The decrepit old sorcerer Perun Markovich Neunyvai-Dubino from the Department of Militant Atheism had taken leave for his next reincarnation.
In the Department of Eternal Youth the model of immortal man had died following a protracted illness.
The Academy of Sciences had allocated the Institute a massive amount of money to improve the facilities on its site. Modest Matveevich intended to use this sum to surround the Institute with fancy cast-iron railings supported by columns with allegorical images and pots of flowers, and in the backyard, between the transformer shed and the fuel store, he was going to install a fountain with a jet nine meters high. The sports committee had requested money for a tennis court, but he had refused, declaring that a fountain was required for scholarly cogitation, and tennis was nothing but a pointless jiggling of arms and joggling of legs.
After breakfast everyone went off to their labs. I stopped by the computer room and shuffled miserably around the Aldan while the sullen, unfriendly technicians from the Technical Service Department fiddled around inside its gaping entrails. They didn’t want to talk to me and suggested morosely that I should go somewhere else and mind my own business. I wandered off to visit friends.
Vitka Korneev threw me out because he couldn’t concentrate with me around. Roman was giving a lecture to some trainees. Volodya Pochkin was chatting with some journalists. When he caught sight of me he looked delighted and shouted, “Aha, there he is! Let me introduce the head of our computer center, he’ll tell you all about how…” I gave a very cunning imitation of my own double, which gave the journalists a real fright, and managed to escape. At Edik Amperian’s place they treated me to fresh cucumbers and we’d just struck up a lively conversation about the advantages of the gastronomical view of life when their distillation apparatus exploded and they forgot all about me.
I went out into the corridor in absolute despair and ran into S-Janus, who said, “I see,” and then after a pause inquired whether we’d spoken yesterday. “No,” I said, “unfortunately we didn’t.” He carried on, and I heard him ask Gian Giacomo the same standard question at the end of the corridor.
Eventually I wound up with the Absolutists, arriving there just before the beginning of the seminar. The members of the department were taking their seats in the small conference hall, yawning and gently stroking their ears. Sitting in the chairman’s seat with his fingers calmly clasped together was the head of department, master academician of all white, black, and gray magic, the all-knowing Maurice Johann Laurentius Pupkov-Zadny. He was gazing benignly at the fidgety efforts of the speaker, assisted by two clumsily made doubles with hairy ears, to set up a machine with a saddle and pedals on the display stand. It looked like an exercise machine for the overweight. I took a seat in the corner as far away as possible from everyone else, pulled out a notebook and a pen, and assumed an interested expression.
“Very well, then,” said the master academician, “do you have everything ready?”
“Yes, Maurice Johannovich,” Louis Sedlovoi replied. “It’s all ready, Maurice Johannovich.”
“Then perhaps we should begin? I don’t see Smoguly anywhere…”
“He’s away on a research trip, Johann Laurentievich,” said a voice from the hall.
“Ah yes, now I remember. Exponential investigations? Right, right… Well, then. Today Louis Ivanovich will present a brief report concerning certain possible types of time machines… Am I right, Louis Ivanovich?”
“Er… actually… actually, the title I would have given to my talk is—”
“Very well then. Call it that.”
“Thank you. Er… I would call it ‘The Feasibility of a Time Machine for Traveling in Artificially Structured Temporal Dimensions.’”
“Very interesting,” put in the master academician. “However, I seem to recall there was a case when one of our colleagues—”
“Excuse me, that is the very point I’d like to start with.”
“Oh, I see… Then please carry on.”
I listened attentively at first. I even got quite engrossed. It seemed that some of these guys were working on very peculiar things. It turned out that some of them were still wrestling with the problem of movement in physical time, but without actually getting anywhere. But someone—I didn’t catch the name, someone old and famous—had proved it was possible to displace material bodies into ideal worlds, that is, into worlds created by the human imagination. It seemed that apart from our usual world with its Riemannian metrics, uncertainty principle, physical vacuum, and boozy Khoma Brut, there were other worlds that possessed a very distinctly defined reality. These were the worlds that had been produced by the creative imagination throughout the course of human history. For instance, there was the world of mankind’s cosmological ideas; the world created by painters; even a semiabstract, subtly structured world created by generations of composers.
Some years ago, it seemed, a pupil of that someone old and famous had put together a machine on which he had set off on a journey to the world of cosmological ideas. Unidirectional telepathic contact had been maintained for a while, and he had managed to report that he was on the edge of a flat Earth and below him he could see the coiling trunk of one of the three great elephants, and he was about to make the descent to the great tortoise. No further communications had been received from him.
The speaker, Louis Ivanovich Sedlovoi, was clearly not a bad scientist (he had a master’s degree) but he suffered from vestigial elements of Paleolithic consciousness, so that he was obliged to shave his ears regularly. He had constructed a machine for traveling in described time. According to him, a world actually existed that was populated by Anna Karenina, Don Quixote, Sherlock Holmes, Grigory Melekhov, and even Captain Nemo. This world possessed its own extremely curious properties and laws, and the degree of vividness, reality, and individuality of the people who inhabited it depended on the talent, passion, and veracity with which they had been depicted by the authors of the relevant works. I found all this very interesting, because Sedlovoi got quite carried away and spoke in a lively and engaging manner. But then he suddenly got the idea that all this didn’t sound very scientific, so he hung up a load of diagrams and charts on the stage and launched into a tedious exposition in highly specialized language about decremental bevel gears, multiple temporal transmissions, and some kind of permeative steering device.
I soon lost track of the thread of his reasoning and started gazing around at the other people there. The master academician was sleeping majestically, occasionally raising his right eyebrow in a pure reflex reaction, as if he were expressing some doubt concerning what the speaker was saying. The people in the back rows were engrossed in a furious game of battleships in Banach space. Two extramural students working as lab assistants were studiously noting down every word, their faces frozen in hopeless despair and abject submission to their fate. Someone furtively lit up a cigarette, blowing the smoke down between his knees under the desk. In the front row the masters and bachelors listened with their customary close attention, preparing their questions and comments. Some were smiling sarcastically; others looked perplexed. Sedlovoi’s research supervisor nodded approvingly after each phrase. I began looking out the window, but there was nothing to see but the same boring old emporium and occasional boys running by with fishing rods.
I livened up a bit when the speaker declared that he had finished his introduction and now he would like to demonstrate his machine in action.