Chapter 3

A while back Victor said that he was going off to a party, leaving a double in the laboratory to work. A double — that’s a very interesting item. As a rule it’s a fairly accurate copy of its creator. Let’s say a man doesn’t have enough hands — he makes up a double that is brainless, mute, who knows only how to solder contacts, or lug weights, or take dictation, but knows how to do these things very well indeed. Or he needs a model anthropoid, also brainless and mute but capable only of walking on ceilings or taking telepathgrams and doing that well. Or again, take the simplest of cases. Say the man is expecting to receive his pay, but does not wish to lose time getting it, so he sends his double in his place, who knows only to keep anyone from getting in front of him in the queue, to sign his name in the record book, and to count the money before leaving the cashier. Of course, not everyone can create doubles. I, for one, was unable to do it. So far, whatever I put together couldn’t do a thing — not even walk. There you would be standing in line with ostensible Victor and Roman and Volodia Pochkin, but there would be no one you could talk to. They would stand like stone monuments, not shifting their weight, not breathing, not blinking, and there would be nobody to ask for a cigarette.

True masters can create very complex, multiprogrammed, self-teaching doubles. It was such a superdouble that Roman sent off in my place last summer in the car. None of my friends guessed that it was not me. The double drove the car very competently, cursed when the mosquitoes bit him, and sang joyfully in chorus. Having returned to Leningrad, he dropped everybody off, turned the car in all by himself, paid for it, and disappeared right then and there before the eyes of the stunned rental agent.

At one time I thought that Janus-A and Janus-U were an original and a double. However, it was not like that. First, both directors had a passport, a diploma, passes, and other necessary documents. The most complex of doubles, on the contrary, could not have any personal identifications. At the mere sight of a government stamp on their photographs they became enraged, and immediately tore the documents to shreds. Magnus Redkin studied this mysterious characteristic for a long time, but the problem was clearly too much for him.

Further, the Januses were protein-based beings. The argument between the philosophers and the cyberneticists as to whether doubles should be regarded as living or not has still not been resolved. Most doubles were silico-organic in structure, some were based on germanium, and lately doubles composed of alumopolymers were in fashion.

And finally, and most importantly, no one ever created either Janus-A or Janus-U artificially. They were not original and copy, nor brothers or twins; they were a single man — Janus Poluektovich Nevstruev. No one in the Institute could understand it, but they knew it so well that they did not even try to understand.

Victor’s double stood, palms braced on the laboratory table, and followed the working of a small Ashby homeostat with a riveted gaze. He accompanied himself with a soft little song to a once-popular tune:

I had never heard of doubles singing before. But you could expect anything from one of Victor’s doubles. I recollect one such, which dared argue about the excessive expenditure of psychic energy with Modest Matveevich himself. And this, while the scarecrows I constructed, without legs or arms, feared him to the point of convulsion, entirely by instinct.

In the corner, to the right of the double, stood the two-speed translator, TDX-8OE, under its canvas covering. It was the inadequate product of the Kitezhgrad magitechnic factory. Next to the table stood my old friend the sofa, its restitched leather gleaming in the glare of three spotlights. A baby bath, filed with water in which a dead perch floated belly up, sat on top of the sofa. Also in the laboratory were shelves loaded with instruments, and near the door, there was a large green bottle covered with dust. In the bottle was a sealed-up jinn, and one could see him moving about in there and flashing his little eyes.

Victor’s double quit examining the homeostat, sat down on the sofa next to the bath, ogled the dead fish with the same fixed stare, and sang the following verse:

The perch maintained its status quo. Precipitately, the double plunged his arm deeply into the sofa and started to turn something there, puffing with great effort.

The sofa was a translator. It erected an M-fleld around itself, which, simply stated, converted normal reality into imaginary reality. I had experienced this myself on that memorable night when boarding with Naina Kievna, and the only thing that had saved me was that the sofa was operating at one quarter of its standard output; otherwise I would have ended up as Tom Thumb or something similar. For Magnus Redkin the sofa was a possible container of the White Thesis. For Modest Matveevich it was a museum exhibit, inventory number 1123, and any auctioning off was strictly forbidden. For Victor it was Device Number One. For this reason he stole it every night. Magnus Feodorovich, being jealous, reported this to Personnel Director Demin, while the activity of Modest Matveevich was reduced to exhortations to “note all that down.” Victor kept stealing the sofa until Janus Poluektovich took a hand — in close cooperation with Feodor Simeonovich, and with the active support of Gian Giacomo — relying on an official letter of the Academy Presidium signed personally by four academicians. They were able to neutralize Redkin completely, and press Modest Matveevich somewhat back from his entrenched position. The latter then announced that he, as the person officially accountable, didn’t want to hear any more about that matter and desired that the sofa, inventory number 1123, be placed in its own special place. Should this not be done, Modest Matveevich threatened, then everyone, including the academicians, must blame themselves. Janus Poluektovich agreed to blame himself, so did Feodor Simeonovich, and Victor quickly lugged the sofa to his laboratory.

He was a serious worker, not one of those loafers from the Department of Absolute Knowledge, and he intended to transform all the water in the seas and oceans of our planet into life-giving water. To date, it is true, he was still in the experimental stage.

The perch in the bath stirred and turned belly down. The double took his arm out of the sofa. The perch moved its fins apathetically, opened its mouth as though in a yawn, fell over on its side, and turned belly up again.

“B-beast,” said the double with much expression.

I snapped to full alertness at once. This was said with emotion. No laboratory double could talk like that. The double put his hand in his pocket, got up slowly, and saw me. We looked at each other for a few seconds.

Then I inquired sarcastically, “Working, aren’t we?”

The double looked at me dully.

“Give it up,” I said. “All is clear.”

The double was silent. He stood like a stone and didn’t blink.

“I’ll tell you what,” I said. “It’s now ten-thirty. I am giving you ten minutes. Clean up, throw out the carrion, and run along to the dance. I’ll turn the power off myself.”

The double puckered his lips into a tube and started to back up. He did this very carefully, skirting the sofa, and stopped when the lab was between us. I looked at my watch demonstratively. He mouthed an incantation. A calculator, pen, and a stack of clean paper appeared on the table. The double bent his legs so that he hung seated in the air, and started to write, looking at me fearfully now and then. It was done so naturally that I began to doubt myself. But I had a sure method for establishing the truth of the matter. Doubles were, as a rule, completely insensitive to pain. Searching in my pocket, I drew out a pair of small diagonal pliers, and snapping them meaningfully, moved toward the double. He stopped writing.

Looking him steadily in the eye, I snapped the head off a nail sticking out of the table and said, “Well?”

“Why are you pestering me?” asked Victor. “Can’t you see a man is at work?”

“But you are a double,” I said. “Don’t you dare talk back to me.”

“Get rid of the pliers,” he said.

“Stop playing the fool,” I said. “Some double!”

Victor sat on the edge of the table and tiredly rubbed his ears.

“Nothing works for me today,” he informed me. “Today I am a dumbbell. Made a double and it came out totally brainless. Dropped everything, sat down on the umclidet… the animal… I hit him in the neck and hurt my hand… and even the perch croaks systematically.”

I went over to the sofa and looked in the bath.

“What’s the matter with him?”

“How do I know?”

“Where did you get it?”

“At the market.”

I picked up the perch by the tail.

“So what do you expect? It’s an ordinary dead fish.”

“Oaf,” said Victor. “That’s water-of-life, of course!”

“A-ah,” I said as I tried to figure out how to advise him. I had but a fuzzy understanding of the mechanism of the water-of-life. Basically all I knew was derived from the well-known fairy tale of Ivan the Tsarevitch and the Gray Wolf.

The jinn in the bottle kept moving about and every so often rubbed the glass, which was dusty on the outside, with the palm of his hand.

“You could wipe the bottle, you know,” I said, not having come up with anything at all.

“What?”

“Wipe the dust off the bottle. He’s bored in there.”

“To the devil with him! Let him be bored!” Victor said absentmindedly. He shoved his hand in the sofa, and again twisted at something in there. The perch revived.

“Did you see that?” said Victor. “When I give it the maximum potential — everything works.”

“It’s an unfortunate choice of sample,” I said, guessing.

Victor extracted his arm from the sofa and stared at me.

“Unfortunate…” he said. “Sample…” His eyes took on the aspect of the double. “Sample to sample lupus…”

“Furthermore, it’s probably been frozen,” I said, growing bold.

Victor wasn’t listening.

“Where could I get a fish?” he said, looking around and slapping his pockets. “Just one little fish….”

“For what?” I asked.

“That’s right,” said Victor. “For what? If there isn’t another fish,” he pronounced thoughtfully, “why not take another water sample? Right?”

“Oh, but no,” I contradicted. “It’s no go.”

“Then what?” Victor asked eagerly.

“Trundle yourself out of here,” I said. “Leave the building.”

“Where to?”

“Wherever you like.”

He climbed over the sofa and hugged me around the chest.

“You listen to me, do you hear?” he said threateningly. “Nothing in the world is identical. Everything fits the Gaussian distribution. One water is different from another… This old fool didn’t reckon that there is a dispersion of properties…

“Hey, friend,” I called to him. “The New Year is almost here; don’t get carried away!”

He let me go, and bustled about.

“Where did I put it…? What a dope…! Where did I stick it…? Ah, here it is…”- He ran toward the stool, where the umclidet stood upright. The very same one.

I jumped back toward the door and said pleadingly, “Get your wits together! It’s going on twelve! They are waiting for you! Your sweet Vera is waiting!”

“Nah,” he replied. “I sent them a double. A good double, a hefty type. -. dumb as they come. Tells jokes, does handstands, dances with the endurance of an ox.”

He turned the umclidet in his hands, estimating something, looking, calculating, and squinting with one eye.

“Out — I’m telling you! Out!” I yelled in desperation.

Victor looked at me briefly, and I fell back. The fun was over with. Victor was in the condition of a magus who, enthralled by his work, would turn those in his way into spiders, wood lice, lizards, and other quiet animals. I squatted by the bottle with the jinn and looked.

Victor froze in the classical imprecation pose involving materialization (the “Matrikhor” position), and a pink fog rose over the table; batlike shades flitted about, the calculator vanished, the paper vanished, and suddenly the whole surface of the table was covered with vessels filled with a transparent liquid. Victor thrust the umclidet at the stool without looking, and grabbed one of the vessels and studied it with great absorption. It was obvious that he was not going anywhere, anytime soon. Quickly be removed the bath from the sofa, was at the shelf in one jump, and started dragging a cumbersome copper aquavitometer to the table. I arranged myself more comfortably, rubbed clear an observation window for the jinn, when voices sounded in the corridor, accompanied by the sound of running feet and slamming doors. I jumped up and charged out of the lab.

The feeling of nighttime emptiness and darkened quiet in the huge building had vanished without a trace. Lights blazed in the corridor. Someone ran helter-skelter on the stairs; someone yelled, “Valka! The potential is falling! Get to the battery room!” Someone was shaking his coat out on the landing, flinging snow in all dfrections. Coming straight at me, bending elegantly and looking pensive, was Gian Giacomo, followed by a trotting gnome carrying a huge portfolio under his arm and a walking stick in his teeth. We bowed to each other. The great prestidigitator smelled of good wine and French scent. I didn’t dare stop him and he went through the locked door into his office. The gnome pushed through the portfolio and stick in his wake, but dived into a radiator himself.

“What the hell?” I cried, and ran to the stairs.

The Institute was stuffed to the gills with colleagues. It seemed there were even more of them than on a working day. In offices and laboratories the lights were full on, doors were wide open. The usual business hum pervaded the Institute: there was the crack of discharges, the manytoned voices dictating numbers or pronouncing incantations, the staccato pounding of calculators and typewriters. Above it all was the rolling and victorious roar of Feodor Simeonovich: “That’s good! That’s great! You are a good man, old buddy. But who’s the imbecile who plugged in the generator?”

I was struck in the back with a sharp corner and grabbed the railing. I was enraged. It was Volodia Pochkin and Eddie Amperian, who were carrying a coordinate-measuring apparatus that weighed half a ton up to their floor.

“Oh, Sasha?” said Eddie, as friendly as could be. “Hello, Sasha.”

“Sasha, make way!” hollered Volodia, backing up. “Swing it around, swing it around!”

I seized him by the collar.

“Why are you at the Institute? How did you get here?”

“Through the door, through the door! Let go…!” said Volodia. “Eddie, more to the right. Can’t you see it’s not getting through?”

I let him go and darted off to the vestibule. I was burning with administrative wrath. “I’ll show you,” I grated, jumping four steps at a time. “I’ll show you how to goof off. I’ll show you how to let anyone in without checking him out!”

The In and Out macro-demons, instead of tending to their business, were playing roulette, shaking with a gambling frenzy and phosphorescing feverishly. Under my very eyes, “In,” oblivious of his duties, took a bank of some seventy billion molecules from “Out.” I recognized the roulette at once. It was my roulette. I made the thing for a party and kept it behind the cabinet in Electronics, and the only one who knew about it was Victor Korneev, A conspiracy. I decided. I’ll blast them all. And all the time gay, rosy-cheeked colleagues kept coming and coming through the vestibule.

“Some wind! My ears are stuffed. .

“So you left too?”

“It’s a bore…. Everyone got a big laugh. I’d be better off doing some work, I thought to myself. So I left them a double and went.”

“You know, there I was dancing with this girl and I could feel I was getting furry all over. Downed some vodka — it didn’t help.”

“And what if you use an electron beam? Too much mass? Then we use photons..

“Alexis, do you have an extra laser? Let me have one even if it’s a gas type.

“Galka, where did you leave your husband?”

“I left an hour ago, if you must know. Right into a drift, up to my ears, almost buried me.”

It came to me that I wasn’t making it as watchman. There was no sense in taking the roulette from the demons anymore; all that was left was to go and have a tremendous row with the provocateur Victor, and let coMe what may thereafter. I shook my fist at the demons and hauled myself up the stairs, trying to visualize what would happen if Modest Matveevich should look in at the Institute now.

On the way to the director’s reception room, I stopped at the Shock and Vibration Hall. Here they were taming a released jinn.. The jinn, huge and purple with rage, was flinging himself about in the open cage, which was surrounded with Gian Ben Gian shields and closed from above with powerful magnetic fields. Stung with high-voltage discharges, he howled, and cursed in several dead languages, leaped about, and belched tongues of flame. Out of sheer excitement he would start building a palace and would immediately destroy it. Finally he surrendered, sat down on the floor shuddering with each shock, moaned piteously, and said, “Enough, leave off! I won’t do it any more… Oi, oi, oi.. I am all quiet now…

Calm, unblinking young men, all doubles, stood by the discharge-control console. The originals, on the other hand, crowding around the vibration stand, were glancing at their watches and uncorking bottles.

I went over to them.

“Ah, Sasha!”

“Sasha pal, I hear you are on watch today… I’ll be over to your section later…

“Hey there, somebody, make up a glass for him — my hands are loaded..

I was stunned and didn’t notice how a glass appeared in my hand. Corks fired into Gian Ben Gian shields, icy champagne flowed, hissing and sparkling. The discharges silenced, the jinn stopped whining and started sniffing the air. In the same instant the Kremlin clock started striking twelve.

“Friends! Long live Monday!”

The glasses clinked together. Later someone said, looking the bottle over, “Who made the wine?”

“I did.”

“Don’t forget to pay tomorrow.”

“How about another bottle?”

“Enough, we’ll catch cold.”

“That’s a good jinn, this one. A bit nervous, maybe.”

“One does not look a gift horse..”

“That’s all right, he’ll fly like a doll, hold out for the forty maneuvers, and then he can go peddle his nerves.”

“Hey, guys,” I said timidly. “It’s night out there and it’s a holiday. How about going home…”

They looked at me, patted me on the back, told me, “It’s OK, you’ll get over it,” and moved in a body toward the cage. The doubles rolled away one of the shields and the originals surrounded the jinn in a businesslike manner, took him in powerful grips by his hands and feet and started carrying him toward the vibro stand. The jinn was timidly begging for mercy and diffidently promising all the riches of the tsars. I stood alone to the side and watched them attaching microsensors to the various parts of his body. Next I felt one of the shields. It was huge, heavy, dented with potholes from the ball lightning strokes, and charred in several places. Gian Ben Gian’s shields were constructed out of seven dragon hides glued together with the bile of a patricide, and rated for direct lightning hits. Attached to each shield with upholstery tacks were metallic inventory tags. Theoretically, the outer sides of the shields should have depicted all the famous battles of the past and the inner sides all the great battles of the future. In practice, the face of the shield I was studying showed something like a jet attacking a motorized column, and the inner side was covered with strange swirls reminiscent of an abstract painting.

They started shaking the jinn on the vibro-stand. He giggled and squealed, “It tickles…! Ai, I can’t stand it!” I returned to the corridor. It smelled of Bengal fire. Girandoles swirled under the ceiling, banging into walls; rockets, trailing streams of colored smoke, streaked overhead. I met Volodia Pochkin’s double carrying a gigantic incunabulum bound with brass bands, two doubles of Roman Oira-Oira collapsing under a ponderous beam, then Roman himself with a stack of bright blue folders from the archives of the Department of Unassailable Problems, and next a wrathful lab technician conveying a troop of cursing ghosts in crusader cloaks, to be interrogated by Junta. Everyone was busy and preoccupied…

The labor legislation was being flagrantly ignored and I began to feel that I had lost all desire to struggle against this law-breaking, because, tonight at twelve o’clock on New Year’s Eve, plowing through a blizzard, they came in, these people who had more interest in bringing to a conclusion, or starting anew, a useful undertaking than stunning themselves with vodka, mindlessly kicking with their legs, playing charades, and practicing flirtations in various degrees of frivolity. Here came people who would rather be with each other than anywhere else, who couldn’t stand any kind of Sunday, because they were bored on Sunday. They were magi, Men with a capital M, and their motto was “Monday begins on Saturday.” True, they knew an incantation or two, knew how to turn water into wine, and any one of them would not find it difficult to feed a thousand with five loaves. But they were not magi for that. That was chaff, outer tinsel. They were magi because they had a tremendous knowledge, so much indeed that quantity had finally been transmuted into quality, and they had come into a different relationship with the world than ordinary people. They worked in an Institute that was dedicated above all to the problems of human happiness and the meaning of human life, and even among them, not one knew exactly what was happiness and what precisely was the meaning of life. So they took it as a working hypothesis that happiness lay in gaining perpetually new insights into the unknown and the meaning of life was to be found in the same process. Every man is a magus in his inner soul, but he becomes one only when he begins to think less about himself and more about others, when it becomes more interesting for him to work than to recreate himself in the ancient meaning of the word. In all probability, their working hypothesis was not far from the truth, for just as work had transformed ape into man so had the absence of it transformed man into ape in much shorter periods of time. Sometimes even into something worse than an ape. We constantly notice these things in our daily life. The loafer and sponger, the careerist and the debauchee, continue to walk about on their hind extremities and to speak quite congruently (although the roster of their subjects shrinks to a cipher). As to tight pants and infatuation with jazz, there was an attempt at one time to use these factors as indices of apeward transformation, but it was quickly determined that they were often the property of even the best of the magi.

However, it was impossible to conceal regression at the Institute. It presented limitless opportunities to transform man into magus. But it was merciless toward regressors and marked them without a miss. All a colleague had to do was to give himself over to egotistical and instinctive behavior (and sometimes just thinking about it), and he would notice in terror that the fuzz on his ears would grow thicker. That was by way of warning. Just as a police whistle warns of a fine, or a pain warns of a possible trauma. Then everything depended on oneself. Quite often a man could not contend with his sour thoughts, that’s why he was a man — the passing stage between neanderthal and magus. But he could act contrary to these thoughts, and then he still had a chance. Or he could give in, give it all up (“We live only once,” “You should take all you can out of life,” “I am no stranger to all that’s human”), but then there was only one thing to do: leave the Institute as soon as possible. There, on the outside, he could still remain at least a decent citizen, honestly if flabbily earning his pay. But it was difficult to decide on leaving. It was cozy and pleasant at the Institute, the work was clean and respected, the pay was not bad, the people were wonderful, and shame would not eat one’s eyes out. So they wandered about, pursued with compassionate glances, through the halls and the labs, their ears covered with gray bristles, aimless, losing clarity of speech, growing more stupid under one’s very eyes. Still, you could pity them, you could try to help and hope to revert them to human aspect.

But there were others. With empty eyes. Those knowing with certainty on which side their bread was buttered. In their own way they were not stupid. In their own way they were not bad judges of human nature. They were calculating and unprincipled, knowledgeable of all the weaknesses of man, clever at turning any bad situation into a good deal for themselves, and tireless at that occupation. They shaved their ears painstakingly and kept inventing the most marvelous means for getting rid of their hairy coverings. Quite often, they succeeded in attaining considerable heights and great success in their basic purpose — the construction of a bright future in a single private apartment or on a single private suburban plot, fenced off with barbed wire from the rest of humanity.

I returned to my post in the director’s reception room, dumped the useless keys into the box, and read a few pages from the classic work of J.P. Nevstruev, Mathematical Equations in Magic. The book read like an adventure novel, as it was stuffed with posed and unsolved problems. I began to burn with a desire to work and almost decided to chuck my watch responsibilities so I could go to my Aldan, when Modest Matveevich called.

Chewing crunchily, he inquired, “Where are you, Privalov? I’m calling for the third time. It’s disgraceful!”

“Happy New Year, Modest Matveevich,” I said.

He chewed in silence for some time and replied in a lower tone, “The same to you. How’s the watch going?”

“I just finished my tour of the building,” I said. “All is normal.”

“There wasn’t any auto-combustion?”

“None at all.”

“Power off everywhere?”

“Briareus broke a finger,” I said.

He was worried. “Briareus? Wait a while…. Ah, yes, inventory number fourteen-eighty-nine… Why?”

I explained.

“That was a correct solution,” said Modest Matveevich. “Continue standing watch. That’s all here.”

Immediately after Modest Matveevich, Eddie Amperian, from Linear Happiness, called, and politely asked me to calculate the optimal coefficients of freedom from care for those working in positions of responsibility. I agreed and we worked out a time of meeting for two hours later in Electronics. After that, Oira-Oira’s double came in and asked for the safe keys in a colorless voice. I refused. He insisted. I chased him out.

In a minute, Roman himself came running.

“Give me the keys.”

I shook my head. “I won’t.”

“Give me the keys!”

“Go take a steambath. I am the person materially accountable.”

“Sasha! I’ll carry it off!”

I grinned and said, “Help yourself.”

Roman glared at the safe and strained his whole body, but the safe was either spellbound or screwed to the floor.

“What do you want in there, anyway?” I asked.

“Documentation on RU-Sixteen,” said Roman. “How about it? Let’s have the keys!”

I laughed, and reached for the box with the keys. In the same instant a piercing scream sounded somewhere above us. I jumped up.