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

We sat down. Christobal Jos├йevich, his right eye squinting from the smoke, looked at us critically.
"I'll explain, if you wish," he said to Fedor Simeonovich. "The circumstances are such, young men,
that the first people to reach the seventy-sixth floor should be those of us who are experienced and wise.
Unfortunately, the administration feels that we are too old and too venerable to go on the first
experimental launch. Therefore, you are going, and I warn you right now that this will not be a simple trip,
but reconnaissance, and perhaps reconnaissance under fire. You'll need stamina, courage, and the utmost
discretion. Personally, I do not observe any of these qualities in you, but I defer to the recommendation
of Fedor Simeonovich. And in any case, you must know that you will most likely be in enemy
territoryтАФa merciless, cruel enemy who will stop at nothing."
That preface made me start sweating, but then Christobal Jos├йevich began explaining how things
stood.
It turned out that on the seventy-sixth floor lay the ancient city of Tmuskorpion, seized as a trophy of
war, way back when, by the vengeful Prince Oleg the Prophetic. From time immemorial Tmuskorpion
was the center of strange phenomena and the site of strange events. Why this was so, no one knew, but
everything that could not be rationally explained at any stage of scientific and technological progress was
sent there to be preserved for better times.
Back in the days of Peter the Great, at the same time that his famous museum, the Kunstkamera, was
being founded in St. Petersburg, the local Solovetsk authorities, in the person of Lieutenant Bombadier
Ptakha and his company of grenadiers, established "His Imperial Majesty's Kamera of Marvelous and
Amazing Kunsts with a Prison and Two Steambaths" in Tmuskorpion. In those days, the seventy-sixth
floor was the second floor, and it was a lot easier to get into His Imperial Majesty's Kamera of Kunsts
than into the baths. But later, as the Edifice of Knowledge grew, access to it became increasingly difficult,
and ceased completely with the appearance of the elevator. Meanwhile the Kamera of Kunsts kept
growing, enriched by new exhibits, and became the Imperial Museum of Zoological and Other Natural
Wonders under Catherine the Great, the Russian Imperial Preserve of Magical, Spiritual, and Occult
Phenomena under Alexander II, and finally, the State Colony of Unexplained Phenomena under the
Research Institute for Magic and Wizardry of the Academy of Sciences.
The destructive consequences of the invention of the elevator impeded the exploitation of the treasure
trove for scientific research. Business correspondence with the administration was extremely difficult and
inevitably drawn-out: cables lowered with correspondence snapped under their own weight; carrier
pigeons refused to fly that high; radio communications were shaky because of the backwardness of
Tmuskorpion's technology; and the use of lighter-than-air craft merely led to needless expenditure of the
limited supplies of helium. But all that is history now.
Some twenty years ago the berserk elevator dropped off the Inspection Commission of the Solovetsk
Committee on Municipal Economy on the seventy-sixth floor. They had come simply to discuss the
stopped-up plumbing in the labs of Professor Vybegallo on the fourth floor. What precisely went on
remains unknown. Vybegallo, who was waiting for the commission on the fourth floor, recounts that the
elevator rushed up past him with a terrifying roar, the glass door showing a glimpse of distorted faces,
and then the horrifying vision passed. Exactly an hour later the elevator car was discovered on the
thirteenth floor in a lather, snorting, and still trembling from excitement. The commission was not in the
car. A note was glued to the wall, written on the back of a form for reporting unsatisfactory conditions. It
said: "Am going out to examine. I see a strange rock. Comrade Farfurkis has been reprimanded for going
into the bushes. Chairman of the Commission, L. Vuniukov."
For a long time, no one knew on what floor L. Vuniukov and his subordinates had disembarked from
the elevator. The police came, and there were many awkward questions. A month later, two sealed
packages addressed to the head of the Municipal Economic Committee were found on the roof of the
car. One package contained a packet of decrees on cigarette paper that recorded reprimands of
Comrade Farfurkis or Comrade Khlebovvodov, for the most part for displaying individualism and some
inexplicable "Zuboism." The second package contained the materials for a report on the plumbing in
Tmuskorpion (the conditions were acknowledged to be unsatisfactory) and an application to Accounting