“Ah, Sasha,” Edik said pleasantly. “Hi there, Sasha.”
“Sashka, get out of the way!” yelled Volodya Pochkin, edging along backward. “Higher, higher!”
I grabbed him by the collar. “Why are you in the Institute? How did you get in?”
“Through the door, through the door, let go…” said Volodya. “Edka, more to the right! Can’t you see it’s not fitting through?”
I let go of him and dashed down to the entrance hall, seething with administrative indignation. “I’ll teach you,” I muttered, jumping four steps at a time. “I’ll teach you, you idle loafers, I’ll teach you to go just letting in all and sundry!”
Instead of doing their job, the macrodemons Entrance and Exit were playing roulette, trembling with excitement and phosphorescing feverishly. In front of my very eyes Entrance, totally oblivious to his duties, broke the bank to win about seventy billion molecules from the equally oblivious Exit. I recognized the roulette wheel immediately. It was mine; I had made it myself for a party and kept it behind a cupboard in the computer room, and the only person who knew about it was Vitka Korneev. A conspiracy, I thought. I’ll sling the whole lot of you out now. But the red-cheeked, jolly, snow-covered members of staff just kept on pouring in through the vestibule.
“It’s really blowing out there! My ears are all clogged up…”
“So you left too, then?”
“Well, it’s so boring… Everyone got drunk. So I thought, why don’t I go in and do a bit of work instead. I left them a double and took off…”
“You know, there I am dancing with her and I can just feel myself turning hairy all over. I took a shot of vodka, but it didn’t do any good…”
“What about an electron beam? A large mass? Try photons, then…”
“Alexei, have you got a laser you’re not using? Even a gas one would do…”
“Galka, how come you left your husband?”
“I left an hour ago, if you must know. I fell into a snowdrift, you know, almost got buried in it…”
I realized I’d failed in my duty. There was no point now in taking the roulette wheel away from the demons. The only thing I could do was go and have a blazing fight with that agent provocateur Vitka; the rest was out of my hands. I waved my fist at the demons and set off back upstairs, trying to imagine what would happen if Modest Matveevich happened to drop into the Institute just then.
On my way to the director’s waiting room I stopped in the test lab, where they were pacifying a genie released from a bottle. The huge genie, blue with rage, was dashing around inside a cage walled off with shields of Jan ben Jan and closed off above by a powerful magnetic field. They were zapping the genie with high-voltage shocks. He howled, cursed in several dead languages, bounded about, and belched tongues of flame. In his vehement fury he began building palaces and then immediately destroying them, until finally he gave up, sat down on the floor, shuddering from the electrical discharges, and howled plaintively. “That’s enough, no more, I’ll behave myself… Hey, hey, hey… Look, see how calm I am…”
The imperturbable, unblinking young men standing at the control panel of the discharge generator were all doubles. The originals were crowded around the vibration table, glancing at their watches and opening bottles.
I went over to them. “Ah, Sashka!” “Sashentsiya, they tell me you’re on watch today… I’ll drop by your room a bit later.” “Hey, someone create him a glass, my hands are full here…”
I was so dumbfounded I didn’t even notice the glass appear in my hand. The corks clattered against the shields of Jan ben Jan; the ice cold champagne hissed as it flowed. The discharges stopped crackling, the genie stopped wailing and began sniffing, and at that very second the Kremlin clock started chiming twelve.
“Right, guys! Long live Monday!”
Glasses clinked together. Then someone cast an eye over the bottles and said, “Who created the wine?”
“I did.”
“Don’t forget to pay tomorrow.”
“Well, how about another bottle?”
“No, that’s enough, we’ll catch a chill.”
“Some genie we’ve got here… Seems a bit high strung.”
“Never look a gift horse…”
“Never mind, he’ll fly like a good’un. Forty turns and his nerves will soon be in order.”
“Guys,” I said timidly, “it’s night outside, and a holiday. Why don’t you all just go home?”
They looked at me, slapped me on the shoulder, and told me, “Don’t worry about it, it’ll pass”—and the whole gang moved across to the cage. The doubles rolled aside one of the shields and the originals surrounded the genie, took a firm grasp of his arms and legs, and carried him across to the vibration table. The genie muttered timidly and uncertainly, promising everyone the treasures of the kings of the Earth.
I stood alone at one side and watched as they strapped him down and attached microsensors to various parts of his body. Then I touched the shield. It was immense and heavy, pitted with dents from the impact of ball lightning, and some spots were carbonized. The shields of Jan ben Jan were made of seven dragon skins, glued together with the bile of a patricide, and were designed to resist a direct lightning strike. All the shields in the Institute had originally been taken from the treasure house of the Queen of Sheba by either Cristóbal Junta or Merlin. Junta never spoke about it, but Merlin boasted about it at every opportunity, always citing the dubious authority of King Arthur. There were tin-plate inventory-number tags attached to each shield with upholstery nails. In theory there ought to have been images of all the famous battles of the past on the fronts of the shields and images of all the great battles of the future on the reverse. In practice, what I could see on the front side of the shield I was looking at was something like a jet plane strafing a refueling station, and its inside was covered with strange swirls and streaks reminiscent of an abstract painting. They started shaking up the genie on the vibration table. He giggled and squealed: “Hey, that tickles! Hey, stop it!”
I went back into the corridor. It smelled of fireworks. There were firecrackers zooming around in circles under the ceiling, and rockets darting about, banging against the walls and leaving trails of colored smoke behind them. I ran into a double of Volodya Pochkin lugging along a gigantic incunabulum with brass clasps, two doubles of Roman Oira-Oira struggling under the weight of a massively heavy metal C beam, then Roman himself with a heap of bright blue files from the archives of the Department of Unsolvable Problems, and then a fierce-looking lab assistant from the Department of the Meaning of Life, herding a flock of cursing ghosts in crusaders’ cloaks to an interrogation with Junta… Everybody was working hard.
The labor regulations were being deliberately and ubiquitously flouted, but I no longer felt the slightest desire to combat these infringements, since these people had fought their way here through a blizzard at midnight on New Year’s Eve because they were more interested in finishing up some useful job of work or starting up a completely new one than in dissolving their wits in vodka, jerking their legs about moronically, playing forfeits, and flirting with varying degrees of frivolity.
These people had come here because they preferred being together to being apart and because they couldn’t stand Sundays of any kind, because on Sunday they felt bored. These were Magicians, People with a capital P, and their motto was “Monday starts on Saturday.” Yes, they knew a few spells, they could turn water into wine, and it would have been no problem for any one of them to feed a thousand people with five loaves. But that wasn’t why they were magicians. That was just the shell, the exterior. They were magicians because they knew a great deal, so much indeed that this huge quantity of theirs had made the leap of conversion into quality, and their relationship with the world had become different from that of ordinary people. They worked in an institute that was concerned first and foremost with the problems of human happiness and the meaning of human life, but even in their ranks there was no one who knew for certain what happiness is and what exactly is the meaning of life. And they had accepted as a working hypothesis that happiness lies in the constant cognition of the unknown, which is also the meaning of life. Every man is a magician in his heart, but he only becomes a magician when he starts thinking less about himself and more about others, when his work becomes more interesting to him than simply amusing himself according to the old meaning of that word. And their working hypothesis must have been close to the truth, because just as labor transformed ape into man, so the absence of labor transforms man into ape or something even worse, only far more rapidly.