When I stopped in the doorway, the soldier looked up at me with one eye and croaked, “Not allowed, on your way…” and dozed off again. I glanced around the unoccupied room, cluttered with fragments of bizarre models and scraps of botched drawings, nudged a file lying by the entrance with the toe of my shoe, reading the blurred inscription TOP SECRET. BURN BEFORE READING, and went on. There was nothing here to switch off, and as for spontaneous combustion, everything that could combust spontaneously had done so many years ago.
The book depository was on the same floor. It was a rather gloomy, dusty space a bit like a lobby, but with substantially larger dimensions. They said that well inside, half a kilometer from the entrance, there was a fairly decent highway running along the shelves, complete with posts showing distances in versts. Oira-Oira had gone as far as post number 19, and the persistent Vitka Korneev, in search of technical documentation on the sofa-translator, had gotten hold of some seven-league boots and run as far as post number 124. He would have gone even farther, but his way was blocked by a brigade of Danaids in padded work jackets with jackhammers. Under the supervision of the fat-faced Cain, they were breaking up the asphalt and laying some kind of pipes. The Academic Council had several times raised the question of building a high-voltage power line along the highway to transmit clients of the depository through the wires, but every positive proposal had foundered on a lack of funding.
The depository was crammed full of extremely interesting books in all languages of the history of the world, from the tongue of the ancient Atlanteans to pidgin English inclusive. But what interested me most of all was a multivolume edition of the Book of Fates.
The Book of Fates was printed in brevier type on super-thin rice paper and contained in chronological order more or less complete data on the 73,619,024,511 members of the genus Homo. The first volume began with the pithecanthropus Aiuikh. (“Born 2 Aug. 965543 BC, died 13 Jan. 965522 BC. Parents ramapithecines. Wife a ramapithecus. Children: male Ad-Amm, female E-Ua. Lived nomadically with a tribe of ramapithecines in the valley of Mount Ararat. Ate, drank, and slept to his heart’s content. Drilled the first hole in stone. Eaten by a cave bear during a hunt.”) The last name in this publication’s latest volume, published the year before, was Francisco Caetano Agostinho Lucia e Manuel e Josefa e Miguel Luca Carlos Pedro Trinidad (“Born 16 Jul. 1491 AD, died 17 July 1491 AD. Parents: Pedro Carlos Luca Miguel e Josefa e Manuel e Lucia Agostinho Caetano Francisco Trinidad and Maria Trinidad. Portuguese. Acephaloid. Cavalier of the Order of the Holy Spirit, Colonel of the Guards”).
The publishing data informed me that the Book of Fates was published in an edition of 1 (one) copy and this latest volume had been sent to press at the time of the Montgolfier brothers’ flights. Evidently in order to satisfy the demand of their own contemporaries, the publishers had begun issuing the occasional special edition, which listed only the years of birth and death. In one of these volumes I found my own name. However, hasty work has led to many errors finding their way into these volumes, and I was amazed to learn that I would die in 1611. Eight volumes of misprints have been identified to date, but they still haven’t gotten as far as my name yet.
The Book of Fates used to be consulted by a special group in the Department of Predictions and Prophecies, but now the department was impoverished and deserted. It had never really recovered following the brief reign of sir citizen Merlin. The Institute had repeatedly advertised to fill the vacant position of head of department, and every time the only person to apply had been Merlin. The Academic Council always conscientiously reviewed the application and safely rejected it—43 votes “against” and 1 “for.” (By tradition Merlin was also a member of the Academic Council.)
The Department of Predictions and Prophecies occupied the entire third floor. I walked past the doors with the plaques that read COFFEE GROUNDS GROUP, AUGURS’ GROUP, PYTHIAS’ GROUP, METEOROLOGICAL GROUP, SOLITAIRE GROUP, SOLOVETS ORACLE. I didn’t have to disconnect anything here, since the department worked by candlelight. On the doors of the weather forecasting group a fresh inscription in chalk had already appeared: “Dark waters in the clouds.” Every morning Merlin, cursing the intrigues of the envious, wiped this inscription away with a damp rag, and every night it was renewed.
I simply couldn’t understand what the authority of this department rested on. From time to time its members gave papers on strange subjects such as “Concerning the Expression of the Augur’s Eye” or “The Predictive Qualities of Mocha Coffee from the Harvest of 1926.” Sometimes the group of Pythias managed to predict something correctly, but every time it happened the Pythias themselves seemed so astonished and frightened by their success that the whole effect was totally ruined. S-Janus, an individual of supreme tact, was remarked on numerous occasions to be unable to restrain an ambiguous smile whenever he attended the augurs’ and Pythias’ seminars.
On the fourth floor I eventually found something to do: I switched off the light in the cells of the Department of Eternal Youth. There were no young people in this department, and these old men suffering from a thousand years of arteriosclerotic dementia were always forgetting to turn the lights off after themselves. I suspected that in fact it wasn’t just a matter of forgetfulness. Many of them were afraid of getting an electric shock. They still called the suburban electric trains iron horses. In the sublimation lab a dejected model of an eternally youthful young man was wandering around between the desks, yawning with his hands stuck in his pockets. His six-foot-long gray beard dragged along the floor and snagged on the legs of the chairs. Just to be on the safe side I put the demijohn of hydrochloric acid that was standing on a stool away in a cupboard before setting off for my own workplace in the computer room.
This was where my Aldan stood. I admired it for a moment—so compact and handsome, gleaming mysteriously. The attitudes taken toward us by people in the Institute had varied. The Accounts Department, for instance, had greeted me with wide-open arms, and the senior accountant, smiling stingily, had immediately lumbered me with his tedious expense and profitability calculations. Gian Giacomo, the head of the Department of Universal Transformations, was also happy to see me at first, but when he realized the Aldan was not even capable of calculating the elementary transformation of a cubic centimeter of lead into a cubic centimeter of gold, he became less enthusiastic about my electronics and favored us only with occasional, incidental tasks. But his subordinate and favorite pupil, Vitka Korneev, snowed me under. And Oira-Oira was always putting the pressure on with his mind-bending problems from the field of irrational metamathematics. Cristóbal Junta, who liked to be the leader in all things, made it a rule to connect the machine to his central nervous system at night, so that all next day there was something constantly buzzing and clicking away in his head, and the confused Aldan, instead of calculating in the binary system, would shift in some way I couldn’t understand into the ancient sexagesimal system and also change its logic, totally rejecting the law of the excluded middle. Fyodor Simeonovich Kivrin amused himself playing with the machine as if it were a toy. He could spend hours playing it at odds and evens; he taught it to play Japanese chess, and to make things more interesting he installed someone’s immortal soul in the machine—quite a cheerful and industrious soul, in fact. Janus Polyeuctovich (I can’t remember if it was A or S) only used the machine once. He brought in a small, translucent box and connected it to the Aldan. After about ten seconds of working with this peripheral, every fuse in the machine blew, following which Janus Polyeuctovich apologized, took his little box, and went away. But despite all the little obstacles and unpleasantnesses, despite the fact that the newly animated Aldan sometimes printed out “I’m thinking. Please do not disturb,” despite the shortage of spare units and the feeling of helplessness that overwhelmed me when I was required to perform a logical analysis of “noncongruent transgression in the psifield of incubotransformation”—despite all of that, the work here was exceptionally interesting, and I was proud to feel that I was obviously needed.