Part 19 (1/2)

”Let me never grow old,” she said.

”Excellent,” I said. ”That's one.”

”Let me...” she began inspiredly and stopped.

I used to enjoy tremendously asking my friends this very question and used to ask it at every available opportunity.

Several times I even a.s.signed compositions to my youngsters on the theme of three wishes. And it was always most amusing that out of a thousand men and women, oldsters and children, only two or three dozen figured that it is possible to wish not only for themselves personally, or their immediate close ones, but also for the world at large, for mankind as a whole. No, this was not witness to the ineradicable human egotism; the wishes were not invariably strictly selfish, and the majority in subsequent discussions, when reminded of missed opportunities and the large problems of all mankind, did a double take and in honest anger reproached me that I hadn't explained at the beginning. But one way or another they all began their reply along the lines of ”Let me...” This was a manifestation of some kind of ancient subconscious conviction that your own personal wishes cannot change anything in the wide world, and it makes no difference whether you do or do not have a magic wand.

”Let me...” began Vousi once more, and again was silent. I was watching her surrept.i.tiously. She noticed this, and dissolving into a broad smile, said with a wave of her hand, ”So that's your game. Some card you are!”

”No -- no -- no,” I said. ”You should always be prepared to answer this question. Because I knew a man once who always asked it of everyone, and then was inconsolable -- 'Oh what an opportunity I missed, how could I not have figured it out?' So you see it's entirely in earnest. Your first wish is never to grow old. And then?”

”Let's see -- what else? Of course, it would be nice to have a handsome fellow, whom they would all chase, but who would be with me only. Always.”

”Wonderful,” I said. ”That's two. And what else?”

Her face showed that the game had already palled on her, and that any second she'd drop a bomb. And she did. All I could do was blink my eyes.

”Yes,” I said, ”of course that, too. But that happens even without any magic.”

”Yes and no,” she argued and began to develop the idea, based on the misfortunes of her clients. All of which was very gay and amusing to her, while I, in ignominious confusion, gulped brandy with lemon and t.i.ttered in embarra.s.sment, feeling like a virgin wall flower. Well, if all this went on in a night club, I could handle it. Well, well, well... some fine activities go on in those salons of the Good Mood. How do you like these elderly ladies...

”Enough,” I said. ”Vousi, you embarra.s.s me, and anyway I understand it all very well now. I can see that it's really impossible to do without magic. It's a good thing that I am not a magician.”

”I really stung you well,” she said happily. ”And what would you wish for yourself, now?”

I decided I'd reciprocate in kind.

”I don't need anything of that sort,” I said. ”Anyway, I am not good at things like that. I'd like a good solid slug.”

She smiled gaily.

”I don't need three wishes,” I explained, ”I can do with one.”

She was still smiling, but the smile became empty, then crooked, and then disappeared altogether.

”What?” she said in a small voice.

”Vousi!” I said, getting up. ”Vousi!”

She didn't seem to know what to do. She jumped up and then sat down and then jumped up again. The coffee table fell over with all the bottles. There were tears in her eyes, and her face looked pitiable, like that of a child who has been brutally, insolently, cruelly, tauntingly deceived. Suddenly she bit her lip and with all her strength slapped my face.

While I was blinking, she, now in full tears, kicked away the overturned table and ran out of the room. I sat, with my mouth open. An engine roared into life and lights sprang up in the dark garden, followed by the sound of the motor traversing the yard and disappearing in the distance.

I felt my face. Some joke. Never in my life have I joked so effectively. What an old fool I was! How do you like that for a slug?

”May we?” asked Len. He stood in the door, and he was not alone. With him was a gloomy, freckle-faced boy with a cleanly shaved head.

”This is Reg,” said Len. ”Could he sleep here too?”

”Reg,” I said, pensively smoothing my eyelids. ”Of course -- even two Regs would be okay. Listen, Len, why didn't you come ten minutes earlier!”

”But she was here,” said Len. ”We were looking in the window, waiting for her to leave.”

”Really?” I said. ”Very interesting. Reg, old chum, how about what your parents will say?”

Reg didn't reply. Len said, ”He doesn't have parents.”

”Well, all right,” I said, feeling a bit tired. ”You're not going to have a pillow fight?”

”No,” said Len, not smiling, ”we are going to sleep.”

”Fair enough,” I said. ”I'll make your beds and you can give all this a quick clean-up.”

I made their beds on the couch and the big chair and they took off their clothes at once and went to bed. I locked the door to the hall, turned out their lights, and went into my bedroom, where I sat awhile listening to them whispering, moving furniture, and settling down. Then they were quiet.

About eleven o'clock there was the sound of broken gla.s.s somewhere in the house. Aunt Vaina's voice could be heard singing some sort of marching song, followed by more breaking gla.s.s. Apparently the tireless Pete again was falling down face first. From the center of town came the cry of ”s.h.i.+vers, s.h.i.+vers.” Someone was loudly sick on the street.

I locked the window and lowered the shades. I also locked the door to the study. Then I went to the bathroom and turned on the hot water. I did everything per instructions. The radio went on the soap shelf, I threw several Devon tablets in the water, together with some salt crystals, and was about to swallow the tablet when I remembered that it was propitious to ”loosen up.” I didn't want to disturb the boys, but it wasn't necessary -- an open bottle of brandy stood in the medicine chest. I took a few swallows right out of the bottle, stripped down to the skin, climbed into the bath, and turned on the radio.

Chapter ELEVEN.

I intentionally did not set the thermo-regulator, so that when the water cooled off, I returned to consciousness. The radio was still shrieking and the sparkle of white light on the walls hurt my eyes. I was thoroughly chilled and covered with goose b.u.mps. Switching off the radio, I turned on the hot water and remained in the bath, basking in the flooding warmth and a very strange, very novel sensation of total, cosmically enormous emptiness. I expected a hangover, but there wasn't any. I simply felt good. And there were very many memories.

Also my thoughts flowed inordinately well, as though after a long rest in the mountains.

In the middle of the last century, Olds and Miller had conducted experiments on brain stimulation. They inserted electrodes into the brains of white rats. They employed a primitive technology and a barbarous methodology, but having located pleasure centers in the rats' brains, they succeeded in having the animals press the lever which closed the contacts to the electrodes, hour after hour, producing up to eight thousand auto-excitations per hour. These rats did not need anything in the real world. They weren't in the slightest interested in anything but the lever. They ignored food, water, danger, females; they were indifferent to everything except the stimulation lever. Later, these experiments were tried on monkeys and produced the same results. Rumors were about that someone carried out similar experiments on criminals condemned to death....

That was a difficult time for mankind: a time of struggle against atomic destruction, a time of increasing limited wars over the entire face of the planet, a time when the majority of mankind was starving, but even so, the contemporary English writer and critic Kingsley Amis, having learned of the experiments with rats, wrote: ”I cannot be sure that this frightens me more than a Berlin or a Taiwan crisis, but it should, I believe, frighten me more.” He feared much about the future, this brilliant and venomous author of New Maps of h.e.l.l, and: in particular, he foresaw the possibilities of brain stimulation for the creation of an illusory existence, just as intense as the actual, or more intense.

By the end of the century, when the first triumphs of wave psychotechnology were realized, and when psychiatric wards began to empty, amid the chorus of exulting cries of science commentators, the little brochure by Krinitsky and Milanovitch had sounded like an irritating dissonance. In its concluding section the Soviet educators wrote approximately as follows: In the overwhelming majority of countries, the education of the young exists on the level of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This ancient system of education always did and continues to posit as its objective, first of all and above all, the preparation for society of qualified but stupefied contributors to the production process. This system is not interested in all the other potentialities of the human mind, and for this reason, outside of the production process, man, en ma.s.se, remains psychologically a cave dweller, Man the Uneducated. The disuse of these potentialities causes the individuals' inability to comprehend our complex world in all its contradictions, to correlate psychologically incompatible concepts and phenomena, to obtain pleasure from the examination of connections and laws when these do not pertain directly to the satisfaction of the most primitive social instincts. In other words, this system of education for all practical purposes does not develop in man pure imagination, untrammeled vision, and as an immediate consequence, the sense of humor.

The Uneducated Man perceives the world as some sort of essentially trivial, routine, and traditionally simple process, a world from which it is possible only by dint of great effort to extract pleasures which are, in the end, also compulsively routine and traditional. But even the unutilized potentialities remain, apparently, a hidden reality of the human brain. The problem for scientific education consists precisely in initiating the action of these possibilities, in teaching man to dream, in bringing the multiordinality and variety of psychic a.s.sociations into quant.i.tative and qualitative coordination with the multiordinality and variety of interrelations.h.i.+ps in the world of reality. This problem is the one which, as is well known, must become the fundamental one for mankind in the coming proximate epoch. But until this problem is resolved, there remains some basis to fear that the successes of psychotechnics will lead to such methods of electrical stimulation as will endow man with an illusory existence which can exceed the real existence in intensity and variety by a considerable margin. And if one remembers that imagination allows man to be both a rational being and a sensual animal, and if one adds to that the fact that the psychic subject matter evoked by the Uneducated Man for his illusory life of splendor derives from the darkest, most primitive reflexes, then it is not hard to perceive the awful temptation hidden in such possibilities.

And therefore -- slug.

It is now understandable, I thought, why they write the word ”slug” on fences.

Everything is now understandable. It's odious, that I understand.... Better if I understood nothing, better if, upon regaining consciousness, I shrugged my shoulders and climbed out of the bath. Would it have been understandable to Strogoff and Einstein and Petrarch? Imagination is a priceless gift, but it must not be given an inward direction. Only outward, only outward... What a tasty worm some corrupter has dropped from his rod into this stagnant pool! And how accurately timed! Yes indeed, if I were commander of Wells' Martians, I would not have bothered with fighter tripods, heat rays, and other such nonsense. Illusory existence ... no, this is not a narcotic, a narcotic has a long way to go to approach it. In a. way this is exactly appropriate. Here. Now. To each time its own. Poppy seeds and hemp, the kingdom of sweet blurred shadows and peace -- for the beggar, the worn-out, the downtrodden... But here no one wants peace, here no one is dying of hunger, here is simply a bore. A well-fed, well-heated, drunken bore. It's not that the world is bad, it's just plain dreary. World without prospects, world without promise. But in the end man is not a carp, he still remains a man. Yes, it is no kingdom of shades, it is indeed the real existence, without detraction, without dreary confusion. Slug is moving on the world and the world will not mind subjecting itself to it.

Suddenly, for a fraction of a moment, I felt that I was lost. And it was cozy to be destroyed. Fortunately I grew angry. Splas.h.i.+ng out water, I climbed out of the bath, cursing and stoking my ire, pulled my shorts and s.h.i.+rt over my wet body, and grabbed my watch. It was three o'clock, and it could have been three in the afternoon or three the following morning or three o'clock after a hundred years. Idiot, I thought, pulling on my trousers. Softened up and let Buba go when he was ready to give me the address of the gangsters' den. The operatives could have been there by now and we could have nabbed the whole accursed nest, the vile nest. The vermin nest.

The repulsive cloaca... And at this instant against the very depth of my consciousness, like a dancing spot of light, flicked a very calm thought. But I could not fasten upon it.

I located some Potomac in the medicine cabinet, the strongest stimulant which I could find in it. I started into the living room, but the youngsters were snoring away there, so I climbed out the window. The city was resting, of course.