"Mikhail Bulgakov. The Fateful Eggs ("Роковые яйца")" - читать интересную книгу автора

avidly on one side.
"Why didn't I notice it before? What a coincidence! Well, I never!
Silly ass!" The Professor looked down and stared pensively at his strangely
shod feet. "Hm, what shall I do? Go back to Pankrat? No, there's no waking
him. It's a pity to throw the wretched thing away. I'll have to carry it."
He removed the galosh and set off carrying it distastefully.
An old car drove out of Prechistenka with three passengers. Two men,
slightly tipsy, with a garishly made-up woman in those baggy silk trousers
that were all the rage in 1928 sitting on their lap.
"Hey, Dad!" she shouted in a low husky voice. "Did you sell the other
galosh for booze?"
"The old boy got sozzled at the Alcazar," howled the man on the left,
while the one on the right leaned out of the car and shouted:
"Is the night-club in Volkhonka still open, Dad? That's where we're
making for!"
The Professor looked at them sternly over the top of his glasses, let
the cigarette fall out of his mouth and then immediately forgot they
existed. A beam was cutting its way through Prechistensky Boulevard, and the
dome of Christ the Saviour had begun to burn. The sun had come out.



CHAPTER III. Persikov Catches It

What had happened was this. When the Professor put his discerning eye
to the microscope, he noticed for the first time in his life that one
particular ray in the coloured tendril stood out more vividly and boldly
than the others. This ray was bright red and stuck out of the tendril like
the tiny point of a needle, say.
Thus, as ill luck would have it, this ray attracted the attention of
the great man's experienced eye for several seconds.
In it, the ray, the Professor detected something a thousand
times more significant and important than the ray itself, that
precarious offspring accidentally engendered by the movement of a microscope
mirror and lens. Due to the assistant calling the Professor away, some
amoebas had been subject to the action of the ray for an hour-and-a-half and
this is what had happened: whereas the blobs of amoebas on the plate outside
the ray simply lay there limp and helpless, some very strange phenomena were
taking place on the spot over which the sharp red sword was poised. This
strip of red was teeming with life. The old amoebas were forming pseudopodia
in a desperate effort to reach the red strip, and when they did they came to
life, as if by magic. Some force seemed to breathe life into them. They
flocked there, fighting one another for a place in the ray, where the most
frantic (there was no other word for it) reproduction was taking place. In
defiance of all the laws which Persikov knew like the back of his hand, they
gemmated before his eyes with lightning speed. They split into two in the
ray, and each of the parts became a new, fresh organism in a couple of
seconds. In another second or two these organisms grew to maturity and
produced a new generation in their turn. There was soon no room at all in
the red strip or on the plate, and inevitably a bitter struggle broke out.