He abruptly broke off, went back to the desk, squinted at the yellow phone, laughed, picked up the receiver of the green phone, and asked for the deputy head of the Department of Special Research.
“Brainiac? Good morning, this is Egghead. How are you feeling? How’s your stomach? Well, that’s excellent… Is Wanderer still not back yet?… Uh-huh… Well, OK… I got a call from upstairs, instructing me to inspect you a bit… No, no, I think it’s purely a formality, I understand damn all about what you do anyway, but you should draw up some kind of a report… the draft conclusions of an inspection visit and what have you. And make sure that everybody’s where they should be this time, not like last year… Huh… About eleven o’clock, probably… Arrange things so that I can leave with all the documents at twelve… Well, I’ll see you then. Let’s go and suffer… Do you suffer too? Or perhaps you long ago invented a form of defense? Only you’re hiding it from the bosses? All right now, I’m only joking… See you.”
He put down the receiver and glanced at his watch. It was a quarter to ten. He gave a loud groan and dragged himself off to the bathroom. This nightmare again… half an hour of nightmare. Against which there is no defense. From which there is no salvation… Which destroys the very desire to live… How very annoying it is that I’ll have to spare Wanderer.
The bath was already full of hot water. The prosecutor flung off his robe, tugged off his nightshirt, and stuck a painkiller under his tongue. The same thing all my life. One twenty-fourth of my entire life is hell. More than 4 percent… And that’s not counting the summonses from on high. Well, the summonses will end soon, but this 4 percent will remain until the very end… But then, we’ll see about that. When everything is settled, I’ll deal with Wanderer myself… He clambered into the bath, arranged himself as comfortably as possible, relaxed, and started thinking about how he would deal with Wanderer. But he didn’t have time to think of anything. The familiar pain struck him on the top of his head, traveled down along his spine, sinking a claw into every cell and every nerve, and started fiercely and methodically shredding him to pieces, in time to the wild jolting of his heart.
When it was all over, he continued lying there for a while in languid exhaustion—the torments of hell also had their compensations: a half hour of nightmare presented him with several minutes of heavenly bliss—then he climbed out, rubbed himself down in front of the mirror, opened the door a little, accepted some clean underwear from his valet, got dressed, went back into his office, drank another glass of warm milk, this time mixed with medicinal water, ate some sticky mush with honey, simply sat there for a little while, finally recovering his wits, then called his day secretary and ordered the car to be made ready.
The way to the Department of Special Research lay along the Government Highway, which was empty at this time of day. It was lined with curly trees that looked as if they were artificial. The driver drove hard, without stopping at the traffic lights, occasionally turning on a booming, bass siren. They drove up to the tall iron gates of the department at three minutes to eleven. A guardsman in dress uniform walked up to the car, leaned down, glanced in, recognized the prosecutor, and saluted. The gates immediately swung open to reveal a view of a rich, green park with white and yellow blocks of apartment buildings, and behind them the gigantic glass parallelepiped of the institute. They slowly drove along the narrow road with its forbidding warnings about speed, past a children’s playground, past the squat building of the swimming pool and the cheerful, brightly colored building of the restaurant. And all of this was surrounded by greenery, billowing clouds of greenery, and wonderful, absolutely pure air and—massaraksh!—what an amazing smell hung in the air here; there was nothing like it absolutely anywhere else, not in any field or any forest…
Oh, that Wanderer—all of this is his initiative, immense damned sums of money have been blown on all of it, but how everyone loves him here! This is the right way to live; this is the right way to set yourself up. Immense damned sums of money were blown on it and Stepfather was terribly displeased, and he’s still displeased now… Risk? Yes, of course there was a risk, but Wanderer took the risk, and now his department is his own, the people here won’t betray him, they won’t try to squeeze him out… He has five hundred people here, most of them young, they don’t read the newspapers, they don’t listen to the radio; they have no time, you see, they have important scientific research work… so here the radiation misses the target completely, or rather, the target it strikes is a completely different one.
Yes, Wanderer, if I were you, I would drag out the development of those protective helmets for a long time. Perhaps you are dragging it out? You almost certainly are. But damn it all, how can I get a serious grip on you? Now, if only a second Wanderer would just turn up… But there isn’t another mind like that one in the entire world. And he knows it. And he keeps a very close watch on any man with even a modicum of talent. He takes him in hand when he’s still young, coddles him and estranges him from his parents—and the parents, the fools, are utterly delighted!—and there, look, he has another little soldier in his ranks… Oh, what a great thing it is that Wanderer isn’t here right now, what a stroke of luck!
The car stopped and the day secretary swung the door open. The prosecutor clambered out and walked up the steps into the glass-walled vestibule. Brainiac and his minions were already waiting for him. With an appropriate expression of boredom on his face, the prosecutor flaccidly shook Brainiac’s hand, glanced at the minions, and allowed himself to be escorted to the elevator. They entered the cabin in regulation order: Mr. State Prosecutor, followed by Mr. Deputy Head of the Department, followed by the state prosecutor’s minion and the deputy head of the department’s senior minion. They left the others in the vestibule. They entered Brainiac’s office in regulation order too: the state prosecutor was followed in by Brainiac, and Mr. Prosecutor’s minion and Brainiac’s senior minion were left outside the door in the reception office. The prosecutor immediately lowered himself into an armchair in a state of exhaustion, and Brainiac immediately started fussing about, pressing buttons at the edge of the desk with his fingers, and when an entire mob of secretaries came running into the room, he ordered tea to be served.
The prosecutor spent the first few minutes amusing himself by studying Brainiac. Brainiac was looking incredibly guilty. He avoided looking the prosecutor in the eyes, kept smoothing down his hair, pointlessly rubbing his hands together, unnaturally coughing, and making a large number of meaningless, fussy movements. He always looked this way. His appearance and behavior were his main assets. He constantly roused suspicions that he had a guilty conscience and drew down constant, thoroughgoing checks and audits on himself. The Department of Public Health had studied his life hour by hour. And since his life was irreproachable, and each new check merely confirmed this rather unexpected fact, Brainiac’s rise up the professional ladder had proceeded at record speed.
The prosecutor knew all of this perfectly well—he himself had personally checked Brainiac three times, each time in the most thorough manner possible, and each time raising him one rung higher—and nonetheless at this moment, as he amused himself by scrutinizing Brainiac, he suddenly caught himself thinking that, by God, Brainiac, the artful rogue, knew where Wanderer was and was terribly afraid that this information would be dragged out of him now. And the prosecutor couldn’t resist it. “Greetings from Wanderer,” he casually said, tapping his fingers on the armrest of his chair.