THE THIRD TALE All Kinds of Fuss

Chapter 1

Eighty-three percent of the days in a year begin the same way: the alarm clock rings. This clamor intrudes into the final dreams sometimes as the frenetic clatter of the paper perforator, sometimes as the angry rolling of Feodor Simeonovich’s basso, or, again, as the scrabblings of basilisk claws frolicking in a thermostat.

On that particular day, I dreamed of Modest Matveevich Kamnoedov. He had become the director of the computer center and was teaching me to operate the Aldan. “Modest Matveevich,” I kept saying, “everything you are telling me is a sick delirium.” And he thundered back, “You will note that down-n-n for me! Everything you have here is j-u-n-k, bru-m-magem!” At last I realized that it was not Modest Matveevich I heard, but my alarm clock, Friendship, with eleven jewels and a picture of an elephant with upraised trunk. Mumbling, “I hear you, I hear,” I banged my hand on the table in the vicinity of the clock.

The window was wide open to a bright blue spring sky and its sharp coolness. Pigeons were strutting and pecking on the cornice. Three tired flies were buzzing around the glass shade of the ceiling light, apparently the first arrivals of this year. From time to time, they suddenly went berserk and flung themselves about from side to side. Into my sleepy head came the brilliant thought that they were surely trying to escape from this plane of existence, and I felt a deep compassion for their hopeless endeavors. Two of them sat on the shade and the third vanished, and that woke me completely.

First thing, I threw off the blanket and attempted to soar over the bed. As usual, before my setting-up exercises, shower, and breakfast, this led only to the reactive component driving me forcefully down into the mattress, causing springs to twang and creak in complaint below me. Next, I remembered the previous evening and felt very chagrined because all day I would not have any work to do. The night before, at eleven o’clock, Cristobal Joseevich had come to Electronics and, as usual, had connected himself to the Aldan in order to solve the next problem in the meaning of life, jointly with it. In five minutes, Aldan was on fire. I didn’t know what could burn in it, but it had gone out of commission for good, and that was why, instead of working, I, like those hairy-eared loafers, would have to wander aimlessly from department to department, grousing about my circumstances and telling jokes.

I made a wry face, sat on the bed, and breathed in a chestful of prahna mixed with the cool morning air. For the required time I waited until the prahna was assimilated and thought happy and radiant thoughts, as recommended. Next I breathed out the cold morning air and started on the complex of moming gymnastics. They tell me that the old school prescribed yoga exercises, but the yoga-complex and the now-almost-forgotten maya-complex took up fifteen to twenty hours a day, and the old school had to give in when the new president of the U.S.S.R Academy of Sciences was appointed to the post. The young people of SRITS broke old traditions with relish. At the hundred and fifteenth leap, my roommate, Victor Korneev, fluttered into the room. As usual in the morning he was brisk, energetic, and even good-natured. He slapped me on my bare back with a wet towel, and went flying around the room making breaststroke swimming motions with his arms and legs. While so doing, he recounted his dreams and simultaneously interpreted them, according to Freud, Merlin, and the maid Lenorman. I went to wash; then we straightened the room and set off to the dining room.

In the dining room, we took our favorite table, under the large but already faded banner Bravely, comradesl Snap your jaws! G. Flaubert, opened bottles of yogurt, and set to eating while lending an ear to the local gossip and news.

The previous night, the traditional spring fly-in had taken place on Bald Mountain. Participants had deported themselves most disgustingly. Viy and Homa Brutus went arm in arm, cruising the town streets at night, accosting passersby, foulmouthed and drunk, and then Viy stepped on his eyelid and went totally ape. He and Homa had a fight, turned over a newspaper kiosk, and landed in the police station, where they were given fifteen days each for hooliganism.

Basil the tomcat had taken a spring vacation — to get married. Soon Solovetz would be graced by talking kittens with ancestralarteriosclerotic memory.

Louis Sedlovoi had invented some kind of time machine and would be reporting on it that day at the seminar.

Vibegallo again appeared at the Institute. He went everywhere and bragged that he had been illuminated with a titanic idea. The speech of many apes, you see, resembles recorded human speech played backward at high speed. So he recorded the conversations of baboons at the Sukhumi preserve and, having heard them through, played them in reverse at low speed. Something phenomenal had been produced, he declared, but what exactly he did not say.

In the computer center, the Aldan had again been burned, but Sasha Privalov was not at fault; Junta was the guilty one, as he had been interested lately in only those problems having been proved to have no solutions.

The elderly sorcerer Peruhn Markovich Chimp-Oafus, from the Department of Atheism, had taken a leave of absence for his regular reincarnation.

In the Department of Perpetual Youth, after a long and extended illness, the model of an immortal man had died.

The Academy of Science had allotted its nth sum to the Institute for the improvement of the grounds. Modest Matveevich was planning to use it for an ornate cast-iron fence to surround the Institute, with allegorical decorations and flowerpots on the pillars. The backyard was to have a fountain with a forty-foot jet, between the substation and the fuel dump. The sport bureau had requested money for a tennis court, but Modest refused this, declaring that the fountain was needed for scientific meditations, while tennis was nothing but leg-kicking and arm-swinging.

After breakfast, everybody scattered to their labs. I, too, looked in on my place, and sorrowfully ambled around my Aldan with its exposed circuitry in which dour technicians from Engineering Maintenance were poking their instruments. They were in no mood to talk to me and suggested sourly that I go somewhere else and mind my own business. I shuffled off to visit friends.

Victor Korneev threw me out because I hampered his concentration. Roman was lecturing to undergrads. Volodia Pochkin was conversing with a correspondent. Seeing me, he was delighted and cried, “A-ah, here he is. Meet our director of the Computer Center. He will tell you how — “ But I very cleverly pretended to be my own double, and having thoroughly frightened the correspondent, ran off. At Eddie Amperian’s I was offered some fresh cucumbers, and a very animated discussion was in the making about the advantages of a gastronomic view of life, but suddenly their distillation polyhedron blew and they forgot about me at once.

In complete despair I went out into the hail and bumped into Janus-U, who said, “So,” and hesitating, inquired whether we had a talk yesterday. “No,” I said, “regretfully we didn’t.” He went on and I heard him ask the same standard question of Gian Giacomo.

Finally I drifted over to the absolutists, arriving just before the start of the seminar. The colleagues, yawning and cautiously stroking their ears, were seating themselves in the small conference auditorium. The head of the department of All White, Black, and Gray Magics, magister-academician Maurice Johann Lavrentii Poopkov-Lahggard, sat in the chairman’s post, his fingers calmly intertwined, and gazed benevolently at the bustling lecturer, who, together with two badly executed hairy-eared doubles, was installing on the exposition stand some sort of contrivance with saddle and pedals, resembling an exerciser for the overweight. I sat down in the corner, as far as I could from the rest of the audience, and, taking out pen and notebook, assumed an interested mien.

“Now then,” emitted the magister academician, “do you have everything ready?”

“Yes, Maurice Johannovich,” responded Sedlovoi. “All set, Maurice Johannovich.”

“Then, we might begin? It seems I don’t see Smoguli…

“He’s away on a trip, Johann Lavrentievieh,” someone said from the auditorium.

“Oh yes, I remember now. Exponential investigations? Aha….. Well, all right. Today our Louis Ivanovieh will make a short report regarding certain possible types of time machines. -. Am I correct, Louis Ivanovich?”

“Eh… as a matter of fact… as a matter of fact I would title my report in such a way, that — “

“Ah, well then, that’s fine. Please do title it.”

“Thank you. Eh… I would title it as “The Feasibility of a Time Machine for Motion Through the Time Dimensions, Constructed Artificially.’“

“Very interesting,” voiced the magister-academician. “However, I seem to recollect that we already had a case when our associate — “

“Forgive me. I was about to start with that.”

“Oh, so that’s it… then please do proceed, please.”

At first I listened quite attentively. I was even interested. It seemed some of these fellows were occupied with the most intriguing projects. It appeared that some of them, to this day, were attacking the problem of moving in physical time, though admittedly without success. However, someone, whose name I forgot, someone of the old ones, the famous, had proved that it was possible to achieve the transfer of material bodies into the ideal worlds, that is, worlds created by man’s imagination. Apparently, besides our customary world with Riemann’s mensuration, the principle of indeterminacy, physical vaccuum, and the drunk Brutus, there exist other worlds, possessing strong characteristics of reality. These worlds were formed by man’s creative imagination, over our entire history. For example, there exist the world of the cosmological structurings; the world created by painters; and even the half-abstract world impalpably constructed by the generations of composers.

A few years ago, the pupil of that same famous one assembled a machine on which he set out on a voyage into the world of cosmological constructs. For some time, unidirectional communication was maintained with him and he had time to transmit that he was on the edge of a flat earth, and could see below him the upreared trunk of one of the Atlas-elephants, and that he was about to start his descent toward the turtle. No further messages were received from him.

The lecturer, Louis Ivanovich Sedlovoi — obviously not a bad scientist and magister, though suffering badly from certain paleolithic throwbacks in his consciousness, and forced for this reason to shave his ears regularly — had constructed a machine for traveling in this subjective time. In his words, there really existed a world in which Anna Karenina, Don Quixote, Sherlock Holmes, Grigory Melikhov, and even Captain Nemo, lived and acted. This world exhibited its own very curious properties and laws, and the people inhabiting it had the brighter personalities and were the more real and individual, as a function of the talent, the passion, and the truthfulness with which their authors described them in their corresponding works.

All this interested me greatly because Sedlovoi, carried away by his subject, was lively and picturesque in his presentation. But then he brought himself up short, thinking that it was all rather unscientific, and hung various schematics and graphs all over the stage, and started to expound in dull and extremely specialized terms on conical decremental shafts, polyvelocity temporal transmissions, and some type of space-piercing steering. I lost the thread of the discussion very quickly and turned my attention to the audience.

The magister-academician slept majestically, occasionally and purely in reflex raising his right eyebrow as though to signify a certain doubt in the lecturer’s words. A hot game of functional naval warfare in transcendental space was going on in the back rows. Two lab-technician day students were copying down everything in sequence, hopeless despair and total submission to fate congealed on their faces. Someone lighted a cigarette surreptitiously and was blowing smoke between his knees and under a table. Magisters and baccalaureates in the front row listened with accustomed attention, preparing questions and comments. Some smiled sarcastically, others displayed expressions of puzzlement. Sedlovoi’s scientific adviser nodded approvingly after each of the lecturer’s sentences. I tried looking out the window, but there was nothing there except the same old warehouse and an occasional boy running by with his fishing rod.

I came to, when the lecturer declared that the introductory portion of his presentation was completed and that he would next like to demonstrate the machine in action.

“Interesting, interesting,” said the awakened magisteracademician. “Now then, will you take a ride yourself?”

“You see,” said Sedlovoi, “I would like to remain here, to provide a commentary on the progress of the journey. Perhaps one of those present?”

Those present exhibited a retiring attitude. They all must have remembered the mysterious fate of the voyager to the edge of the world. One of the magisters offered to send a double. Sedlovoi replied that that would not be of interest because doubles had a low sensitivity to external excitation and would make poor transmitters of information for this reason. What sort of external excitations could be expected? they asked from the rear row. All the usual, Sedlovoi replied: visual, acoustic, odoriferous, tactile. Again someone asked from the rear row: What type of tactile sensations would be the most prevalent? Sedlovoi spread his arms in disclaimer and said that it would depend on the conduct of the traveler in the places where he would find himself. “Aha…” they said in the rear row and didn’t ask any further questions. The lecturer glanced here and there helplessly. In the auditorium everyone also looked here and there, but always to the side. The magister-academician repeated good-humoredly, “Well? How about it? My young ones! Well? Who?”

So I stood up and went to the machine. I just can’t stand an agonized lecturer; it’s a shameful, pitiful, and tortured spectacle.

The back row yelled, “Sasha! Where are you going? Come to your senses!” Sedlovoi’s eyes glittered.

“Permit me,” I said.

“Please, please, of course!” lisped Sedlovoi, seizing me by a finger and dragging me to the machine.

“Just one minute,” I said, pulling away decorously. “Will it take long?”

“Any way you like!” cried out Sedlovoi. “I’ll do just as you tell me…. But you’ll be steering yourself. It’s all very simple.” He seized me again and again drew me toward the machine. “Here’s the wheel. Here is the pedal for coupling into reality. This is the brake. And this is the gas pedal. You drive a car, don’t you? Wonderful! Here is the push button… Where do you want to go? The past or the future?”

“The future,” I said.

“Ah,” he enunciated, in disappointment, it seemed to me. “Into the described future. .. That means all those fantastic novels and utopias. Of course, that’s interesting, too. But take into consideration that the future is probably discrete; there must be tremendous gaps, not covered by any authors. However, it’s all the same. -. OK, then, you will press this button twice. Once, now at the start, and the second time when you wish to return. Do you understand?”

“I understand,” I said. “And what if something should malfunction?”

“Absolutely safe!” He windmilled his arms. “The instant anything goes wrong, even a speck of dust on the contacts, you will immediately be returned here.”

“Be audacious, young man,” continued the magister-academician. “You’ll be telling us everything that is going on in the future. Ha, ha, ha…

I climbed ponderously into the saddle, trying not to look at anyone and feeling exceedingly stupid.

“Press it, press it!” the lecturer whispered passionately.

I pressed the button. It was obviously something similar to a starter. The machine jerked, wheezed, and settled down to a regular vibration.

“The shaft is bent,” Sedlovoi whispered in disappointment, “but it’s all right, it’s nothing… put it in gear. That’s right. Now give it some gas, more gas.

I fed it gas, at the same time smoothly letting out the clutch. The world began to darken. The last I heard in the auditorium was, “And how are we going to keep track of him..

Everything vanished.