Only without any rhyme. Would you like to hear it?”
“Of course we would,” said Roman.
Magnus Fyodorovich opened his notebook and read it out, stammering and stuttering:
“I didn’t understand a thing,” said Roman. “Let me read it for myself.”
Redkin gave him the notebook and explained: “It’s Christopher Logue. From the English.”
“Great poetry,” said Roman.
Magnus Fyodorovich sighed. “Some say one thing, others say something else.”
“It’s tough,” I said sympathetically.
“It really is, isn’t it? How can you link it all together? Hear a girl singing… And not just any old singing either—the girl has to be young and be off his path, and it must be after someone asks him the way… How on Earth can it be done? Is it really possible to reduce things like that to algorithms?”
“Hardly,” I said. “I wouldn’t like to try.”
“You see!” Magnus Fyodorovich exclaimed. “And you’re the head of our computer center! So who can do it?”
“Maybe it just doesn’t exist at all?” Roman suggested in the voice of a movie villain.
“What?”
“Happiness.”
Magnus Fyodorovich immediately took offense at that. “How can it not exist,” he said with a dignified air, “when I myself have experienced it on repeated occasions?”
“By changing pennies for a shilling?” asked Roman.
Magnus Fyodorovich took even greater offense at that and grabbed his notebook out of Roman’s hands. “You’re still too young—” he began.
But at that moment there was a sudden rumbling and crashing, a flash of flame, and a smell of sulfur, and Merlin appeared in the center of the room. Magnus Fyodorovich recoiled all the way to the window in surprise, exclaimed, “Oh, you!” and went running out.