It would have been better if I hadn’t. My imagination somehow began running riot, and the most unexpected associations flared up and faded away in my brain. As I continued my efforts, the reception room filled up with the most peculiar objects. Many of them had clearly emerged from my subconscious, out of the teeming jungles of hereditary memory, from behind the primordial terrors long ago suppressed by higher education. They had limbs on which they moved about restlessly; they made repulsive sounds; they were obscene; they were aggressive and kept fighting all the time. I gazed around me, worn out. The scene reminded me very vividly of old engravings showing the temptations of Saint Anthony. One especially unpleasant item was an oval plate on spider’s legs with thin, coarse fur around its edge. I don’t know what it wanted from me, but it kept retreating into the far corner of the room, taking a run at me, and smashing into me full steam below the knees, until I finally trapped it against the wall with my armchair. Eventually I managed to eliminate some of the items and the rest wandered off into the corners and hid. I was left with the plate, the white coat with the crystal, and the mug with the black liquid, which had expanded to the size of a jug. I picked it up with both hands and took a sniff. I believe it was black ink for fountain pens. The dish wriggled behind my armchair, scratching at the patterned linoleum with its feet and hissing loathsomely. Things were looking very bleak.
I heard footsteps and voices in the corridor, and the door opened. Janus Polyeuctovich appeared in the doorway and, as always, said, “I see.” I was thrown into confusion. Janus Polyeuctovich walked through into his office, having liquidated my entire cabinet of curiosities on the way with a single multifunction movement of one eyebrow. He was followed by Fyodor Simeonovich, Cristóbal Junta with a thick black cigar in the corner of his mouth, a sullen, scowling Vybegallo, and a determined-looking Roman Oira-Oira. They were all greatly preoccupied and in a great hurry, so they paid no attention at all to me. The office door was left open. With a sigh of relief, I settled back into my former position, only to discover a large porcelain mug of steaming hot coffee and a plate of sandwiches waiting for me. One of the titans at least must have felt some concern for me, but I don’t know which. I tucked into my breakfast, listening to the voices coming out of the office.
“Let us begin,” said Cristóbal Junta, speaking with icy disdain, “with the fact that your ‘Nursery’—begging your pardon—is located directly below my laboratory. You have already succeeded in producing one explosion, with the result that I was obliged to wait for ten minutes while the shattered windows in my office were replaced. I strongly suspect that you will not pay any attention to arguments of a more general nature, and I am therefore basing my comments on purely egotistical considerations—”
“My dear fellow, what I do in my own lab is my own business,” Vybegallo replied in a thin falsetto. “I don’t interfere with your floor, although just recently living water’s been leaking through continuously. It’s soaked my entire ceiling, and it encourages bedbugs. But I don’t interfere with your floor, so don’t you interfere with mine.”
“Dear fellow,” rumbled Fyodor Simeonovich, “Ambrosius Ambroisovich! You must take into account the possible complications… After all, no one works with the dragon, for instance, in the building, even though we have heatproof materials, and—”
“I don’t have a dragon, I have a happy human being! A giant of the mental life! Your reasoning is rather strange, comrade Kivrin: you draw rather strange comparisons, not our kind at all! A model of an ideal man—and some déclassé fire-breathing dragon!”
“Dear fellow, the point is not that he has no social class, it’s that he could cause a fire—”
“There you go again! An ideal man could cause a fire! You haven’t bothered to think it through, Fyodor Simeonovich!”
“I was talking about the dragon.”
“And I’m talking about your incorrect orientation! You’re blurring boundaries, Fyodor Simeonovich! Doing everything possible to plaster over differences! Of course, we do eliminate contradictions between… the mental and the physical… between town and country… between man and woman, even… But we won’t allow you to plaster over an abyss, Fyodor Simeonovich!”
“What abyss? What sort of idiocy is this, Roman, tell me? I was there when you explained it to him! I am saying, Ambrosius Ambroisovich, that your experiment is dangerous, do you understand? It could do damage to the town, do you understand?”
“I understand everything, all right. And I won’t allow the ideal man to hatch out in a bare, windswept field!”
“Ambrosius Ambroisovich,” said Roman, “I can run through my arguments again. The experiment is dangerous because—”
“There you are, Roman Petrovich. I’ve been watching you for a long time and I just can’t understand how you can use expressions like that about the ideal man. Hah, he thinks the ideal man is dangerous!”
At this point Roman ran out of patience, no doubt due to his youth. “It’s not the ideal man!” he yelled. “It’s just your ultimate consumer genius!”
There was an ominous silence.
“What did you say?” Vybegallo inquired in a terrible voice. “Repeat that. What did you call my ideal man?”
“Janus Polyeuctovich,” said Fyodor Simeonovich, “this really won’t do, my friend—”
“It certainly won’t!” exclaimed Vybegallo. “Quite right, comrade Kivrin, it won’t do! We have an experiment of global scientific significance! This titan of the mental world must make his appearance here, within the walls of our Institute! It is symbolic! Comrade Oira-Oira with his pragmatic deviation from the party line is taking a narrow, utilitarian view, comrades! And comrade Junta is also adopting a lowbrow approach! Don’t you look at me like that, comrade Junta, the czar’s gendarmes didn’t frighten me, and you won’t frighten me either! Is it really in the spirit of our work, comrades, to be afraid of an experiment? Of course it is excusable for comrade Junta, as a former foreigner and employee of the Church, to go astray at times, but you, comrade Oira-Oira, and you, Fyodor Simeonovich, you are simple Russian folk!”