“Well?” I asked. “Does it hurt?”
The heads that were awake started jabbering in ancient Hellenic and woke up a head that knew Russian.
“It hurts really badly,” said the head. The other heads fell silent and gaped at me with their mouths open.
I inspected the finger. It was dirty and swollen, but it wasn’t broken at all. It was simply dislocated. In our sports hall, injuries like that are cured without any doctor. I grabbed hold of the finger and tugged it toward me as hard as I could. Briareos roared with all of his fifty throats and fell over on his back.
“There, there,” I said, wiping my hands on my handkerchief. “It’s all over now.”
Sniveling with all his noses, Briareos began inspecting the finger. The heads at the back craned their necks avidly and in their impatience bit the ears of the heads in front to make them get out of the way. Alfred chuckled.
“It would do him good to have some blood let,” he said with a long-forgotten expression on his face, then he sighed and added, “But what sort of blood has he got in him? It’s just pretend. Nonlife, isn’t he?”
Briareos stood up. All of his fifty heads were smiling blissfully. I waved to him and began walking back. I paused beside Koschei the Deathless. The great villain lived in his own comfortable cage with carpets, air conditioning, and bookshelves. The walls of the cage were hung with portraits of Genghis Khan, Himmler, Catherine de Médicis, one of the Borgias, and either Goldwater or McCarthy. Koschei himself, wearing a shimmering dressing gown, was standing in front of an immense lectern with one leg crossed over the other, reading an offset-printed copy of the Malleus Maleficarum; at the same time he was making unpleasant movements with his fingers—screwing or thrusting something in or ripping something off. He was detained in eternal confinement awaiting trial while a never-ending investigation was conducted into his infinite number of crimes. He was well taken care of in the Institute, since he was used in certain unique experiments and as an interpreter for communicating with Wyrm Gorynych. Gorynych himself was locked away in an old boiler room, where he could be heard snoring metallically and roaring as he dozed.
I stood there, thinking that if at some point in time infinitely removed from us Koschei should ever be convicted, then the judges, whoever they might be, would find themselves in a very strange position: the death penalty can’t be applied to an immortal, and if you included detention while awaiting trial, he would already have served an infinite sentence…
Then someone grabbed me by the trouser leg and a hoarse drunk’s voice asked, “Right, then, guys, who fancies sharing a drink?”
I had to pull myself free. The three vampires in the next cage were staring at me greedily, pressing their grayish-purple faces against the metal mesh that carried two hundred volts of electricity.
“You crushed my hand, you four-eyed beanpole!” said one of them.
“You shouldn’t go grabbing hold of people,” I said. “Fancy a nice little poplar stake?”
Alfred came running up, cracking a whip, and the vampires withdrew into a dark corner, where they immediately started swearing obscenely and slapping down homemade cards on the floor in a frenzied game.
I said to Alfred, “All right, then. I think everything’s in order. I’ll get going.”
“Safe journey,” Alfred replied eagerly.
As I walked upstairs I could hear the rattling and glugging of his teapot.
I glanced into the electrical room to see how the generator was working. The Institute was not dependent on the municipal energy supply. After the principle of determinism had been defined, it had been decided to use the well-known Wheel of Fortune as a source of free mechanical energy. There was only a minute section of the gigantic wheel’s gleaming, polished rim rising up above the concrete floor, and since the axis of rotation lay an infinite distance away, the rim looked like a conveyor belt emerging from one wall and disappearing into the other. At one time it was fashionable to present doctoral dissertations on calculating the Wheel of Fortune’s radius of curvature, but since all these dissertations produced results with an extremely low degree of accuracy, plus or minus 10 megaparsecs, the Institute’s Academic Council had decided not to consider any more dissertations on this topic until such time as intergalactic transportation should make it reasonable to expect a substantial improvement in precision.
Several maintenance imps were playing by the Wheel, leaping onto the rim, riding as far as the wall, leaping off, and running back to the start. I called them to order firmly. “That’s enough of that,” I said. “You’re not at the fairground now.” They hid behind the housings of the transformers and began pelting me with spitballs. I decided not to get involved with the little babies and set off along the line of control panels. Once I was certain everything was in order, I went up to the second floor.
Here it was quiet, dark, and dusty. A decrepit old soldier wearing the uniform of the Preobrazhensky Regiment and a three-cornered hat was dozing by a low, half-open door, leaning on a long flintlock rifle. This was the Department of Defensive Magic, where for a long time now the staff had not included a single living person. In their day all of our old-timers, with the possible exception of Fyodor Simeonovich, had shown some enthusiasm for this division of magic. Ben Bezalel had made successful use of the Golem in palace coups; the clay monster, indifferent to bribes and impervious to poisons, had guarded the laboratories and with them the imperial treasure house. Giuseppe Balsamo had created the first flying broom squadron, which had given a good account of itself in the battlefields of the Hundred Years’ War. But the squadron had fallen apart fairly quickly: some of the witches had married and the others had tagged along with the German cavalry regiments as camp followers. King Solomon had captured and enchanted a dozen times a dozen ifrits and hammered them into a special flame-throwing anti-elephant pursuit battalion. The young Cristóbal Junta had brought the forces of Charlemagne a Chinese dragon trained to fight Moors; on learning, however, that it was not the Moors that the emperor intended to fight but his fellow tribesmen the Basques, he had flown into a fury and deserted.
Throughout many centuries of history various magicians have suggested the use in battle of vampires (for night reconnaissance raids), basilisks (to terrify the enemy into a state of total petrification), flying carpets (for dropping sewage on enemy towns), magic swords of various calibers (to compensate for lack of numbers), and many other things. However, after the First World War, after Big Bertha, tanks, mustard gas, and chlorine gas, defensive magic had gone into decline. Staff began abandoning the department in droves.
The one who stayed longer than all the others was a certain Pitirim Schwarz, a former monk and the inventor of a musket stand, who had labored with selfless devotion on a project for genie bombardments. The essential idea of the project was to bomb the enemy’s cities with bottles containing genies who had been held in solitary confinement for at least three thousand years. It is a well-known fact that in a state of freedom, genies are only capable of either destroying cities or building palaces. A fully mature genie, so Pitirim Schwarz reasoned, would not start building palaces when he was freed from his bottle, and the enemy would find himself with a serious problem. A certain obstacle to the realization of this plan was presented by the small number of bottles containing genies, but Schwarz was counting on augmenting the reserves by deep trawling of the Red and Mediterranean Seas. They say that when he learned about the hydrogen bomb and bacteriological warfare, old Pitirim became mentally unbalanced, gave away the genies he had to various departments, and moved over to Cristóbal Junta’s team to investigate the meaning of life. No one had ever seen him again.