The press pulled out its notebooks; the three men sat down at a table and set about defining the details of an essay titled “The Birth of a Discovery” and an article titled “Professor Vybegallo’s Story.” The audience dispersed. Oira-Oira left after taking the keys to Janus Polyeuctovich’s safe from me. Stella left in despair because Vybegallo had refused to let her transfer to a different department. The lab assistants left, noticeably more cheerful now. Edik left, surrounded by a crowd of theoreticians, figuring out in their heads as they walked along what was the minimum stomach pressure at which the cadaver could have exploded. I left too, and went back to my post, having first made sure that the testing of the second cadaver would not take place before eight o’clock in the morning.
The experiment had left me feeling very unsettled. I lowered myself into an immense armchair in the director’s waiting room and tried for a while to understand whether Vybegallo was a fool or a cunning demagogue and hack. The total scientific value of all his cadavers was quite clearly zero. Any member of the Institute who had successfully defended his master’s thesis and taken the two-year special course in nonlinear transgression was capable of creating models based on his own doubles. And it was no problem either to endow these models with magical properties, because there were handbooks, tables, and textbooks for use by postgraduate magicians. In themselves these models had never proved anything, and from a scientific point of view they were of no more interest than card tricks or sword swallowing.
Of course, I could understand all these pitiful journalists who stuck to Vybegallo like flies on a dung heap. Because from the viewpoint of the nonspecialist it all looked very impressive; it inspired a frisson of admiration and vague presentiments of immense possibilities. It was harder to understand Vybegallo, and his morbid obsession with organizing circus performances and public explosions to satisfy people who could not possibly understand (and had no desire to understand) the essence of what was happening. Apart from two or three Absolutists who were exhausted by their research trips and loved to give interviews on the state of affairs in infinity, no one else in the Institute abused their contacts with the press. It was considered bad form—and that disapproval derived from a profound internal logic.
The problem is that the most interesting and elegant scientific results frequently possess the property of appearing abstruse and drearily incomprehensible to the uninitiated. In our time people who have no connection with science expect it to produce miracles and nothing but miracles, but they’re practically incapable of distinguishing a genuine scientific miracle from a conjuring trick or intellectual acrobatics. The science of sorcery and wizardry is no exception. There are plenty of people who can organize a conference of famous ghosts in a television studio or drill a hole in a fifty-centimeter wall just by looking at it, which is no good at all to anyone, but it produces an ecstatic response from our highly esteemed public, which has no real idea of the extent to which science has interwoven and blended together the concepts of fairy tale and reality. But just you try to define the profound internal connection between the drilling capacity of the human glance and the philological characteristics of the word concrete—just try to answer this one discrete little question, which is known as Auer’s Great Problem! Oira-Oira solved it by creating the theory of fantastical totality and founding an entirely new branch of mathematical magic. But almost no one has ever heard of Oira-Oira, and everyone knows all about Professor Vybegallo. (“Ah, so you work at NITWiT? How’s Vybegallo doing? What else has he discovered now?”) This happens because there are only two or three hundred people in the entire world capable of grasping Oira-Oira’s ideas, and while these two or three hundred include many corresponding members of the Academy of Sciences, they do not, alas, include a single journalist. But in its time Vybegallo’s classic work “Fundamentals of Technology for the Production of Self-Donning Footwear,” which is crammed full of demagogic nonsense, was a great sensation, thanks to the efforts of B. Pitomnik. (It later emerged that self-donning shoes cost more than a motorcycle and are easily damaged by dust and moisture.)
It was getting late. I was seriously tired and I dozed off without realizing it. I dreamed about some kind of fantastic vermin—gigantic multilegged mosquitoes with beards like Vybegallo’s—talking buckets of skim milk, a tub with short little legs running down the stairs. Occasionally some indiscreet brownie glanced into my dream, but when he saw these horrors, he bolted in fright. I was woken by a pain and opened my eyes to see beside me a macabre bearded mosquito trying to sink its proboscis, as thick as a ballpoint pen, into my calf.
“Shoo!” I roared, and punched it in its bulging eye.
The mosquito gurgled resentfully and ran away a few steps. It was as big as a dog, ginger with white spots. I must have pronounced the materialization formula without realizing it while I was asleep and unwittingly summoned this macabre beast out of nonexistence. I tried to drive it back into nonexistence but failed. Then I armed myself with the heavy volume Equations of Mathematical Magic, opened the small window, and drove the mosquito out into the frost. The blizzard immediately whirled it away, and it disappeared into the darkness. That’s the way unsavory sensations are started, I thought.
It was six in the morning and the Institute was absolutely quiet. Either everyone was working hard or they’d all gone home. I was supposed to make one more round, but I didn’t want to go anywhere and I wanted something to eat, because the last time I’d eaten was eighteen hours earlier. So I decided to send a double instead.
I’m really still a very weak magician. Inexperienced. If there’d been anybody else there with me, I’d never have taken the chance of exposing my ignorance. But I was alone, and I decided to risk it and get in a bit of practice at the same time. I found the general formula in Equations of Mathematical Magic, entered my own parameters into it, performed all the required manipulations, and pronounced all the required expressions in ancient Chaldean. Hard study really does pay dividends. For the first time in my life I managed to make a decent double. He had everything in the right place and he even looked a little bit like me, except that for some reason his left eye didn’t open and he had six fingers on his hands. I explained his task to him and he nodded, shuffled one foot across the floor, and set off, staggering as he walked. We never met again. Perhaps he somehow ended up in the Gorynych Wyrm’s bunker, or perhaps he embarked on an infinite journey on the rim of the Wheel of Fortune—I don’t know, I just don’t know. But as a matter of fact, I very quickly forgot all about him, because I decided to make myself breakfast.
I’m not a very fussy person. All I wanted was a piece of bread with a slice of “doctor’s” sausage and a cup of black coffee. I don’t understand how it happened, but what first appeared on the table was a doctor’s white coat thickly spread with butter. When the first shock of natural amazement had passed, I took a close look at the white coat. The greasy substance wasn’t actually butter and it wasn’t vegetable oil either. At this point I ought to have destroyed the white coat and started all over again. But in my heinous conceit I imagined I was God the Creator and chose the route of sequential transformations. A bottle of black liquid appeared beside the white coat, and after a brief pause the coat itself began charring at the edges. I hastily refined my conceptual formulations, laying special emphasis on the images of the mug and the meat. The bottle changed into a mug but the liquid remained unchanged; one of the coat’s sleeves bent up, extended, turned reddish, and began twitching. I broke into a sweat when I saw it was a cow’s tail. I got up out of the armchair and moved away into the corner. The change didn’t go any further than the tail, but even so it was a pretty horrendous sight. I tried again, and the tail sprouted ears of grain. I got a grip on myself, squeezed my eyes shut, and tried to picture as clearly as possible a slice of ordinary rye bread being sliced off the loaf and spread with butter from a crystal butter dish, and a round slice of sausage being set on it. Never mind the “doctor’s” sausage, it could be ordinary Poltava sausage, semismoked. I decided to wait for a while with the coffee. When I cautiously half-opened my eyes, there was large piece of rock crystal lying on the white coat, with something dark inside it. I picked up the crystal and the coat came with it, having become attached to it in some mysterious way, and inside the crystal I could make out my much-coveted sandwich, looking very much like the real thing. I groaned and mentally attempted to shatter the crystal. It became covered with a dense network of cracks, so that the sandwich was almost hidden from view. “You dunce,” I said to myself, “you’ve eaten thousands of sandwiches and you can’t even manage a half-decent visualization of one. Don’t worry, there’s no one here—no one can see you. It’s not a test or a piece of course work or an exam. Try it again.” So I did.