Meanwhile the cadaver suddenly began stirring uneasily. Stella squealed quietly and pressed herself against me. The cadaver’s eyes opened. First he leaned over and glanced into the tub. Then he rattled the empty buckets. Then he froze and sat there for a while without moving. The expression of satisfaction on his face was replaced by an expression of bitter resentment. He half-raised himself out of his chair and sniffed the table rapidly, flaring his nostrils, then stretched out his long red tongue and licked up the crumbs.
“Watch out now, guys,” someone whispered in the crowd.
The cadaver stuck his hand into the tub, pulled out the tray, examined it from every angle, and cautiously bit off the edge. His eyebrows shot up in a martyred expression. He bit off another piece and began crunching it. His face turned blue as though from extreme exasperation and his eyes became moist, but he bit again and again until he had chewed up the entire tray. He sat there thoughtfully for about a minute, running his fingers over his teeth, then slowly ran his gaze over the motionless crowd. It was not a nice gaze; it seemed too appraising and selective. Responding automatically, Volodya Pochkin said, “Now then, calm down…” And then the empty transparent eyes locked on to Stella, and she let out a howl, that same blood-curdling howl bordering on ultrasonic frequencies that Roman and I had already heard in the director’s waiting room three stories below. I shuddered. It embarrassed the cadaver too: he lowered his eyes and began drumming nervously on the table with his fingers.
There was a noise in the doorway, everybody squeezed together, and Ambrosius Ambroisovich Vybegallo, the real one, came walking through the crowd, pushing aside the dawdlers and pulling the icicles out of his beard. He smelled of vodka, a coarse cloth overcoat, and frost.
“My dear fellow!” he yelled. “What is all this? Quelle situation? Stella, what are you… er… thinking of! Where are the herrings? He has needs! And they’re expanding! You should read my works!”
He approached the cadaver and the cadaver immediately started sniffing him. Vybegallo gave him his coat.
“Needs have to be satisfied!” he said, hastily clicking the switches on the conveyor’s control board. “Why didn’t you give him them straightaway? Oh, always les femmes, les femmes! Who said it was broken? It’s not broken at all, it’s bewitched. So, you know, not just anybody can use it, because… er… everybody has needs, but the herrings are for the model.”
A little window opened in the wall, the conveyor started muttering, and a stream of fragrant herring heads poured straight out onto the floor. The cadaver’s eyes glittered. He went down on all fours, trotted smartly over to the little window, and got to work. Vybegallo stood beside him, clapping his hands, crying out in delight, and just occasionally, overcome by his feelings, scratching the cadaver behind the ear.
The crowd sighed in relief and began shuffling about. It turned out that Vybegallo had brought with him two correspondents from the regional newspaper, our old acquaintances G. Pronitsatelny and B. Pitomnik. They also smelled of vodka. They blitzed away with their flashguns, taking photographs and making notes in their little books. G. Pronitsatelny and B. Pitomnik specialized in science. G. Pronitsatelny was renowned for the phrase “Oort was the first to glance up at the starry sky and notice that the galaxy rotates.” He was also the author of a literary account of Merlin’s journey with the chairman of the district soviet and an interview (conducted out of ignorance) with one of Oira-Oira’s doubles. The interview was called “‘Man’ with a Capital Letter” and began, “Like any genuine scientist he was sparing with words…” B. Pitomnik was parasitical on Vybegallo. His militant essays on self-donning footwear, carrots that were self-pulling and self-loading-into-trucks, and other projects undertaken by Vybegallo were well known throughout the district, and his article “The Wizard from Solovets” had even appeared in one of the major national magazines.
When the cadaver’s next acute fit of satisfaction set in and he dozed off, Vybegallo’s lab assistants, who had turned up after being dragged away from their festive New Year’s tables and were not in a very friendly mood, hastily dressed him in a black suit and shoved a chair underneath him. The journalists stood Vybegallo beside him, put his hands on the cadaver’s shoulders, pointed their lenses at him, and asked him to continue.
“What is the most important thing of all?” said Vybegallo, readily complying. “The most important thing is for man to be happy. Let me observe in parenthesis: happiness is a human concept. And what is man, philosophically speaking? Man, comrades, is Homo sapiens, the creature who can achieve and who desires. He can achieve everything that he desires, and he desires everything that he can achieve. N’est-ce pas, comrades? If he—that is, man—can achieve everything that he desires and desires everything that he can achieve, then he is happy. This is how we shall define him. What is this that we have here before us, comrades? We have here a model. But this model, comrades, desires, and that is already good. Exquis, excellent, charmant, so to speak. And again, comrades, you can see for yourselves that it can achieve. And that is even better, because… because in that case it—he, that is—is happy. There is a metaphysical transition from unhappiness to happiness and this comes as no surprise to us, because people are not born happy, they… er… become happy. Thanks to proper care and attention being paid. Look, now it’s waking up… it desires. And therefore for the moment it is unhappy. But it can achieve, and this ability can produce a sudden dialectical leap. There, there! Look! See how it can achieve! Oh, you little darling, my happy little one! Look! Look! See how well it can achieve. It can achieve for a whole ten or fifteen minutes… You there, comrade Pitomnik, put down your little camera and pick up the movie camera, because here we have a process… everything we have here is in motion! For us the state of rest is relative, as it ought to be, and movement is absolute. Indeed so. Now it has achieved and it is making the dialectical transition to happiness. To satisfaction, that is. Look, it has closed its eyes. It is delighted. It feels good. I can tell you quite scientifically that I would gladly change places with it. At the present moment, of course… You, comrade Pronitsatelny, write down everything I say, and then give it to me. I’ll straighten it out and put in the references… There, it’s dozing now, but that’s not all there is to this process. Our needs must grow and expand in depth as well as in breadth. Otherwise, you know, the process will not be correct. On dit que Vybegallo is supposedly against the world of the mind. That, comrades, is a crude label. It is high time for us, comrades, to forget such manners in scientific discussion. We all know that the material comes first and the spiritual comes afterward. Satur venter, as we all know, non studet libenter.[1] Which, with regard to the present case, we can translate thus: a hungry fox is always thinking of bread.”
“The opposite way round,” said Oira-Oira.
Vybegallo stared vacantly at him for a short while, then said, “Comrades, we shall dismiss that undisciplined remark from the audience with the contempt it deserves. Let us not be distracted from the main thing—from practice. Let us leave the theory to those who have not yet mastered it sufficiently. To continue, I now move on to the next stage of the experiment. Let me elucidate for the press. Proceeding from the materialist idea that the temporary satisfaction of material needs has taken place, we may proceed to the satisfaction of spiritual needs. That is, watching films and television, listening to folk music or singing it yourself, and even reading some kind of book or, let’s say, the magazine Crocodile or a newspaper… Comrades, we do not forget that you have to possess the abilities for all of this, whereas the satisfaction of material needs does not require any special abilities—they are always present, for nature follows materialism. As yet we can say nothing about the spiritual abilities of this particular model, insofar as the rational core of its being is gastric dissatisfaction. But we will now identify its spiritual abilities.”