Tale of the Troika

MISCELLANEOUS CASES

We were the last ones to leave the meeting room. I was crushed. Eddie was leading me by the arm. He was also depressed, but under control. Old Edelweiss whirled around us, pulled by the weight of his contraption. He was whispering words of undying love to me, promising to wash my feet and drink the water, and demanded traveling expenses and a per diem. Eddie gave him three rubles and bade him look in the day after tomorrow. Edelweiss managed to sucker him out of another fifty kopecks for hazardous work conditions and disappeared. Then I felt better.

“Don’t despair,” Eddie said. “All is not lost. I have a plan.”

“What?” I asked weakly.

“Did you pay attention to Lavr Fedotovich’s speech?”

“I did. Why do you ask?”

“I was checking to see whether or not he had any brains,” Eddie explained.

“So, what’s the opinion?”

“You saw for yourself that he does. He has brains, and I got them started. They had not been activated at all. Pure bureaucratic reflexes. But I convinced him that he had a real heuristic machine before him and that he was not Vuniukov, but a real administrator with a broad mind. As you see, there was some result. Of course, his psychic rigidity is enormous. When I removed the field, there were no signs of residual deformation. He remained just as he had been. But that was just a trial test. But now I’ll do the proper calculations, adjust the apparatus, and then we’ll see. I cannot believe that he can’t be changed. We’ll turn him into a decent man, and things will be good for us, and for everybody, and for him.”

“I doubt it,” I said.

“You see,” Eddie said, “the theory of positive humanization states that any creature that has at least an iota of reason can be made into a decent creature. It’s another matter that every case needs special methods. So we’ll look for the right approach. Everything will be all right.”

We went out into the street. Snowman Fedya was waiting for us. He got up from the bench and the three of us went down First of May Street arm in arm.

“Was it difficult?” Fedya asked.

“Terrible,” said Eddie. “I’m tired of talking, tired of listening, and on top of that, I think I’ve become decidedly stupider. Fedya, is it noticeable that I’m stupider?”

“Not yet,” Fedya replied shyly. “It’s usually apparent an hour or so later.”

I said: “I’m hungry. I want to forget. Let’s go somewhere and forget. Drink some wine. Have some ice cream.”

Eddie was all for it, and Fedya had no objections, but he did apologize for not drinking wine and having no taste for ice cream.

The streets were crowded, but there was nobody just hanging around the way they do on summer evenings in big cities. The descendants of Oleg’s armies and Peter’s grenadiers sat quietly and culturedly on their stoops shelling seeds in silence. They ate watermelon seeds, sunflower seeds, and pumpkin seeds. They sat on carved stoops with patterns, carved ones with figures, and carved ones with balustrades or on stoops made of simple smooth boards. But they were marvelous stoops, and some were of museum quality, hundreds of years old; those had been taken under government custody and therefore disfigured by metal supports. Somewhere in the background an accordion was playing.

Eddie, looking around with interest, was asking Fedya about life in the mountains. Fedya had developed an abiding love for Eddie and answered readily.

“The worst thing,” Fedya was saying, “are the mountain climbers with guitars. You can’t imagine how terrible it is, Eddie, when in your own quiet mountains, where the only sound comes from avalanches, and then only occasionally, you suddenly hear someone start strumming away and singing about some guy whose love is lost in the misty mountains. It’s a disaster, Eddie. Some of us get sick from this, and the weaker ones actually die.”

“At home I have a clavichord,” he continued dreamily. “Up on the peak I have a clavichord, on top of the glacier. I like to play it on moonlit nights, when it’s quiet and there’s no wind at all. Then the dogs in the valley can hear me and they howl along. Really, Eddie, tears come to my eyes when I think how beautiful it is and how sad. The moon, the music resounding in the distance, and the dogs howling, far far away.”

“How do your friends feel about that?” Eddie asked.

“They’re not there at that time of night. Only one boy usually stays, but he doesn’t disturb me. He’s lame. But this must be boring you.”

“On the contrary, it’s fascinating.”

“No. But you might like to know where I got the clavichord. Can you imagine, it was brought up by mountain climbers. They were setting some record or other, and they had to bring a clavichord up there. We’ve got a lot of strange things up on the peak. Some guy will decide to climb up there on a motorcycle—so we have a motorcycle, even if it’s damaged. We’ve got guitars, bicycles, various statues, antiaircraft guns. One record nut decided to climb to the top in a tractor, but he couldn’t find one. So he tried with a steamroller. You should have seen him struggling. So much effort! But he failed. He couldn’t get it up to the snow level. Five or ten more yards, and we would have had a steamroller, too. Ah, here’s Gabby, I’ll introduce you.”

We had reached a café. On the brightly lit steps of the imposing stone entrance, right by the turnstile, Gabby the Bedbug was struggling. He was dying to get in, but the doorman would not let him. Gabby was having a fit, and consequently exuding an odor strongly reminiscent of Courvoisier cognac. Fedya quickly introduced us, put Gabby in a matchbox, and ordered him to sit still and be quiet. And the bedbug was quiet, but when we got into the café and sat down at an empty table, he lounged in his chair and beat his fist on the table, demanding a waiter. Naturally, he himself could not eat or drink anything in a café, but he demanded justice and a complete correspondence between the work of the waiters’ brigade and the lofty calling that the brigade was striving for. Besides, he was obviously showing off for Eddie. He already knew that Eddie had come to Tmuskorpion specifically to see him and offer him employment. Eddie and I ordered a home-style omelet, shrimp salad, and a bottle of dry wine. They knew Fedya well in the café, and they brought him a plate of grated raw potatoes, carrot tops, and cabbage stumps. Gabby got a plate of stuffed tomatoes, which he had ordered on principle.

Having eaten the salad, I realized that I was insulted and injured, dog-tired, that my tongue refused to function, and that I had no desire to do anything. Besides that, I was jumpy, because in the crowd I could hear the squeaky “I’ll wash your feet and drink the water!” and “the thinker is insade it!” But old Gabby was in fine fettle and was enjoying showing Eddie his philosophical turn of mind, independent opinions, and tendency to universalize.

“What senseless and unpleasant creatures!” he said, looking around the café with a superior air. “Truly, only such clumsy, cud-chewing animals are capable of creating the myth, born out of their inferiority complex, that they are the rulers of the earth. I ask you: How did this myth come about? For instance, we insects consider ourselves the rulers of the earth, and rightly so. We are numerous and ubiquitous, we multiply plentifully but do not waste precious time on senseless worries about posterity. We have sensory organs that you humans can only dream of. We can fall into anabiosis for centuries without any harm to ourselves. The more intelligent representatives of our class are famous as great mathematicians, architects, and sociologists. We have discovered the ideal system of society, we control gigantic territories, and we establish ourselves anywhere we want. Let us put the question this way: What can you humans—by the way, the most highly developed of the mammals—what can you do that we might want to do but can’t? You brag a lot about your ability to create tools and use them. Forgive me, but that is laughable! You’re like cripples who brag about their crutches. You build yourselves dwellings, tortuously, with such expenditures of effort, using unnatural forces like fire and steam, you’ve been building them for thousands of years, and never the same way twice, and still you can’t find a comfortable and rational form of dwelling. Even the pathetic ants, whom I truly despise for their crudeness and glorification of brute strength, solved that simple problem a hundred million years ago—and solved it once and for all. You brag that you are constantly developing, and without limit. We can only laugh. You are searching for something that has been found, patented, and in use since time immemorial, namely: a rational social order and a meaningful existence.”

Eddie was listening with professional attention, and Fedya, chewing on a cabbage stump with his excellent teeth, spoke:

“I’m a weak dialectician, of course, but I was brought up to believe that the human mind is nature’s greatest achievement. We in the mountains are used to fearing human wisdom and bowing down before it, and now that I have been educated to a certain degree, I never cease being amazed by the boldness and cleverness with which man has created and continues to create a second nature. The human mind is … is …” He shook his head and stopped talking.

“Second nature!” the bedbug said sarcastically. “The third element, the fourth kingdom, the fifth estate, the sixth wonder of the world. A wise human could have asked what you need a second nature for. You’ve ruined one, and now you’re trying to replace it with another. I’ve said it before, Fedya: a second nature is a cripple’s crutches. As for reason, it’s not for you to talk or for me to listen. For a hundred centuries these skins stuffed with a nourishing mixture have been mouthing off about reason, and they still can’t agree what it is they’re talking about! They agree only on one point: no one but they themselves has reason. That’s really amazing! If a creature is small, if it’s easy to poison with some chemical or simply to squash with a finger, then they look down at it. Such a creature naturally has nothing more than instinct, a primitive irritability, the lowest form of nervous activity. Typical world view of conceited imbeciles. But, after all, they are rational and they have to establish a foundation for everything, so that they can squash insects without guilt pangs.

“And look, Fedya, at their rationalization. Let’s say that a digger wasp lays her eggs in her nest burrow and goes off to look for food for her future young. What do those bandits do? The barbarians steal the eggs and then, reveling in idiotic pleasure, they watch the wretched mother cement up the empty hole. Therefore, the mother is stupid, does not see what she is doing, and therefore she only has instincts, blind instinct, you understand, and not reason—and if necessary, she can be squashed. Do you see how this is vile juggling with terminology? The a priori assumption is that the wasp’s main goal in life is to reproduce and protect her young, and therefore if she is incapable of fulfilling her major goal, then what is she worth? They, humans, they have the cosmos-shmosmos and photosynthesis-shmynthesis and the pathetic wasp has nothing but reproduction, and that only on a primitive instinctual level. Those mammals can’t even imagine that the wasp has a rich spiritual life, that in the short span of her life she wants to succeed in science and in art, those warm-blooded beasts can’t see that she simply doesn’t have the time or the desire to look back at her young, particularly since they are only senseless eggs.

“Of course, wasps have their laws, their behavioral norms, their morals. Since wasps are rather thoughtless by nature when it comes to propagating their kind, the law, of course, stipulates certain punishments for not fulfilling parental obligations. Every decent wasp must follow a prescribed sequence of behavior. She must dig a pit, lay her eggs, bring back a number of paralyzed caterpillars, and block off the hole. This is inspected by silent observers, and a wasp must always assume that an inspector may be lurking behind the nearest rock. Of course, the wasp sees that the eggs have been stolen or that her food stores have been depleted. But she can’t lay the eggs over again and she has no desire to waste time gathering more food. Fully realizing the incongruity of her actions, she makes believe that she has noticed nothing and finishes the program to the very end, because the last thing she wants to do is make the rounds of the nine departments of the Committee for the Preservation of Appearances.

“Fedya, picture a highway, smooth and flat from horizon to horizon. Some experimenter sets up a roadblock with a detour sign. Visibility is fine, and the driver sees that there is nothing threatening him on the other side of the roadblock. He even suspects that it’s a foolish practical joke, but he follows the rules and regulations like a decent driver, he turns off onto the disgusting side road, and gets shaken and jolted, splashed with mud, and wastes a lot of time and energy to get back on the same highway two hundred yards down the road. Why? For the same reasons: he’s law-abiding, and he doesn’t want to be hauled to traffic court, all the more because like the wasp, he has reason to suspect that it’s a trap and that behind those bushes there is a cop on a motorcycle. And now let us suppose that the invisible experimenter sets up the experiment to gauge man’s intellect and that the experimenter is a conceited fool like the one who destroyed the nest. Ha, ha, ha! What conclusion do you think he would come to?” Gabby slapped the table in ecstasy with all his legs.

“No,” said Fedya. “Somehow you oversimplify things, Gabby. Of course, a man can’t shine intellectually when he’s driving.”

“No more so than a wasp laying eggs,” the crafty bedbug interrupted. “You know, that’s no time for intellect.”

“Wait a minute, Gabby, you keep interrupting me. I want to say … Now, see, I forgot what I was about to say. Oh yes! In order to enjoy the grandeur of human reason you have to peruse all the edifices of that reason, all the achievements of science, all the achievements of literature and art. You scoffed at the cosmos, yet the sputniks and rockets are a great step forward—they’re amazing, and you must agree that not a single arthropod is capable of doing it.”

The flea wiggled his antennae in disgust.

“I could argue by saying that arthropods have no need for the cosmos,” he said. “But people don’t need it either, and therefore we will not discuss it. You don’t understand the simplest things, Fedya. Every species has its own dream, historically formed and passed down from generation to generation. The realization of such a dream is what is usually termed a great achievement. Humans have had two such dreams: one was to fly, arising from their envy of insects, and the other to travel to the sun, arising from their ignorance of the distance to the sun. But it cannot be expected that different species, not to mention different classes and phyla, should have the same Great Idea. It would be absurd to imagine that flies dream from generation to generation of free flight, that octopuses dream of the ocean depths, and that we bedbugs—Cimex lectularius—dream of the sun, which we cannot tolerate. Everyone dreams of an unattainable goal that promises pleasure. The hereditary dream of the octopus, as everyone knows, is to travel freely on dry land. And the octopuses spend a lot of time thinking about it in their briny homes. The hereditary and evil dream of viruses is absolute control of the world, and even though their methods are deplorable, you must give them credit for perseverance, inventiveness, and the capability of self-sacrifice for a greater goal.

“And how about the inspired dream of the spiders? Many millions of years ago they rashly climbed out of the sea, and since then they have been struggling to get back into their native element. You should hear their songs and ballads about the sea! Your heart would bleed with pity and compassion. By comparison the heroic myth of Daedalus and Icarus is a joke. And what of it? They’ve made some headway, and in very clever ways, I might add, since arthropods in general are given to ingenious solutions. They’re getting what they want by creating new species. First they created water spiders, then diving spiders, and now they’re going full speed ahead on a water-breathing spider.

“I’m not even talking about us bedbugs. We achieved our dream long ago—back when these skins with nourishing mixture in the veins first appeared. Do you follow me, Fedya? Each species has its own dream. Don’t brag about your achievements before your planetary neighbors. You risk seeming foolish. Those to whom your dreams are foreign will think you stupid, and those who have realized their dreams will think you pathetic boasters.”

“I cannot answer you, Gabby,” Fedya said, “but I must admit that I don’t enjoy listening to you. First of all I don’t like it when crafty casuistry is used to disprove self-evident facts, and secondly, I too am human.”

“You are an abominable snowman. You are the missing link, and that’s all. If you must know, you’re even inedible. But why do I get no argument from Homo sapiens? Why don’t they step in to defend their species, their genus, their class? I will explain; it’s because they have no refutation.”

Attentive Eddie let this challenge slip by. I had an argument, that windbag was irritating me beyond reason, but 1 controlled myself because I knew that Fedor Simeonovich was watching in his magic crystal and could see it all.

“No, no, allow me,” said Fedya. “Yes, I am a snowman. Yes, everyone insults us, even humans, who are our closest relatives and our hope, the symbol of our faith in the future. No, no, Eddie, let me speak my piece. We are insulted by the ignoramuses and lowest strata of human society who call us by the dastardly name Yeti, which, as you know, sounds like the Swiftian Yahoo, and by the name golub yavan which means either huge ape or abominable snowman. We are insulted by the most progressive representatives of humanity as well, who call us missing links, humanoid apes, and other scientific-sounding but derogatory names. Perhaps we are worthy of a certain disdain. We think slowly, we are not ambitious, our striving for something better is very weak, and our reason is still slumbering. But I believe, I know, that it is a human reason, which finds the greatest pleasure in transforming nature—first the environment, and then itself.”

Fedya looked at the bedbug sternly. “You, Gabby, are just a parasite. Forgive me, but I’m using the term in the scientific sense. I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but you are a parasite, and you don’t understand what a great pleasure it is to transform nature. And what a future the pleasure has! After all, nature is infinite, and it can be transformed infinitely. That’s why man is called the ruler of nature. Because he not only studies nature, and not only finds a lofty but passive pleasure in communing with it, but because he transforms nature, sculpts it according to his wishes.”

Gabby immediately counterattacked. “Yes! And meanwhile, man takes a certain Fedya by his hairy shoulders and brings him on stage and asks this Fedya to demonstrate the process of an ape’s humaniza-tion for a crowd of seed-cracking hicks. Attention, step right up!” the bedbug shouted. “Tonight the club presents a lecture on Darwinism Versus Religion by Candidate of Sciences Vyalobuev-Frankenstein with a live demonstration of the humanization of an ape! Act One—Ape. Fedya sits under the lecturer’s table, scratching his underarms and gazing nostalgically around the room. Act Two—Ape-Man. Fedya, clutching a broom handle, wanders around the stage, looking for something to hit. Act Three—Man-Ape. Fedya, under the watchful eye of a fireman, starts a small fire on a metal grid and acts out simultaneous terror and joy. Act Four—Man Creates Labor. Fedya, using a broken hammer, plays a prehistoric smithy. Act Five—Apotheosis. Fedya sits at the piano and plays the Turkish March. Lecture begins at six p.m. and after the lecture a new foreign film, On the Last Shores, and a dance!”

Fedya, extremely flattered, smiled shyly.

“Well, of course, Gabby,” he said, touched. “I knew that we had no basic disagreement. Of course, that’s exactly how reason creates its beneficial miracles, slow and easy, promising future Archimedes, Newtons, and Einsteins. But you shouldn’t exaggerate my role in this cultural undertaking. Though I understand, you’re just trying to be nice.”

The bedbug looked at us, flabbergasted, and I snickered maliciously. Fedya was worried.

“Did I say something wrong?”

“You’re just fine,” I said. “You put him in his place so well it’ll take him days to recover. Look, he’s even eating the stuffed tomatoes.”

“Yes, Gabby, I’m listening to you with great interest,” Eddie said. “I have no intention of arguing with you, of course, because I hope we’ll have many arguments ahead of us on much more important topics. I would like to say, however, that unfortunately I find too much of the human in your thinking and too little of the original, the unique psychology of Cimex lectularius.”

“All right, all right,” the bedbug yelled in exasperation. “All well and good. But, perhaps, at least one representative of Homo sapiens would deign to give a straight answer to the questions I was permitted to raise here? Or, I repeat, has he nothing to say? Or does rational man have as little to do with reason as a glass snake has to do with a drinking glass? Or does he have no arguments that would be accessible to the understanding of a creature who has only primitive instincts?”

That’s where I lost my patience. I had an argument accessible to his understanding and I used it with pleasure. I showed Gabby my index finger and then made a motion like wiping a drop from the table top.

“Very witty,” said the bedbug, blanching. “Now that’s really on the level of higher reasoning.”

Fedya timidly asked us to explain the meaning of the pantomime, but Gabby announced that it was all nonsense.

“I’m tired of this place,” he said in an exaggeratedly loud voice, looking around in a lordly manner. “Let’s get out of here.”

I paid up, and we went out into the street, where we stopped, trying to figure out where to go next. Eddie suggested going to a hotel and reserving a room, but Fedya said hotels were no problem in Tmuskorpion. The only residents of the hotel were the members of the Troika, and the rest of the rooms were empty. I looked at the subdued bedbug and felt the pangs of conscience, so I suggested a moonlight walk along the banks of the Skorpionka River. Fedya supported me, but Gabby protested. He was tired, he was bored by endless conversation, and, finally, he was hungry, and he’d better be off to the movies. We felt so sorry for him—he was so shaken and shocked by my gesture, which had been tactless—that we decided to go to the movies with him.

Suddenly old man Edelweiss came barreling out of a beer hall. He held a beer mug in one hand and his contraption in the other. With a liquor-thickened tongue he swore allegiance to science and to me personally and demanded a per diem, high-altitude pay, and expenses for equipment. I gave him a ruble, and he headed straight back into the bar.

On the way to the movies, the bedbug could not settle down. He boasted, picked on passers-by, sparkled with aphorisms and bon mots, but we could tell that he still was not himself. To keep him quiet, Eddie told him what great contributions to the Theory of Linear Happiness they expected from him and transparently hinted at world fame and the inevitability of lengthy trips abroad, including some exotic countries. His emotional balance obviously restored, Gabby cheered up, and as soon as the theater lights went out he went crawling around looking for victims to bite. Eddie and I got no pleasure from being at the movies. Eddie was afraid that someone would squash Gabby, and I was afraid there would be a row. It was stuffy in the theater, the movie was sickening, and we heaved a sigh of relief when it was over.

The moon was shining and there was a cool breeze from the Skorpionka. Fedya told us with embarrassment that he had a schedule and it was his bedtime. We decided to walk him to the Colony. We went along the river. Below the steep banks, the ancient Skorpionka carried poisonous sewage in its crystal currents. On the other shore, meadows spread out in the moonlight. Uneven crowns of a distant forest dotted the horizon. A small flying saucer was circling some dank, decrepit towers marked with warning lights.

The walk turned out to be marvelous. Fedya explained the universe to us, and incidentally, we discovered that he could see Saturn’s rings and the red spot on Jupiter with his naked eye. The envious bedbug heatedly tried to prove that all that was nonsense, and in reality, the universe was shaped like a mattress spring. Kuzma, a shy common pterodactyl, hovered around us. We never did get a good look at him in the dark. We could hear him tromping ahead of us or rustling in the nearby bushes with a feeble quack, and sometimes he would fly up, blocking the moon with his spread wings. We called to him, promising candy and friendship, but he never did come closer.

In the Colony we also met Konstantin, the visitor from outer space. Konstantin was very unfortunate. His flying saucer made a forced landing last year. The saucer was totaled, and Konstantin couldn’t remove the protective force field that was automatically created at landing. The field did not allow anything foreign to pass through. Konstantin could carry his clothes and engine parts through its lavender membrane without any problems. But the family of field mice that happened to be in the landing site had to stay there, and Konstantin was forced to feed them with his rapidly depleting supplies, since he couldn’t get earth food inside the protective shield even in his own stomach. Also left inside the shield were a pair of sneakers, forgotten by somebody on a park path, and these were the only earthly goods that were of any use to Konstantin. Besides the sneakers and the mice, the shield had trapped two bushes of spurge laurel, part of an ugly park bench, carved with all kinds of graffiti, and a quarter acre of damp soil that never dried out.

Things were bad for Konstantin. He couldn’t repair his ship. The local repair shops naturally did not have the right spare parts or the special tools he needed. He could have gotten some things from the scientific centers of the world, but for that he needed to work through the Troika. Konstantin had been waiting impatiently for many months to be allowed to see them. He had some hopes of being helped by earthlings, thinking that they would at least be able to remove the damned protective field and bring some famous scientists on board. But generally he was rather pessimistic, prepared for the fact that earth technology would be of no use to him for at least two hundred years.

Konstantin’s flying saucer, glowing like a huge gaslight, was parked not far from the road. His feet were sticking out from under the ship, shod in size twelve sneakers. The family of mice was staring at the feet, persistently demanding their supper. Fedya knocked on the shield, and Konstantin, seeing us, slid out from under the saucer. He yelled at the mice and came out to greet us. The famous sneakers naturally remained inside, and the mice immediately turned them into a temporary home. We were introduced, expressed our sympathy, and asked how things were going. Konstantin announced heartily that things seemed to be getting started, and listed two dozen items we had never heard of that he needed. He turned out to be a very convivial and friendly rational creature. Or maybe he had just grown lonely for company. We asked questions and he answered them readily. But he did not look at all well, and we told him that it was bad to work so much and that it was time for sleep. Ten minutes later we had explained what “sleep” was, and he allowed as how it did not interest him a bit and that it would be better if he didn’t take it up. And besides, it was time to feed the mice. He shook our hands and crawled back under the saucer. We bade Fedya and the bedbug goodnight and headed for the hotel. It was late, and the city was falling asleep—only far away we could hear accordion music and sweet pure girlish voices singing: