When we reached this point in our deliberations, Edik suddenly turned gloomy and declared that he didn’t like Photon’s remarks about his untimely death—to which the absolutely tactless Korneev remarked that the death of any magician is always untimely, but it comes to all of us anyway.
“But maybe,” said Roman, “he’ll love you more than the rest of us, so your death will be the only one he’ll remember.” Edik realized he still had a chance of outliving us all, and his mood improved.
However, the talk of death had set our thoughts running on melancholy lines. All of us, except Korneev of course, began feeling sorry for S-Janus. If you thought about it, his situation really was quite terrible. In the first place he was a model example of immense self-sacrifice in the name of science, because he was effectively deprived of any opportunity of benefiting from the fruits of his own ideas. And of course, he had no bright future to look forward to. We were moving toward a world of reason and brotherhood, but with every day that passed he moved further back toward the bloody Nicholas II, serfdom, the cannon fire in Senate Square, and—who could tell?—perhaps even Arakcheev, Biron, and the oprichnina.
And one awful day somewhere in the depths of time he would be met on the waxed floor of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences by a colleague in a powdered wig—a colleague who had already been looking at him rather strangely for a week—who would gasp, throw his hands up in the air, and mumble with eyes full of terror, “Herr Nefstrueff! How can it be, ven only yesterday ze Gazette definitely wrote zat you had passed avay from a stroke…” And he would have to make excuses about a twin brother or false rumors, all the time knowing perfectly well what this conversation meant…
“Stop that,” said Korneev. “Sloppy sentimentalists. He knows the future, doesn’t he? He’s already been in places we won’t reach for ages and ages. And perhaps he knows exactly when we’re all going to die.”
“That’s completely different,” Edik said sadly.
“It’s tough on the old man,” said Roman. “Let’s try to be a bit more gentle and kind with him. Especially you, Vitka. You’re always so rude to him.”
“Well, why does he have to keep pestering me?” Vitka growled. “What were we talking about, where did we see each other…”
“Now you know why he pesters you, so behave yourself.”
Vitka scowled and began demonstratively perusing the list of questions.
“We have to explain everything to him in more detail,” I said. “Everything that we know. We have to predict his immediate future for him.”
“Yes, damn it!” said Roman. “This winter he broke his leg. On the black ice.”
“We have to prevent it,” I said firmly.
“What?” said Roman. “Do you realize what you’re saying? His leg had mended ages before then.”
“But he hasn’t broken it yet,” Edik objected.
We sat there for a few minutes trying to work it all out. Then Vitka suddenly said, “Hang on! What about this, guys? There’s still one question we haven’t crossed out.”
“Which one?”
“What happened to the feather?”
“What happened to it?” said Roman. “It skipped to the eighth. And on the eighth I turned the furnace on and smelled something…”
“So what?”
“But I threw it in the wastepaper basket. On the eighth, the seventh, and the sixth I didn’t see it… Hmm… Where did it get to?”
“The cleaning woman threw it out,” I suggested.
“It’s a very interesting problem though,” said Edik. “Let’s assume no one burned it. What’s it going to look like in ages past?”
“There are even more interesting problems than that,” said Vitka. “For instance, what happens to Janus’s shoes when he wears them back to the day they were made at the Footman Factory? And what happens to the food he eats for supper? And in general…”
But we were already exhausted. We carried on arguing for a while, then Sasha Drozd arrived and shoved us, still arguing, off the sofa, switched on his Spidola, and started trying to borrow two rubles. “Oh, come on,” he whined.
“We haven’t got it,” we told him.
“Come on, you must have a couple left… Let me have it!”
We couldn’t carry on arguing like that, and we decided to go to lunch.
“In the final analysis,” said Edik, “our hypothesis isn’t really all that fantastic. Maybe S-Janus’s true story is far more amazing.”
Maybe it is, we thought, and went to the cafeteria.
I stopped by the computer room for a moment to let them know I was going to lunch. In the corridor I ran into S-Janus, who looked at me closely, smiled, and for some reason asked if we’d seen each other yesterday.
“No, Janus Polyeuctivich,” I said. “We didn’t see each other yesterday. You weren’t in the Institute yesterday. Early yesterday morning you flew to Moscow.”
“Ah yes,” he said. “I’d forgotten.”
He gave me such a kindly smile that I decided to do it. It was rather impertinent, of course, but I knew Janus Polyeuctovich had been well disposed toward me just recently, and that meant there couldn’t be any serious kind of incident between us now. I asked in a low voice, looking around cautiously, “Janus Polyeuctovich, would it be all right if I asked you a question?”
He raised his eyebrows and looked at me intently for a while, then, evidently recalling something, he said, “By all means. Just one?”
I realized he was right. There was no way I could fit everything into a single question. Was there going to be a war? Would I turn out all right? Would they find the recipe for universal happiness? Would the last fool ever die?
I said, “May I stop in to see you tomorrow morning?”
He shook his head, and I thought I detected a slight note of mockery in his answer. “No, that’s quite impossible. Tomorrow morning, Alexander Ivanovich, you will be summoned to the Kitezhgrad Plant, and I shall have to grant you a temporary reassignment.”
I felt stupid. There was something humiliating about this determinism that condemned me, an independent human being with freedom of will, to absolutely fixed actions that no longer depended on me. It had nothing to do with whether I wanted to go to Kitezhgrad or not. The point was that now I couldn’t die or fall ill or even turn testy and threaten to resign. I was foredoomed, and for the first time I understood the terrible meaning of that word. I had always known that it was bad to be foredoomed to be executed, for instance, or to go blind. But now it turned out that even to be foredoomed to the love of the most wonderful girl in all the world, or an absolutely fascinating voyage around the world, or a trip to Kitezhgrad (which I’d been wanting to visit for the last three months), could be extremely unpleasant too. I suddenly saw knowledge of the future in an entirely new light…