Following instructions, I put a spell on them both—that is, I shut off the information channels and linked the input-output devices to myself. The demons didn’t react; they had other things on their mind. One was winning and the other, accordingly, was losing, and that bothered them, because it violated the statistical equilibrium. I closed the cover over the little window and walked around the entrance hall. It was damp and gloomy, with a hollow echo. The Institute building was pretty ancient, but they had obviously started building it from this entrance hall. The bones of chained skeletons gleamed in the mildewed corners, there was a steady drip-drip of water from somewhere, in the niches between the columns statues in rusty suits of armor stood in unnatural poses, fragments of ancient idols were heaped up by the wall to the right of the door, and there was a pair of plaster legs in boots jutting out of the top of the heap. Venerable elders gazed down severely from blackened portraits up under the ceiling, with the familiar features of Fyodor Simeonovich, comrade Gian Giacomo, and other grand masters discernible in their faces. They should have thrown out all this archaic garbage ages ago, set windows in the walls and installed daylight fluorescent lighting, but everything was registered and inventoried and Modest Matveevich had personally forbidden its improper exploitation or disposal.
On the capitals of the columns and in the labyrinths of the gigantic chandelier hanging from the blackened ceiling, bats of several varieties, large and small, rustled their wings. Modest Matveevich waged war against them. He doused them with turpentine and creosote, sprinkled them with insecticide, sprayed them with hexachlorophene, and they died in the thousands—but regenerated in the tens of thousands, and mutated. Singing and talking strains appeared, and the descendants of the most ancient species now fed exclusively on a mixture of pyrethrum and chlorophene. The Institute’s film technician, Sasha Drozd, swore that one day he’d seen a bat here that was a dead ringer for our comrade head of the Personnel Department.
In a deep niche that gave off an icy stench, someone was moaning and rattling chains. “Now that’s enough of that,” I said sternly. “None of that mysticism! You ought to be ashamed of yourself!” The niche went quiet. I restored order by adjusting a carpet that was out of position and went back up the stairs.
As you already know, from the outside the Institute looked like a two-story building, but in actual fact it had at least twelve floors. I never went any higher up than the twelfth floor, because they were always repairing the elevator, and I didn’t know how to fly yet. Like most facades, the frontage with ten windows was an optical illusion. To the right and left of the entrance hall the Institute extended for at least a kilometer, and yet absolutely all of the windows looked out onto the same crooked street and the same “emporium.” I was absolutely astounded by this. At first I used to pester Oira-Oira to explain to me how it could be reconciled with classical or even relativistic concepts of the properties of space. I didn’t understand a word of his explanations, but I gradually got used to it and stopped being amazed. I am quite convinced that in ten or fifteen years’ time every schoolboy will have a better grasp of the general theory of relativity than our present-day specialists. This by no means requires any understanding of how the deformation of space and time occurs; all that’s needed is for the concept to be made familiar in childhood so that it seems normal.
The entire ground floor was occupied by the Department of Linear Happiness. This was Fyodor Simeonovich’s kingdom, which smelled of apples and pine forests; this was where the prettiest girls and the grandest boys worked. Here there were no gloomy zealots and adepts of black magic; here no one plucked out his own hair, hissing and grimacing at the pain; no one muttered incantations that sounded like indecent tongue twisters or boiled toads and ravens alive at midnight, for Halloween or on unlucky days of the year. They worked on optimism here. Here they did everything that was possible within the limits of white, submolecular, and infraneuron magic to enhance the spiritual vigor of every individual and entire collectives of individuals. Here they condensed happy, good-natured laughter and disseminated it right around the world; they developed, tested, and applied models of behavior and relationships that reinforced friendship and subverted discord; they sublimated and distilled extracts of sorrow-soothers that didn’t contain a single molecule of alcohol or other drugs. At that time they were preparing for the field trials of a portable universal evil-crusher and were developing new grades of the rarest alloys of intellect and kindness.
I unlocked the door of the central hall and stood in the doorway, admiring the operation of the gigantic Children’s Laughter Distillation Unit, which looked something like a Van de Graaf generator, except that unlike a generator it worked quite silently and gave off a pleasant smell. According to my instructions, I was supposed to turn two large white switches on the control panel to switch off the golden glow that filled the hall and leave it dark, cold, and still—in other words, my instructions required me to cut off the power to the production premises in question. But without even the slightest hesitation, I backed out into the corridor and locked the door behind me. Shutting down anything at all in Fyodor Simeonovich’s laboratories seemed like sacrilege to me.
I set off slowly along the corridor, examining the amusing pictures on the doors of the laboratories, and at the corner I met the brownie Tikhon, who drew the pictures and changed them every night. We shook hands. Tikhon was a lovely little gray brownie from the Ryazan region, whom Viy had exiled to Solovets for some offense or other: he’d either failed to greet someone correctly or refused to eat up his boiled viper… Fyodor Simeonovich had taken him in, cleaned him up, and cured him of chronic alcoholism, and he’d settled in here on the ground floor. He drew extremely well, in the manner of Bidstrup, and he was famous among the local brownies for his sensible and sober behavior.
I was about to go up to the second floor when I remembered about the vivarium and set out for the basement instead. The vivarium supervisor, an elderly rehabilitated vampire named Alfred, was drinking tea. When he caught sight of me he tried to hide the teapot under the table and broke his glass. He blushed and lowered his eyes. I felt sorry for him.
“Happy New Year, when it arrives,” I said, pretending I hadn’t noticed anything.
He cleared his throat, put his hand over his mouth, and replied hoarsely, “Thank you. And the same to you.”
“Is everything in order?” I asked, looking around at the rows of cages and stalls.
“Briareos has broken a finger,” said Alfred.
“How did he manage that?”
“Some way or other. On his eighteenth right hand. He was picking his nose and he turned awkwardly—they’re clumsy, those hecatoncheires—and he broke it.”
“Then we need a vet,” I said.
“He’ll manage without! It’s not the first time.”
“No, that’s not right,” I said. “Let’s go and take a look.”
We walked through into the depths of the vivarium, past the Little Humpbacked Horse, dozing with its nose stuck in a feed bag of oats, past the cage of harpies who watched us go by with eyes dull and heavy from sleep, past the cage of the Hydra of Lerna, morose and incommunicative at that time of year… The three hecatoncheir brothers, triplets with a hundred hands and fifty heads each, the firstborn of Heaven and Earth, were housed in a vast concrete cave, closed off by thick iron bars. Gyges and Kottos were asleep, curled up into huge, shapeless bundles from which their blue shaved heads with closed eyes and their relaxed hairy hands protruded. Briareos was suffering. He was squatting on his haunches, huddled up against the bars, sticking the hand with the damaged finger out into the passage and holding it with another seven hands. With his remaining ninety-two hands he was holding on to the bars and propping up his heads. Some of the heads were asleep.