“Good God!” Oira-Oira said in English, wiping the dust out of his eyes. “Canst thou not enter by the usual route as decent people do?” Then he added, “Sir.”
“I do beg thy pardon,” Merlin said smugly, casting a satisfied glance in my direction. I must have looked pale, because I’d suddenly been terrified by the thought of spontaneous combustion.
Merlin straightened his moth-eaten robe, tossed a bunch of keys onto the desk, and said, “Have you noticed, kind sirs, what the weather is like?”
“As predicted,” said Roman.
“Precisely, Sir Oira-Oira! Precisely as predicted!”
“A very handy thing, the radio,” said Roman.
“I listen not to the radio,” said Merlin. “I have my own methods.” He shook the hem of his robe and floated up a meter above the floor.
“The chandelier!” I said. “Careful!”
Merlin glanced briefly at the chandelier and began speaking, apropos of nothing at alclass="underline" “Oh ye imbued with the spirit of Western materialism, base mercantilism, and utilitarianism, whose spiritual poverty is incapable of rising above the gloom and chaos of petty, cheerless cares… I cannot help but recall, dear sirs, how last year I and Sir Chairman of the district soviet, comrade Pereyaslavsky…”
Oira-Oira gave a heart-rending yawn, and I suddenly felt depressed too. Merlin would probably have been even worse than Vybegallo, if he weren’t so archaic and conceited. Through an oversight on someone’s part he had once managed to rise to be head of the Department of Predictions and Prophecies, because he had written in all his questionnaires about his implacable struggle against Yankee imperialism even back in the Middle Ages, attaching to the questionnaires notarized typed copies of the relevant pages from Mark Twain. Later, in connection with the changed internal situation and the improved international climate, he had been moved back to his position as head of the weather office and now worked, just as he had a thousand years earlier, at forecasting atmospheric phenomena, relying on magical means as well as the behavior of tarantulas, twinges of rheumatism, and the propensity of the pigs of Solovets to lie down and wallow in the mud or to clamber out of the aforesaid substance. However, the main source of his forecasts was the crude interception of radio signals, performed with the assistance of a crystal receiver that was widely believed to have been stolen in the 1920s from a Young Scientist Exhibition in Solovets. The Institute kept him on out of respect for his age. He was a great friend of Naina Kievna Gorynych, and the two of them collected and disseminated rumors about a gigantic woman covered in hair appearing in the forest and a female student being taken prisoner by a yeti from Mount Elbrus. It was also said that from time to time he took part in the nocturnal vigils on Bald Mountain with C. M. Viy, Khoma Brut, and other hooligans.
Roman and I said nothing and waited for him to disappear. But he wrapped his robe around himself, settled in comfortably under the chandelier, and launched into the long, boring story that everyone already knew by heart about how he, Merlin, and the chairman of the Solovets district soviet, Pereyaslavsky, had undertaken a journey of inspection around the local district. The whole story was nothing but a pack of lies, a talentless and opportunistic transposition of Mark Twain. He talked about himself in the third person, sometimes losing the thread and calling the chairman King Arthur.
“Right so the chairman of the district soviet and Merlin departed, and went until a keeper of bees, the Hero of Labor Sir Eremitenko, who was a good knight and a renowned gatherer of honey. So Sir Eremitenko related to them his successes in labor and did cure Sir Arthur of his radiculitis with bee venom. And Sir Chairman was there three days, and his radiculitis was soothed that he might ride and go, and so departed. And as they rode, Ar—Chairman said, I have no sword. No force, said Merlin, hereby is a sword that shall be yours and I may. So they rode till they came to a lake, the which was a fair water and broad, and in the midst of the lake Arthur was ware of a hand hardened by toil, that held a hammer and sickle. Lo, said Merlin, yonder is that sword that I spake of…”
Then the phone rang and I grabbed it in delight. “Hello,” I said. “Hello, who is it?”
There was a low mumbling in the receiver and Merlin droned on through his nose: “…So they rode into Lezhnev, and by the way they met with Sir Pellinor; but Merlin had done such a craft that Pellinore saw not the Chairman…”
“Sir citizen Merlin,” I said, “could you speak more quietly please? I can’t hear.”
Merlin stopped speaking, but with the expression of a man ready to continue at any moment.
“Hello,” I said into the receiver again. “Who’s speaking? Who are you looking for?” I said out of old habit.
“That’s enough of that from you. You’re not in the circus now, Privalov.”
“I’m sorry, Modest Matveevich. Duty staff member Privalov here.”
“That’s better. Now report.”
“Report what?”
“Listen here, Privalov, there you go again behaving like I don’t know what. Who’s that you’re talking with there? Why are there outsiders at your post? Why, in contravention of the labor regulations, are there still people in the Institute after the end of the working day?”
“It’s Merlin,” I said.
“Throw him out on his ear!”
“Gladly,” I said. (Merlin, who had no doubt been listening, broke out in red blotches, exclaimed, “Boorish churl!” and dissolved into thin air.)
“Gladly or otherwise, it makes no difference to me. And I’ve received a warning here that you’re piling up the keys entrusted to you in a heap on the desk, instead of locking them in the box.”
Vybegallo ratted on me, I thought.
“Haven’t you got anything to say?”
“I’ll put that right.”
“That’s the way of things,” said Modest Matveevich. “Unflagging vigilance is absolutely essential. Is that clear?”
“It is.”
“That’s all from me, then,” Modest Matveevich said, and hung up.
“All right, then,” said Oira-Oira, “I’ll go and start opening cans and uncorking bottles. Cheers for now—I’ll drop by again later.”
2
I walked on, descending dark passages, in order to ascend again to the floors above. I was alone, I called out, nobody answered, I was alone; there was no one in that house—a house as vast and tortuous as a labyrinth.
I dropped the keys into my jacket pocket and set off on my first round. I went down the formal staircase, which I could only ever remember being used on one occasion, when the Institute was visited by a most august personage from Africa, into the vast entrance hall decorated with centuries-old strata of architectural extravagance, and glanced in the window of the doorman’s chamber, where I could vaguely make out the two Maxwell’s macrodemons through the phosphorescent mist. The demons were playing that most stochastic of games—heads or tails, which was what they did whenever they weren’t on duty. Huge, sluggish, and indescribably grotesque, resembling more than anything else colonies of the polio virus under an electron microscope, dressed in worn-out livery, they spent all their lives, as Maxwell’s demons are supposed to do, opening and closing doors. These were experienced, well-trained specimens, but one of them—the one in charge of the exits—had already reached retirement age, commensurate with the age of the galaxy, and every now and then he lapsed into senile dementia and started malfunctioning. Then someone from the Technical Service Department had to put on a diving suit, clamber into the chamber, which was filled with compressed argon, and restore the old guy to his senses.