“Let’s go home,” said Roman.
“Yes, let’s,” I said. “Where did you get the genie from?”
“I signed him out of the store yesterday. For entirely different purposes.”
“But what actually happened? Did this one overeat as well?”
“No, Vybegallo’s just an idiot,” said Roman.
“Well that’s obvious,” I said. “But what caused the cataclysm?”
“The same reason,” said Roman. “I told him a thousand times: ‘You’re programming a standard super egocentric. He’ll just grab all the material valuables he can lay his hands on, then he’ll roll up space, wrap himself up like a pupa, and halt time.’ But Vybegallo just can’t grasp that a genuine mental giant is less interested in consuming than in thinking and feeling.”
“That’s all simple stuff,” he continued after we’d flown to the Institute. “It’s quite clear enough to everyone. But can you tell me how S-Janus knew that everything would turn out exactly that way, and not any other? He foresaw it all. The massive destruction, and me suddenly realizing how to put an end to the giant in the cradle.”
“That’s right,” I said. “He even expressed his gratitude to you. In advance.”
“That is strange, isn’t it?” said Roman. “It all needs thinking through very carefully.”
So we started thinking it through very carefully. It took us a long time. In fact it wasn’t until spring—and then only by chance—that we managed to figure everything out.
But that’s an entirely different story.
STORY No. 3
All Kinds of Commotion
1
“When God made time,” the Irish say, “He made plenty of it.”
Eighty-three percent of all the days in the year start the same way: the alarm clock rings. The ringing insinuates itself into my final dreams as the frenetic clattering of an automatic card punch or Fyodor Simeonovich’s booming, thunderous bass, or the rasping of a basilisk playing in the constant temperature cabinet.
That morning I was dreaming about Modest Matveevich Kamnoedov. He’d been made head of the computer center and was training me to work on the Aldan. “Modest Matveevich,” I was telling him, “all this advice you’re trying to give me is nothing but crazy gibberish.”
And he kept yelling, “Thaaat’s quite eeenough of that frrrom you! Everything you’ve got here iiis absolute nonsense, toootal rubbish!”
Then I realized it wasn’t Modest Matveevich but my “Friendship” alarm clock with its eleven stones and picture of a little elephant with its trunk raised. “I hear you, I hear you,” I muttered, and started slapping away at the tabletop, trying to hit the clock.
The window was wide open: I caught a glimpse of clear blue spring sky and felt the sharp breath of a cool spring breeze. There were pigeons clattering along the sheet metal of the cornice. Three flies were fluttering exhaustedly around the glass dome of the ceiling light—they must have been the first flies of the year. Every now and then they suddenly began dashing frenziedly from side to side, and in my half-awake state the brilliant idea occurred to me that the flies were probably trying to break free of a plane that transected them. I sympathized with their hopeless struggle. Two flies settled on the light cover and the third disappeared, and then I finally woke up completely.
First of all I threw off the blanket and attempted to rise into the air above the bed. As always, without my morning exercises, shower, and breakfast, the only result I achieved was that the moment of reaction drove me back down hard into the sofa bed, unhooking the springs and setting them jangling plaintively somewhere beneath me. Then I remembered the previous evening and felt really upset, because I knew I’d be left without any work to do all day long. Yesterday at eleven o’clock in the evening Cristóbal Junta had come into the computer room and, as always, connected himself to the Aldan so that the two of them together could tackle the latest problem of the meaning of life. Five minutes later the Aldan had burst into flames. I don’t know what there was inside it that could have burned, but the Aldan was going to be out of action for a long time, which meant that instead of working I would be doing the same thing that all the hairy-eared parasites did: wandering aimlessly from one department to another, complaining about life and telling jokes.
I frowned, sat on the edge of the bed, and began by filling my lungs up to the top with prāṇa mingled with the cold spring air. I waited a while for the prāṇa to be absorbed and followed the standard recommendations by thinking bright and happy thoughts. Then I breathed out the cold spring air and began performing a sequence of morning exercises. I’d been told that the old school used to prescribe yoga exercises, but the yoga sequence, like the now almost forgotten maya sequence, used to take from fifteen to twenty hours a day, and when a new president of the USSR Academy of Sciences was appointed, the old school had been forced to give way. NITWiT’s young generation had been only too glad to break with the old traditions.
At the 115th leap my roommate Vitka Korneev came floating into the room. As always in the morning, he was cheerful and full of energy, even good humored. He lashed me across my bare back with a wet towel and began flying around the room, making movements with his arms and legs as if he were swimming the breaststroke, telling me as he did so about his dreams and interpreting them as he went along according to Freud, Merlin, and Mademoiselle Lenormand. I went and got washed, then we both got ready and set out for the cafeteria.
In the cafeteria we took our favorite table under a large, faded poster (“Be bold, comrades, and snap your jaws! —Gustave Flaubert”), opened our bottles of kefir, and started eating while we listened to the local news and gossip:
The traditional spring rally had taken place the night before on Bald Mountain, and the participants had behaved quite deplorably. Viy and Khoma Brut had gotten drunk and gone wandering through the dark streets of the town, pestering passersby and using foul language, then Viy had stepped on his own left eyelid and flown into a furious rage. He and Khoma had gotten into a fight, knocked over a newspaper kiosk, and ended up in the militia station, where they were both given fifteen days for being drunk and disorderly. It had taken six men to hold Khoma Brut so that his head could be shaved, and meanwhile the bald-headed Viy had sat in the corner giggling offensively. The case was being passed on to the people’s court because of what Khoma Brut had said while his hair was being cut.
Vasily the cat had taken a spring vacation—to get married. Soon Solovets would be blessed once again with talking kittens suffering from hereditary amnesia.
Louis Sedlovoi from the Department of Absolute Knowledge had invented some kind of time machine, and he was going to give a paper about it at a seminar today.
Vybegallo had reappeared in the Institute. He was going around boasting that he’d been inspired by an absolutely titanic idea. It seemed that the speech of many monkeys resembled human speech recorded on tape and played backward at high speed. So he’d, you know, recorded the conversations of the baboons in the Sukhumi nature reserve and listened to them back to front at low speed. The result, he claimed, was something absolutely phenomenal, but exactly what he wasn’t saying.
The computing center’s Aldan had burned out again, but it wasn’t Sashka Privalov’s fault, it was Junta’s: just recently he’d made it a matter of principle to take an interest only in problems that had already been proved not to have any solution.