‘What’s to guess?’ Semyon muttered. ‘You’ve gathered all the Higher and First-Level Others. Svetlana’s the only one missing.’
‘Svetlana’s not here because she’s not on the staff of the Night Watch,’ Geser said and frowned. ‘I’ve no doubt that Anton will tell her everything. I won’t even attempt to forbid it. But I won’t connive at breaches of the rules, either … this is a meeting of the Night Watch top management. I have to warn Ilya straight away that some of what he hears will be new to him, and under normal circumstances he would never have heard it. So he must not talk about it. Not to anyone.’
‘What exactly is that?’ Ilya asked, adjusting his spectacles.
‘Probably … probably everything that you are about to hear.’
‘A bit more than just “some of it”,’ Ilya said, with a nod. ‘Whatever you say. If you like, I’m willing to accept the mark of the Avenging Fire.’
‘We can dispense with the formalities,’ said Geser. He took a small metal box out of his desk and began rummaging in it. Meanwhile I carried on looking round with my usual curiosity. What made the boss’s office so interesting was the huge number of little items that he kept because he needed them for his work or simply as souvenirs. Something like Pliushkin’s bins in Dead Souls, or a child’s box in which he keeps his most cherished ‘treasures’, or the apartment of some absent-minded collector who’s always forgetting what it is that he actually collects. And the most amazing thing was that nothing ever disappeared, even though there was almost no space left in the cabinets: new exhibits were added all the time.
This time my attention was caught by a small terrarium. It didn’t have a lid, and there was a piece of paper glued to its side, with the letters OOO (or the numbers 000). Standing inside the terrarium was a stupid little toy made in China – a small plastic toilet, with a tarantula squatting on it in a regal pose. At first I thought the spider was dead or made of plastic, but then I noticed its eyes glinting and its mandibles moving. There was another spider crawling across the glass walls: fat and round, looking like a hairy ball with legs. Every now and then the spider stopped and spat a drop of green venom onto the glass, clearly aiming at something outside. At the same time something showered down off the spider into the terrarium. There were some other spiders moving around on the bottom, greedily reaching out their legs to catch the treat. The fortunate ones who managed to grab something began jumping up and down for joy.
‘Interested?’ Geser asked, without looking up.
‘Uh-huh … what is it?’
‘A simulation. You know I like to study self-contained social groups.’
‘And what does this simulation represent?’
‘A very interesting social structure,’ Geser said evasively. ‘In its basic form it should have become the traditional jar of spiders. But here we have two principal spiders, one of whom has taken up a dominant position by climbing onto a high point, while the other is acting as if he is providing protection against external aggression and caring for the members of the community. As long as the dominant spiders remain active, this simulation can continue to function with minimal internal aggression. I just have to spray the inhabitants with beer every now and then to relax them.’
‘But doesn’t anyone ever try to climb out?’ Ilya asked. ‘There’s no lid …’
‘Only very rarely. And only the ones who get fed up of being a spider in a jar. In the first place, the illusion of conflict is constantly maintained. And in the second place, the experimental subjects regard being in the jar as something out of the ordinary.’ Geser finally took some object out of his box and said, ‘All right, that’s enough of the small talk. Here is the first thing for you to think about. What is it?’
We stared in silence at the grey lump of concrete that looked as if it had been chipped out of a wall.
‘Don’t use magic!’ Geser warned us.
‘I know,’ Semyon said guiltily. ‘I remember that incident. A radio microphone. They tried to put it in here in the 1950s … or was it the 1960s? When we were the “Non-Ferrous Mining Equipment Assembly Trust”. Some bright guys from the KGB, wasn’t it?’
‘That’s right,’ said Geser. ‘Back then they were very keen on looking for spies, and on a sudden impulse they decided to check us … we had provoked certain suspicions in the “organs” … It was a good thing that we had our own eyes and ears in the KGB. We organised a campaign of misinformation, certain vigilant comrades managed to get others rebuked for the pointless squandering of expensive equipment … And what about this?’
A huge steel screw glinted in Geser’s hands. To be quite honest, I didn’t even know that they made screws that large.
‘I doubt if you know about this,’ Geser told us. ‘It’s the only attempt – at least, I hope it is – ever made by the Dark Ones to spy on us using human means. In 1979 I had a very difficult conversation with Zabulon, and afterwards we signed an appendix to the agreement on prohibited methods of conflict.’
The screw was put back in the box. In its place two tiny brown ‘tablets’ were taken out.
‘That was when they wanted to take our building away!’ Ilya said brightly. ‘In 1996, wasn’t it?’
Geser nodded.
‘Absolutely right. A certain ambitious young oligarch got the idea that the former state enterprise which had become the “Non-Ferrous Metal Mining Company” looked like a very tasty and absolutely defenceless little morsel of property. However, when their listening devices and external observation revealed the kind of people who simply dropped in for tea and a chat with the old director, the oligarch cut his ambitions back sharply.’
‘That was misinformation as well, of course?’ Olga asked curiously. It seemed that the boss’s unusually complicated introduction was intended for her, because she had missed all these old events.
Semyon giggled and drawled in a voice like Yeltsin’s:
‘You un-der-stand, my friend, you decide important matters at the city level, and you don’t ask for any help … Call round if anything happens.’
Geser smiled and replied:
‘“Call round if anything happens,” is putting it a bit strongly. But never mind, no one judges the victors… Right, those were cases from the past. But here is today’s catch …’
He took something that looked like a Band-Aid out of the box. A thin white square, slightly sticky on one side – it was not easy for Geser to pull it off his finger.
‘Technology is always developing,’ I said, impressed. ‘A microphone and transmitter?’
‘You’ll be surprised to know that there’s a recorder here too,’ Geser told me. ‘Everything is recorded and then shot off in a three-second coded burst once a day. A fine little toy. Expensive. And you can’t buy it just anywhere.’
‘Get to the point, Boris,’ Olga said.
Geser tossed the ‘toy’ back into the box, and glanced round keenly at all of us.
‘A week ago Anton and Semyon spent some time in the city of Edinburgh. Something rather unpleasant happened there: without going into too much detail, a group of Others, including at least one Light One, one Dark One and an Inquisitor, tried to steal one of the most ancient magical artefacts in existence, with the help of paid human assistants who were equipped with magical amulets. The artefact is the so-called “Crown of All Things,” created by the Great Merlin shortly before he withdrew into the Twilight.’
Ilya whistled. Olga said nothing – either she had already heard about this from Geser, or she didn’t think any display of emotion was required.