"Arkady & Boris Strugatsky - Tale of the Troika" - читать интересную книгу автора (Strugatski Arkady)

'elevators for everyone.' No matter who. The elevator must be able to withstand the entrance of the
least-educated academician."
We made our way through the crowd and moved on. The pomp of that improvised meeting
impressed me greatly. I had the feeling that today the elevator would actually, finally, be running and
would continue running maybe for as much as twenty-four hours. That was impressive. The elevator had
always been the Achilles' heel of the institute and of Modest Matveevich, personally. Actually, there was
nothing special about it. It was an elevator like any other, with its good points and its bad points. As
befits a proper elevator, it constantly strove to get stuck between floors, was always occupied, burned
out the bulbs that were screwed into it, and demanded irreproachable behavior and a deft touch with the
gate. Getting into the elevator, one could never say with any certainty where and when one would be
getting out.
But our elevator did have one unique trait. It could not stand going above the thirteenth floor. I mean,
of course, that there are recorded instances in the history of the institute of individual skilled craftsmen
who managed to overcome the contrariness of the mechanism and, giving it its head, went up to
absolutely fantastic heights. But for the average man, the endless territory of the institute looming above
the thirteenth floor was just a blank. There were all kinds of rumors, some contradictory, about those
territories, almost completely cut off from the world and the influence of the administration. It was
maintained, for example, that the one hundred twenty-fourth floor had an exit into an adjoining space with
different physical properties, that on the two hundred thirtieth floor lived a mysterious race of
alchemistsтАФthe spiritual descendants of the famous Union of the Nine established by the enlightened
Indian king Asoka, and that on the one thousand seventeenth floor, the old man, his wife, and the Golden
Fish still lived on the shore of the Blue Sea.
The floor that interested me the most, and Eddie too, was seventy-six. It was there, according to
Inventory Control, that the Ideal Black Box was kept, indispensable to a computer lab. A talking bedbug
lived there too, and the Department of Linear Happiness had long needed it. As far as we could tell, the
seventy-sixth floor was a sort of storehouse for the anomalies of nature and society, and many of our
employees were eager to dig their claws into that treasure trove. Fedor Simeonovich Kivrin, for example,
dreamed of the granulated Grounds for Optimism that were supposed to be there. The guys from the
Department of Social Meteorology were desperate for at least one qualified Cold ShoulderтАФthree were
indicated as being there, and all three had an effective temperature close to absolute zero. Old Christobal
Jos├йevich Junta, director of the Department of the Meaning of Life and doctor of the most unexpected
sciences, was champing at the bit to catch the sole remaining specimen of the Wingless Earthbound
Dream and stuff it. Over the past twenty-five years he had tried no less than six times to break through all
the barriers to the seventy-sixth floor, using his formidable powers of vertical translocation. But even he
was unsuccessful: all the floors above thirteen, according to the clever plans of the ancient architects,
were solidly blocked against any type of translocation. Thus a successful launching of the elevator would
have signified a new epoch in the life of our collective.
We stopped outside Fedor Simeonovich's ofEce, and the old house spirit Tikhon, clean and
presentable, cheerily opened the door for us. We went in.
Fedor Simeonovich Kivrin was not alone. Olive-hued Christobal Jos├йevich Junta was casually draped
in the soft armchair behind his large work table, sucking on a smelly Havana cigar. Fedor Simeonovich
himself, his large fingers tucked in his colorful suspenders, was walking up and down the office with his
head bowed. He was trying to step along the very edge of the Persian carpet. Crystal vases on the table
held the Fruits of Paradise: the large, rosy apples of the Knowledge of Evil and the completely
inedible-looking, but nevertheless worm-eaten, apples of the Knowledge of Good. The porcelain dish at
Christobal Jos├йevich's elbow was full of cores and butts.
Detecting our presence, Fedor Simeonovich stopped in his tracks.
"And here they are in person," he said without his customary smile. "P-p-please sit down. T-t-time is
short. K-K-Kamnoedov is a blowhard, but he'll be through soon. Ch-Christo, why don't you
ex-ex-explain the circumstances, it always comes out badly when I try."