Vitka had told me he was going to join a group of friends and he was leaving a double working in the lab. A double is a very interesting kind of thing. As a rule it is a rather specific copy of its creator. Let’s say someone has too much to handle—he creates himself a double, mindless and submissive, who only knows how to solder contacts or carry heavy weights, or write to dictation, but who does it well. Or say someone requires a model anthropoid for some kind of experiment—he creates himself a double, mindless and submissive, who only knows how to walk on the ceiling or receive telepathemes, but who does it well. Or take the simplest case. Let’s say someone wants to collect his pay, but he doesn’t want to waste any time, and he sends a double in his place, one who knows nothing except how to make sure no one jumps the line, sign the register, and count the money without leaving the cash desk. Of course, not everyone can create doubles. I still couldn’t, for instance. What I’d managed to produce so far didn’t know how to do anything, not even walk. And I’d be standing there in the line, and Vitka and Roman and Volodya Pochkin would all apparently be there, but there was no one to talk to. They just stood there like stones, not blinking or breathing, not shifting their feet, and there wasn’t even anyone to ask for a cigarette.
The genuine masters can create highly complex, multiprogrammed, self-teaching doubles. Roman sent one of those super models off in the car instead of me in the summer. And not one of the guys even guessed it wasn’t me. The double drove my Moskvich magnificently, swore when the mosquitoes bit him, and really enjoyed a good sing-along. When he got back to Leningrad he dropped everyone off at their homes, returned the rented car, paid the bill, and immediately disappeared in front of the very eyes of the astounded director of the car rental office.
At one time I used to think that A-Janus and S-Janus were a double and an original. But that wasn’t it at all. First, both directors had passports, diplomas, passes, and other essential documents. Not even the most complex doubles could possess any identity documents. At the sight of an official stamp on their photographs they flew into a rage and immediately tore the documents to shreds. Magnus Redkin had spent a lot of time studying this mysterious property of doubles, but the task was clearly beyond him.
In addition, the Januses were protein-based entities. To this day the philosophers and cyberneticists haven’t managed to agree whether doubles should be regarded as alive or not. Most of the doubles were organo-silicon structures; there were also germanium-based doubles, and just recently aluminium polymer doubles have become fashionable.
Finally, and most important, neither A-Janus nor S-Janus was ever artificially created by anyone. They weren’t a copy and an original; they weren’t twin brothers. They were one man—Janus Polyeuctovich Nevstruev. Nobody in the Institute understood this, but they all knew it so well that they didn’t even try to understand.
Vitka’s double was standing leaning with his open palms on the lab table and staring fixedly at a small Ashby homeostat. At the same time he was purring a song set to a tune that was once popular:
I’d never heard any doubles sing before, but you could expect anything at all from Vitka’s doubles. I remember one of them who even dared to wrangle with Modest Matveevich himself over the excessive consumption of psychic energy—and even the pitiful specimens I created, without any arms or legs, were pathologically afraid of Modest Matveevich. It was clearly instinctive.
Standing under a canvas cover in the corner to the right of the double was the TDK-80E translator, the useless product of the Kitezhgrad Magotechnical Plant. Beside the laboratory table was my old friend the sofa, its patched leather gleaming in the light of three spotlights. Perched on top of the sofa was a child’s bathtub full of water, and floating belly up in the water was a dead perch. The laboratory also contained shelves crammed with instruments and, right beside the door, a large green-glass carboy covered in dust. There was a genie sealed inside the carboy; you could see him swirling around inside with his eyes glittering.
Vitka’s double stopped watching the homeostat, sat down on the sofa beside the bath, and, fixing the same stony stare on the dead fish, sang the following verse:
The perch remained as it was. Then the double thrust his hand deep into the sofa and began breathing hard and straining as it twisted something inside there.
The sofa was a translator. It created around itself an M-field that, putting it simply, translated genuine reality into fairy tale reality. I had experienced the result that memorable night when I lodged with Naina Kievna, and the only thing that had saved me then was that the sofa was operating at a quarter power, on dark current, otherwise I would have woken up as some little Tom Thumb in thigh boots. For Magnus Redkin the sofa was the possible receptacle of the long-sought White Thesis. For Modest Matveevich, it was a museum exhibit, inventory number 1123, the improper appropriation and exploitation of which was prohibited. For Vitka it was instrument number 1. That was why Vitka stole the sofa every night, Magnus Fyodorovich jealously reported this to comrade Demin, the head of personnel, and Modest Matveevich directed his energies to putting an end to all of the foregoing. Vitka had carried on stealing the sofa until Janus Polyeuctovich intervened. Acting in close cooperation with Fyodor Simeonovich, with the support of Gian Giacomo, on the authority of an official letter from the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences signed in person by four academicians, the director had eventually managed to neutralize Redkin completely and shift Modest Matveevich slightly from his entrenched position.
Modest Matveevich declared that he, as the individual bearing material responsibility, wouldn’t hear of anything else but the sofa, inventory number 1123, being located in the premises specifically designated for it. And if that was not done, Modest Matveevich threatened, then be it on the heads of all of them, up to and including the academicians. Janus Polyeuctovich agreed to take it on his own head, and so did Fyodor Simeonovich, and Vitka quickly moved the sofa into his own laboratory. Vitka was a serious scientist, not like those idle loafers from the Department of Absolute Knowledge, and his intention was to transform all the water in the seas and oceans of our planet into living water. As yet, however, he was still at the experimental stage.
The perch in the bathtub began to stir and turned belly down. The double removed his hand from the sofa. The perch fluttered its fins apathetically, yawned, slumped over onto its side, and turned belly up again.
“Bastard!” the double said emphatically.
That immediately put me on my guard. It had been said with feeling. No lab double could have said it like that. The double stuck its hands in its pockets, slowly stood up, and saw me. We looked at each other for a few seconds. Then I inquired acidly, “Working, are we?”