its cream-painted walls. Neither the absurd rumours circulating around
Moscow about terrible dragons, nor the newsboys' shouts about a strange
telegram in the evening paper reached his ears. Docent Ivanov had gone to
see TsarFyodor Ivanovich at the Arts Theatre, so there was no one to tell
the Professor the news.
Around midnight Persikov arrived at Prechistenka and went to bed, where
he read an English article in the Zoological Proceedings received from
London. Then he fell asleep, like the rest of late-night Moscow. The only
thing that did not sleep was the big grey building set back in Tverskaya
Street where the Izvestia rotary presses clattered noisily, shaking the
whole block. There was an incredible din and confusion in the office of the
duty editor. He was rampaging around with bloodshot eyes like a madman, not
knowing what to do, and sending everyone to the devil. The maker-up followed
close on his heels, breathing out wine fumes and saying:
"It can't be helped, Ivan Vonifatievich. Let them bring out a special
supplement tomorrow. We can't take the paper off the presses now."
Instead of going home, the compositors clustered together reading the
telegrams that were now arriving in a steady stream, every fifteen minutes
or so, each more eerie and disturbing than the one before. Alfred Bronsky's
pointed hat flashed by in the blinding pink light of the printing office,
and the fat man with the artificial leg scraped and hobbled around. Doors
slammed in the entrance and reporters kept dashing up all night. The
printing office's twelve telephones were busy non-stop, and the exchange
almost automatically replied to the mysterious calls by giving the engaged
signal, while the signal horns beeped constantly before the sleepless eyes
of the lady telephonists.
The compositors had gathered round the metal-legged ocean-going
captain, who was saying to them:
"They'll have to send aeroplanes with gas."
"They will and all," replied the compositors. "It's a downright
disgrace, it is!" Then the air rang with foul curses and a shrill voice
cried:
"That Persikov should be shot!"
"What's Persikov got to do with it?" said someone in the crowd. "It's
that son-of-a-bitch at the farm who should be shot."
"There should have been a guard!" someone shouted.
"Perhaps it's not the eggs at all."
The whole building thundered and shook from the rotary machines, and it
felt as if the ugly grey block was blazing in an electrical conflagration.
Far from ceasing with the break of a new day, the pandemonium grew more
intense than ever, although the electric lights went out. One after another
motorbikes and automobiles raced into the asphalted courtyard. All Moscow
rose to don white sheets of newspapers like birds. They fluttered down and
rustled in everyone's hands. By eleven a.m. the newspaper-boys had sold out,
although that month they were printing a million and a half copies of each
issue of Izvestia. Professor Persikov took the bus from Prechistenka to the
Institute. There he was greeted by some news. In the vestibule stood three
wooden crates neatly bound with metal strips and covered with foreign labels
in German, over which someone had chalked in Russian: "Eggs. Handle with
care!"
The Professor was overjoyed.
"At last!" he cried. "Open the crates at once, Pankrat, only be careful
not to damage the eggs. And bring them into my office."
Pankrat carried out these instructions straightaway, and a quarter of
an hour later in the Professor's office, strewn with sawdust and scraps of
paper, a voice began shouting angrily.
"Are they trying to make fun of me?" the Professor howled, shaking his
fists and waving a couple of eggs. "That Poro-syuk's a real beast. I won't
be treated like this. What do you think they are, Pankrat?"
"Eggs, sir," Pankrat replied mournfully.
"Chicken eggs, see, the devil take them! What good are they to me? They
should be sent to that rascal on his state farm!"
Persikov rushed to the phone, but did not have time to make a call.
"Vladimir Ipatych! Vladimir Ipatych!" Ivanov's voice called urgently
down the Institute's corridor.
Persikov put down the phone and Pankrat hopped aside to make way for
the decent. The latter hurried into the office and, contrary to his usual
gentlemanly practice, did not even remove the grey hat sitting on his head.
In his hand he held a newspaper.
"Do you know what's happened, Vladimir Ipatych?" he cried, waving
before Persikov's face a sheet with the headline "Special Supplement" and a
bright coloured picture in the middle.
"Just listen to what they've done!" Persikov shouted back at him, not
listening. "They've sent me some chicken eggs as a nice surprise. That
Porosyuk's a positive cretin, just look!"
Ivanov stopped short. He stared in horror at the open crates, then at
the newspaper, and his eyes nearly popped out of his head.
"So that's it," he gasped. "Now I understand. Take a look at this,
Vladimir Ipatych." He quickly unfolded the paper and pointed with trembling
fingers at the coloured picture. It showed an olive-coloured snake with
yellow spots swaying like terrible fire hose in strange smudgy foliage. It
had been taken from a light aeroplane flying cautiously over the snake.
"What is that in your opinion, Vladimir Ipatych?"
Persikov pushed the spectacles onto his forehead, then pulled them back
onto his nose, stared at the photograph and said in great surprise:
"Well, I'll be damned. It's ... it's an anaconda. A boa constrictor..."
Ivanov pulled off his hat, sat down on a chair and said, banging the
table with his fist to emphasise each word:
"It's an anaconda from Smolensk Province, Vladimir Ipatych. What a
monstrosity! That scoundrel has hatched out snakes instead of chickens,
understand, and they are reproducing at the same fantastic rate as frogs!"
"What's that?" Persikov exclaimed, his face turning ashen. "You're
joking, Pyotr Stepanovich. How could he have?"
Ivanov could say nothing for a moment, then regained the power of
speech and said, poking a finger into the open crate where tiny white heads
lay shining in the yellow sawdust:
"That's how."
"Wha-a-at?" Persikov howled, as the truth gradually dawned on him.
"You can be sure of it. They sent your order for snake and ostrich eggs
to the state farm by mistake, and the chicken eggs to you."
"Good grief ... good grief," Persikov repeated, his face turning a
greenish white as he sank down onto a stool.
Pankrat stood petrified by the door, pale and speechless. Ivanov jumped
up, grabbed the newspaper and, pointing at the headline with a sharp nail,
yelled into the Professor's ear:
"Now the fun's going to start alright! What will happen now, I simply
can't imagine. Look here, Vladimir Ipatych." He yelled out the first passage
to catch his eye on the crumpled newspaper: "The snakes are swarming in the
direction of Mozhaisk ... laying vast numbers of eggs. Eggs have been
discovered in Dukhovsky District... Crocodiles and ostriches have appeared.
Special armed units... and GPU detachments put an end to the panic in Vyazma
by burning down stretches of forest outside the town and checking the
reptiles' advance..."
With an ashen blotched face and demented eyes, Persikov rose from the
stool and began to gasp:
"An anaconda! A boa constrictor! Good grief!" Neither Ivanov nor
Pankrat had ever seen him in such a state before.
The Professor tore off his tie, ripped the buttons off his shirt,
turned a strange paralysed purple and staggered out with vacant glassy eyes.
His howls echoed beneath the Institute's stone vaulting.
"Anaconda! Anaconda!" they rang.
"Go and catch the Professor!" Ivanov cried to Pankrat who was hopping
up and down with terror on the spot. "Get him some water. He's had a fit."
A frenzied electrical night blazed in Moscow. All the lights were
burning, and the flats were full of lamps with the shades taken off. No one
was asleep in the whole of Moscow with its population of four million,
except for small children. In their apartments people ate and drank whatever
came to hand, and the slightest cry brought fear-distorted faces to the
windows on all floors to stare up at the night sky criss-crossed by
searchlights. Now and then white lights flared up, casting pale melting
cones over Moscow before they faded away. There was the constant low drone
of aeroplanes. It was particularly frightening in Tverskaya-Yamskaya Street.
Every ten minutes trains made up of goods vans, passenger carriages of
different classes and even tank-trucks kept arriving at Alexandrovsky
Station with fear-crazed folk clinging to them, and Tverskaya-Yamskaya was
packed with people riding in buses and on the roofs of trams, crushing one
another and getting run over. Now and then came the anxious crack of shots
being fired above the crowd at the station. That was the military
detachments stopping panic-stricken demented people who were running along
the railway track from Smolensk Province to Moscow. Now and then the glass
in the station windows would fly out with a light frenzied sob and the steam
engines start wailing. The streets were strewn with posters, which had been
dropped and trampled on, while the same posters stared out from the walls
under the hot red reflectors. Everyone knew what they said, and no one read
them any more. They announced that Moscow was now under martial law.
Panicking was forbidden on threat of severe punishment, and Red Army
detachments armed with poison gas were already on their way to Smolensk
Province. But the posters could not stop the howling night. In their
apartments people dropped and broke dishes and vases, ran about banging into
things, tied and untied bundles and cases in the vain hope of somehow
getting to Kalanchevskaya Square and Yaroslavl or Nikolayevsky Station. But,
alas, all the stations to the north and east were surrounded by a dense
cordon of infantry, and huge lorries, swaying and rattling their chains,
piled high with boxes on top of which sat Red Army men in pointed helmets,
bayonets at the ready, were evacuating gold bullion from the vaults of the
People's Commissariat of Finances and large crates marked "Tretyakov
Gallery. Handle with care!" Cars were roaring and racing all over Moscow.
Far away in the sky was the reflected glow of a fire, and the constant
boom of cannons rocked the dense blackness of August.
Towards morning, a huge snake of cavalry, thousands strong, hooves
clattering on the cobble-stones, wended its way up Tverskaya through
sleepless Moscow, which had still not extinguished a single light. Everyone
in its path huddled against entrances and shop-windows, knocking in panes of
glass. The ends of crimson helmets dangled down grey backs, and pike tips
pierced the sky. At the sight of these advancing columns cutting their way
through the sea of madness, the frantic, wailing crowds of people seemed to
come to their senses. There were hopeful shouts from the thronged pavements.
"Hooray! Long live the cavalry!" shouted some frenzied women's voices.
"Hooray!" echoed some men.
"We'll be crushed to death!" someone wailed.
"Help!" came shouts from the pavement.
Packets of cigarettes, silver coins and watches flew into the columns
from the pavements. Some women jumped out into the roadway, at great risk,
and ran alongside the cavalry, clutching the stirrups and kissing them.
Above the constant clatter of hooves rose occasional shouts from the platoon
commanders:
"Rein in."
There was some rowdy, lewd singing and the faces in cocked crimson
helmets stared from their horses in the flickering neon lights of
advertisements. Now and then, behind the columns of open-faced cavalry, came
weird figures, also on horseback, wearing strange masks with pipes that ran
over their shoulders and cylinders strapped to their backs. Behind them
crawled huge tank-trucks with long hoses like those on fire-engines. Heavy
tanks on caterpillar tracks, shut tight, with narrow shinning loopholes,
rumbled along the roadway. The cavalry columns gave way to grey armoured
cars with the same pipes sticking out and white skulls painted on the sides
over the words "Volunteer-Chem. Poison gas".
"Let 'em have it, lads!" the crowds on the pavements shouted. "Kill the
reptiles! Save Moscow!"
Cheerful curses rippled along the ranks. Packets of cigarettes whizzed
through the lamp-lit night air, and white teeth grinned from the horses at
the crazed people. A hoarse heartrending song spread through the ranks:
...No ace, nor queen, nor jack have we, But we'll kill the reptiles
sure as can be. And blast them into eternity...
Loud bursts of cheering surged over the motley throng as the rumour
spread that out in front on horseback, wearing the same crimson helmet as
all the other horsemen, was the now grey-haired and elderly cavalry
commander who had become a legend ten years ago. The crowd howled, and their
hoorays floated up into the sky, bringing a little comfort to their
desperate hearts.
The Institute was dimly lit. The events reached it only as isolated,
confused and vague echoes. At one point some shots rang out under the neon
clock by the Manege. Some marauders who had tried to loot a flat in
Volkhonka were being shot on the spot There was little traffic in the street
here. It was all concentrated round the railway stations. In the Professor's
room, where a single lamp burned dimly casting a circle of light on the
desk, Persikov sat silently, head in hands. Streak of smoke hung around him.
The ray in the chamber had been switched off. The frogs in the terrariums
were silent, for they were already asleep. The Professor was not working or
reading. At his side, under his left elbow, lay the evening edition of
telegrams in the narrow column, which announced that Smolensk was in flames
and artillery were bombarding the Mozhaisk forest section by section,
destroying deposits of crocodile eggs in all the damp ravines. It also
reported that a squadron of aeroplanes had carried out a highly successful
operation near Vyazma, spraying almost the whole district with poison gas,
but there were countless human losses in the area because instead of leaving
it in an orderly fashion, the population had panicked and made off in small
groups to wherever the fancy took them. It also said that a certain
Caucasian cavalry division on the way to Mozhaisk had won a brilliant
victory against hordes of ostriches, killing the lot of them and destroying
huge deposits of ostrich eggs. The division itself had suffered very few
losses. There was a government announcement that if it should prove
impossible to keep the reptiles outside the 120-mile zone around Moscow, the
capital would be completely evacuated. Office- and factory-workers should
remain calm. The government would take the strictest measures to avoid a
repetition of the Smolensk situation, as a result of which, due to the
pandemonium caused by a sudden attack from rattlesnakes numbering several
thousands, the town had been set on fire in several places when people had
abandoned burning stoves and begun a hopeless mass exodus. It also announced
that Moscow's food supplies would last for at least six months and that a
committee under the Commander-in-Chief was taking urgent measures to armour
apartments against attacks by reptiles in the streets of the capital, if the
Red Army and aeroplanes did not succeed in halting their advance.
The Professor read none of this, but stared vacantly in front of him
and smoked. Apart from him there were only two other people in the
Institute, Pankrat and the house-keeper, Maria Stepanovna, who kept bursting
into tears. This was her third sleepless night, which she was spending in
the Professor's laboratory, because he flatly refused to leave his only
remaining chamber, even though it had been switched off. Maria Stepanovna
had taken refuge on the oilcloth-covered divan, in the shade in the corner,
and maintained a grief-stricken silence, watching the kettle with the
Professor's tea boil on the tripod of a Bunsen Burner. The Institute was
quiet. It all happened very suddenly.
Some loud angry cries rang out in the street, making Maria Stepanovna
jump up and scream. Lamps flashed outside, and Pankrat's voice was heard in
the vestibule. The Professor misinterpreted this noise. He raised his head
for a moment and muttered: "Listen to them raving... what can I do now?"
Then he went into a trance again. But he was soon brought out of it. There
was a terrible pounding on the iron doors of the Institute in Herzen Street,
and the walls trembled. Then a whole section of mirror cracked in the
neighbouring room. A window pane in the Professor's laboratory was smashed
as a grey cobble-stone flew through it, knocking over a glass table. The
frogs woke up in the terrariums and began to croak. Maria Stepanovna rushed
up to the Professor, clutched his arm and cried: "Run away, Vladimir
Ipatych, run away!" The Professor got off the revolving chair, straightened
up and crooked his finger, his eyes flashing for a moment with a sharpness
which recalled the earlier inspired Persikov.
"I'm not going anywhere," he said. "It's quite ridiculous. They're
rushing around like madmen. And if the whole of Moscow has gone crazy, where
could I go? And please stop shouting. What's it got to do with me? Pankrat!"
he cried, pressing the button.
He probably wanted Pankrat to stop all the fuss, which he had never
liked. But Pankrat was no longer in a state to do anything. The pounding had
ended with the Institute doors flying open and the sound of distant gunfire.
But then the whole stone building shook with a sudden stampede, shouts and
breaking glass. Maria Stepanovna seized hold of Persi-kov's arms and tried
to drag him away, but he shook her off, straightened himself up to his full
height and went into the corridor, still wearing his white coat.
"Well?" he asked. The door burst open, and the first thing to appear on
the threshold was the back of a soldier with a red long-service stripe and a
star on his left sleeve. He was firing his revolver and retreating from the
door, through which a furious crowd was surging. Then he turned and shouted
at Persikov:
"Run for your life, Professor! I can't help you anymore."
His words were greeted by a scream from Maria Stepanovna. The soldier
rushed past Persikov, who stood rooted to the spot like a white statue, and
disappeared down the dark winding corridors at the other end. People rushed
through the door, howling:
"Beat him! Kill him..."
"The villain!"
"You let the reptiles loose!"
The corridor was a swarming mass of contorted faces and torn clothes. A
shot rang out. Sticks were brandished. Persikov stepped back and half-closed
the door of his room, where Maria Stepanovna was kneeling on the floor in
terror, then stretched out his arms like one crucified. He did not want to
let the crowd in and shouted angrily:
"It's positive madness. You're like wild animals. What do you want?"
Then he yelled: "Get out of here!" and finished with the curt, familiar
command: "Get rid of them, Pankrat."
But Pankrat could not get rid of anyone now. He was lying motionless in
the vestibule, torn and trampled, with a smashed skull. More and more people
swarmed past him, paying no attention to the police firing in the street.
A short man on crooked ape-like legs, in a tattered jacket and torn
shirt-front all askew, leapt out of the crowd at Persikov and split the
Professor's skull open with a terrible blow from his stick. Persikov
staggered and collapsed slowly onto one side. His last words were:
"Pankrat. Pankrat."
The totally innocent Maria Stepanovna was killed and torn to pieces in
the Professor's room. They also smashed the chamber with the extinguished
ray and the terrariums, after killing and trampling on the crazed frogs,
then the glass tables and the reflectors. An hour later the Institute was in
flames. Around lay corpses cordoned off by a column of soldiers armed with
electric revolvers, while fire-engines sucked up water and sprayed it on all
the windows through which long roaring tongues of flame were leaping.
On the night of 19th August, 1928, there was an unheard-of frost the
likes of which no elderly folk could recall within living memory. It lasted
forty-eight hours and reached eighteen degrees below. Panic-stricken Moscow
closed all its doors and windows. Only towards the end of the third day did
the public realise that the frost had saved the capital and the endless
expanses under its sway afflicted by the terrible disaster of 1928. The
cavalry army by Mozhaisk, which had lost three-quarters of its men, was on
its last legs, and the poison gas squads had been unable to halt the
loathsome reptiles, who were advancing on Moscow in a semi-circle from the
west, south-west and south.
They were killed off by the frost. The foul hordes could not survive
two days of minus eighteen degrees centigrade, and come the last week of
August, when the frost disappeared leaving only damp and wet behind it,
moisture in the air and trees with leaves dead from the unexpected cold,
there was nothing to fight. The catastrophe was over. The forests, fields
and boundless marshes were still covered with coloured eggs, some bearing
the strange pattern unfamiliar in these parts, which Feight, who had
disappeared no one knew where, had taken to be muck, but these eggs were now
completely harmless. They were dead, the embryos inside them had been
killed.
For a long time afterwards these vast expanses were heavy with the
rotting corpses of crocodiles and snakes brought to life by the ray
engendered in Herzen Street under a genius's eye, but they were no longer
dangerous. These precarious creations of putrid tropical swamps perished in
two days, leaving a terrible stench, putrefaction and decay over three
provinces. There were epidemics and widespread diseases from the corpses of
reptiles and people, and the army was kept busy for a long time, now
supplied not with poison gas, but with engineering equipment, kerosene tanks
and hoses to clean the ground. It completed this work by the spring of 1929.
And in the spring of 'twenty-nine Moscow began to dance, whirl and
shimmer with lights again. Once more you could hear the old shuffling sound
of the mechanical carriages, a crescent moon hung, as if by a thread, over
the dome of Christ the Saviour, and on the site of the two-storey Institute
which burnt down in August 'twenty-eight they built a new zoological palace,
with Docent Ivanov in charge. But Persikov was no more. No more did people
see the persuasive crooked finger thrust at them or hear the rasping
croaking voice. The world went on talking and writing about the ray and the
catastrophe of '28 for a long time afterwards, but then the name of
Professor Vladimir Ipatievich Persikov was enveloped in mist and
extinguished, like the red ray discovered by him on that fateful April
night. No one succeeded in producing this ray again, although that refined
gentleman, Pyotr Stepanovich Ivanov, now a professor, occasionally tried.
The first chamber was destroyed by the frenzied crowd on the night of
Persikov's murder. The other three chambers were burnt on the Red Ray State
Farm in Nikolskoye during the first battle of the aeroplanes with the
reptiles, and it did not prove possible to reconstruct them. Simple though
the combination of the lenses with the mirror-reflected light may have been,
it could not be reproduced a second time, in spite of Ivanov's efforts.
Evidently, in addition to mere knowledge it required something special,
something possessed by one man alone in the whole world, the late Professor
Vladimir Ipatievich Persikov.
Moscow about terrible dragons, nor the newsboys' shouts about a strange
telegram in the evening paper reached his ears. Docent Ivanov had gone to
see TsarFyodor Ivanovich at the Arts Theatre, so there was no one to tell
the Professor the news.
Around midnight Persikov arrived at Prechistenka and went to bed, where
he read an English article in the Zoological Proceedings received from
London. Then he fell asleep, like the rest of late-night Moscow. The only
thing that did not sleep was the big grey building set back in Tverskaya
Street where the Izvestia rotary presses clattered noisily, shaking the
whole block. There was an incredible din and confusion in the office of the
duty editor. He was rampaging around with bloodshot eyes like a madman, not
knowing what to do, and sending everyone to the devil. The maker-up followed
close on his heels, breathing out wine fumes and saying:
"It can't be helped, Ivan Vonifatievich. Let them bring out a special
supplement tomorrow. We can't take the paper off the presses now."
Instead of going home, the compositors clustered together reading the
telegrams that were now arriving in a steady stream, every fifteen minutes
or so, each more eerie and disturbing than the one before. Alfred Bronsky's
pointed hat flashed by in the blinding pink light of the printing office,
and the fat man with the artificial leg scraped and hobbled around. Doors
slammed in the entrance and reporters kept dashing up all night. The
printing office's twelve telephones were busy non-stop, and the exchange
almost automatically replied to the mysterious calls by giving the engaged
signal, while the signal horns beeped constantly before the sleepless eyes
of the lady telephonists.
The compositors had gathered round the metal-legged ocean-going
captain, who was saying to them:
"They'll have to send aeroplanes with gas."
"They will and all," replied the compositors. "It's a downright
disgrace, it is!" Then the air rang with foul curses and a shrill voice
cried:
"That Persikov should be shot!"
"What's Persikov got to do with it?" said someone in the crowd. "It's
that son-of-a-bitch at the farm who should be shot."
"There should have been a guard!" someone shouted.
"Perhaps it's not the eggs at all."
The whole building thundered and shook from the rotary machines, and it
felt as if the ugly grey block was blazing in an electrical conflagration.
Far from ceasing with the break of a new day, the pandemonium grew more
intense than ever, although the electric lights went out. One after another
motorbikes and automobiles raced into the asphalted courtyard. All Moscow
rose to don white sheets of newspapers like birds. They fluttered down and
rustled in everyone's hands. By eleven a.m. the newspaper-boys had sold out,
although that month they were printing a million and a half copies of each
issue of Izvestia. Professor Persikov took the bus from Prechistenka to the
Institute. There he was greeted by some news. In the vestibule stood three
wooden crates neatly bound with metal strips and covered with foreign labels
in German, over which someone had chalked in Russian: "Eggs. Handle with
care!"
The Professor was overjoyed.
"At last!" he cried. "Open the crates at once, Pankrat, only be careful
not to damage the eggs. And bring them into my office."
Pankrat carried out these instructions straightaway, and a quarter of
an hour later in the Professor's office, strewn with sawdust and scraps of
paper, a voice began shouting angrily.
"Are they trying to make fun of me?" the Professor howled, shaking his
fists and waving a couple of eggs. "That Poro-syuk's a real beast. I won't
be treated like this. What do you think they are, Pankrat?"
"Eggs, sir," Pankrat replied mournfully.
"Chicken eggs, see, the devil take them! What good are they to me? They
should be sent to that rascal on his state farm!"
Persikov rushed to the phone, but did not have time to make a call.
"Vladimir Ipatych! Vladimir Ipatych!" Ivanov's voice called urgently
down the Institute's corridor.
Persikov put down the phone and Pankrat hopped aside to make way for
the decent. The latter hurried into the office and, contrary to his usual
gentlemanly practice, did not even remove the grey hat sitting on his head.
In his hand he held a newspaper.
"Do you know what's happened, Vladimir Ipatych?" he cried, waving
before Persikov's face a sheet with the headline "Special Supplement" and a
bright coloured picture in the middle.
"Just listen to what they've done!" Persikov shouted back at him, not
listening. "They've sent me some chicken eggs as a nice surprise. That
Porosyuk's a positive cretin, just look!"
Ivanov stopped short. He stared in horror at the open crates, then at
the newspaper, and his eyes nearly popped out of his head.
"So that's it," he gasped. "Now I understand. Take a look at this,
Vladimir Ipatych." He quickly unfolded the paper and pointed with trembling
fingers at the coloured picture. It showed an olive-coloured snake with
yellow spots swaying like terrible fire hose in strange smudgy foliage. It
had been taken from a light aeroplane flying cautiously over the snake.
"What is that in your opinion, Vladimir Ipatych?"
Persikov pushed the spectacles onto his forehead, then pulled them back
onto his nose, stared at the photograph and said in great surprise:
"Well, I'll be damned. It's ... it's an anaconda. A boa constrictor..."
Ivanov pulled off his hat, sat down on a chair and said, banging the
table with his fist to emphasise each word:
"It's an anaconda from Smolensk Province, Vladimir Ipatych. What a
monstrosity! That scoundrel has hatched out snakes instead of chickens,
understand, and they are reproducing at the same fantastic rate as frogs!"
"What's that?" Persikov exclaimed, his face turning ashen. "You're
joking, Pyotr Stepanovich. How could he have?"
Ivanov could say nothing for a moment, then regained the power of
speech and said, poking a finger into the open crate where tiny white heads
lay shining in the yellow sawdust:
"That's how."
"Wha-a-at?" Persikov howled, as the truth gradually dawned on him.
"You can be sure of it. They sent your order for snake and ostrich eggs
to the state farm by mistake, and the chicken eggs to you."
"Good grief ... good grief," Persikov repeated, his face turning a
greenish white as he sank down onto a stool.
Pankrat stood petrified by the door, pale and speechless. Ivanov jumped
up, grabbed the newspaper and, pointing at the headline with a sharp nail,
yelled into the Professor's ear:
"Now the fun's going to start alright! What will happen now, I simply
can't imagine. Look here, Vladimir Ipatych." He yelled out the first passage
to catch his eye on the crumpled newspaper: "The snakes are swarming in the
direction of Mozhaisk ... laying vast numbers of eggs. Eggs have been
discovered in Dukhovsky District... Crocodiles and ostriches have appeared.
Special armed units... and GPU detachments put an end to the panic in Vyazma
by burning down stretches of forest outside the town and checking the
reptiles' advance..."
With an ashen blotched face and demented eyes, Persikov rose from the
stool and began to gasp:
"An anaconda! A boa constrictor! Good grief!" Neither Ivanov nor
Pankrat had ever seen him in such a state before.
The Professor tore off his tie, ripped the buttons off his shirt,
turned a strange paralysed purple and staggered out with vacant glassy eyes.
His howls echoed beneath the Institute's stone vaulting.
"Anaconda! Anaconda!" they rang.
"Go and catch the Professor!" Ivanov cried to Pankrat who was hopping
up and down with terror on the spot. "Get him some water. He's had a fit."
A frenzied electrical night blazed in Moscow. All the lights were
burning, and the flats were full of lamps with the shades taken off. No one
was asleep in the whole of Moscow with its population of four million,
except for small children. In their apartments people ate and drank whatever
came to hand, and the slightest cry brought fear-distorted faces to the
windows on all floors to stare up at the night sky criss-crossed by
searchlights. Now and then white lights flared up, casting pale melting
cones over Moscow before they faded away. There was the constant low drone
of aeroplanes. It was particularly frightening in Tverskaya-Yamskaya Street.
Every ten minutes trains made up of goods vans, passenger carriages of
different classes and even tank-trucks kept arriving at Alexandrovsky
Station with fear-crazed folk clinging to them, and Tverskaya-Yamskaya was
packed with people riding in buses and on the roofs of trams, crushing one
another and getting run over. Now and then came the anxious crack of shots
being fired above the crowd at the station. That was the military
detachments stopping panic-stricken demented people who were running along
the railway track from Smolensk Province to Moscow. Now and then the glass
in the station windows would fly out with a light frenzied sob and the steam
engines start wailing. The streets were strewn with posters, which had been
dropped and trampled on, while the same posters stared out from the walls
under the hot red reflectors. Everyone knew what they said, and no one read
them any more. They announced that Moscow was now under martial law.
Panicking was forbidden on threat of severe punishment, and Red Army
detachments armed with poison gas were already on their way to Smolensk
Province. But the posters could not stop the howling night. In their
apartments people dropped and broke dishes and vases, ran about banging into
things, tied and untied bundles and cases in the vain hope of somehow
getting to Kalanchevskaya Square and Yaroslavl or Nikolayevsky Station. But,
alas, all the stations to the north and east were surrounded by a dense
cordon of infantry, and huge lorries, swaying and rattling their chains,
piled high with boxes on top of which sat Red Army men in pointed helmets,
bayonets at the ready, were evacuating gold bullion from the vaults of the
People's Commissariat of Finances and large crates marked "Tretyakov
Gallery. Handle with care!" Cars were roaring and racing all over Moscow.
Far away in the sky was the reflected glow of a fire, and the constant
boom of cannons rocked the dense blackness of August.
Towards morning, a huge snake of cavalry, thousands strong, hooves
clattering on the cobble-stones, wended its way up Tverskaya through
sleepless Moscow, which had still not extinguished a single light. Everyone
in its path huddled against entrances and shop-windows, knocking in panes of
glass. The ends of crimson helmets dangled down grey backs, and pike tips
pierced the sky. At the sight of these advancing columns cutting their way
through the sea of madness, the frantic, wailing crowds of people seemed to
come to their senses. There were hopeful shouts from the thronged pavements.
"Hooray! Long live the cavalry!" shouted some frenzied women's voices.
"Hooray!" echoed some men.
"We'll be crushed to death!" someone wailed.
"Help!" came shouts from the pavement.
Packets of cigarettes, silver coins and watches flew into the columns
from the pavements. Some women jumped out into the roadway, at great risk,
and ran alongside the cavalry, clutching the stirrups and kissing them.
Above the constant clatter of hooves rose occasional shouts from the platoon
commanders:
"Rein in."
There was some rowdy, lewd singing and the faces in cocked crimson
helmets stared from their horses in the flickering neon lights of
advertisements. Now and then, behind the columns of open-faced cavalry, came
weird figures, also on horseback, wearing strange masks with pipes that ran
over their shoulders and cylinders strapped to their backs. Behind them
crawled huge tank-trucks with long hoses like those on fire-engines. Heavy
tanks on caterpillar tracks, shut tight, with narrow shinning loopholes,
rumbled along the roadway. The cavalry columns gave way to grey armoured
cars with the same pipes sticking out and white skulls painted on the sides
over the words "Volunteer-Chem. Poison gas".
"Let 'em have it, lads!" the crowds on the pavements shouted. "Kill the
reptiles! Save Moscow!"
Cheerful curses rippled along the ranks. Packets of cigarettes whizzed
through the lamp-lit night air, and white teeth grinned from the horses at
the crazed people. A hoarse heartrending song spread through the ranks:
...No ace, nor queen, nor jack have we, But we'll kill the reptiles
sure as can be. And blast them into eternity...
Loud bursts of cheering surged over the motley throng as the rumour
spread that out in front on horseback, wearing the same crimson helmet as
all the other horsemen, was the now grey-haired and elderly cavalry
commander who had become a legend ten years ago. The crowd howled, and their
hoorays floated up into the sky, bringing a little comfort to their
desperate hearts.
The Institute was dimly lit. The events reached it only as isolated,
confused and vague echoes. At one point some shots rang out under the neon
clock by the Manege. Some marauders who had tried to loot a flat in
Volkhonka were being shot on the spot There was little traffic in the street
here. It was all concentrated round the railway stations. In the Professor's
room, where a single lamp burned dimly casting a circle of light on the
desk, Persikov sat silently, head in hands. Streak of smoke hung around him.
The ray in the chamber had been switched off. The frogs in the terrariums
were silent, for they were already asleep. The Professor was not working or
reading. At his side, under his left elbow, lay the evening edition of
telegrams in the narrow column, which announced that Smolensk was in flames
and artillery were bombarding the Mozhaisk forest section by section,
destroying deposits of crocodile eggs in all the damp ravines. It also
reported that a squadron of aeroplanes had carried out a highly successful
operation near Vyazma, spraying almost the whole district with poison gas,
but there were countless human losses in the area because instead of leaving
it in an orderly fashion, the population had panicked and made off in small
groups to wherever the fancy took them. It also said that a certain
Caucasian cavalry division on the way to Mozhaisk had won a brilliant
victory against hordes of ostriches, killing the lot of them and destroying
huge deposits of ostrich eggs. The division itself had suffered very few
losses. There was a government announcement that if it should prove
impossible to keep the reptiles outside the 120-mile zone around Moscow, the
capital would be completely evacuated. Office- and factory-workers should
remain calm. The government would take the strictest measures to avoid a
repetition of the Smolensk situation, as a result of which, due to the
pandemonium caused by a sudden attack from rattlesnakes numbering several
thousands, the town had been set on fire in several places when people had
abandoned burning stoves and begun a hopeless mass exodus. It also announced
that Moscow's food supplies would last for at least six months and that a
committee under the Commander-in-Chief was taking urgent measures to armour
apartments against attacks by reptiles in the streets of the capital, if the
Red Army and aeroplanes did not succeed in halting their advance.
The Professor read none of this, but stared vacantly in front of him
and smoked. Apart from him there were only two other people in the
Institute, Pankrat and the house-keeper, Maria Stepanovna, who kept bursting
into tears. This was her third sleepless night, which she was spending in
the Professor's laboratory, because he flatly refused to leave his only
remaining chamber, even though it had been switched off. Maria Stepanovna
had taken refuge on the oilcloth-covered divan, in the shade in the corner,
and maintained a grief-stricken silence, watching the kettle with the
Professor's tea boil on the tripod of a Bunsen Burner. The Institute was
quiet. It all happened very suddenly.
Some loud angry cries rang out in the street, making Maria Stepanovna
jump up and scream. Lamps flashed outside, and Pankrat's voice was heard in
the vestibule. The Professor misinterpreted this noise. He raised his head
for a moment and muttered: "Listen to them raving... what can I do now?"
Then he went into a trance again. But he was soon brought out of it. There
was a terrible pounding on the iron doors of the Institute in Herzen Street,
and the walls trembled. Then a whole section of mirror cracked in the
neighbouring room. A window pane in the Professor's laboratory was smashed
as a grey cobble-stone flew through it, knocking over a glass table. The
frogs woke up in the terrariums and began to croak. Maria Stepanovna rushed
up to the Professor, clutched his arm and cried: "Run away, Vladimir
Ipatych, run away!" The Professor got off the revolving chair, straightened
up and crooked his finger, his eyes flashing for a moment with a sharpness
which recalled the earlier inspired Persikov.
"I'm not going anywhere," he said. "It's quite ridiculous. They're
rushing around like madmen. And if the whole of Moscow has gone crazy, where
could I go? And please stop shouting. What's it got to do with me? Pankrat!"
he cried, pressing the button.
He probably wanted Pankrat to stop all the fuss, which he had never
liked. But Pankrat was no longer in a state to do anything. The pounding had
ended with the Institute doors flying open and the sound of distant gunfire.
But then the whole stone building shook with a sudden stampede, shouts and
breaking glass. Maria Stepanovna seized hold of Persi-kov's arms and tried
to drag him away, but he shook her off, straightened himself up to his full
height and went into the corridor, still wearing his white coat.
"Well?" he asked. The door burst open, and the first thing to appear on
the threshold was the back of a soldier with a red long-service stripe and a
star on his left sleeve. He was firing his revolver and retreating from the
door, through which a furious crowd was surging. Then he turned and shouted
at Persikov:
"Run for your life, Professor! I can't help you anymore."
His words were greeted by a scream from Maria Stepanovna. The soldier
rushed past Persikov, who stood rooted to the spot like a white statue, and
disappeared down the dark winding corridors at the other end. People rushed
through the door, howling:
"Beat him! Kill him..."
"The villain!"
"You let the reptiles loose!"
The corridor was a swarming mass of contorted faces and torn clothes. A
shot rang out. Sticks were brandished. Persikov stepped back and half-closed
the door of his room, where Maria Stepanovna was kneeling on the floor in
terror, then stretched out his arms like one crucified. He did not want to
let the crowd in and shouted angrily:
"It's positive madness. You're like wild animals. What do you want?"
Then he yelled: "Get out of here!" and finished with the curt, familiar
command: "Get rid of them, Pankrat."
But Pankrat could not get rid of anyone now. He was lying motionless in
the vestibule, torn and trampled, with a smashed skull. More and more people
swarmed past him, paying no attention to the police firing in the street.
A short man on crooked ape-like legs, in a tattered jacket and torn
shirt-front all askew, leapt out of the crowd at Persikov and split the
Professor's skull open with a terrible blow from his stick. Persikov
staggered and collapsed slowly onto one side. His last words were:
"Pankrat. Pankrat."
The totally innocent Maria Stepanovna was killed and torn to pieces in
the Professor's room. They also smashed the chamber with the extinguished
ray and the terrariums, after killing and trampling on the crazed frogs,
then the glass tables and the reflectors. An hour later the Institute was in
flames. Around lay corpses cordoned off by a column of soldiers armed with
electric revolvers, while fire-engines sucked up water and sprayed it on all
the windows through which long roaring tongues of flame were leaping.
On the night of 19th August, 1928, there was an unheard-of frost the
likes of which no elderly folk could recall within living memory. It lasted
forty-eight hours and reached eighteen degrees below. Panic-stricken Moscow
closed all its doors and windows. Only towards the end of the third day did
the public realise that the frost had saved the capital and the endless
expanses under its sway afflicted by the terrible disaster of 1928. The
cavalry army by Mozhaisk, which had lost three-quarters of its men, was on
its last legs, and the poison gas squads had been unable to halt the
loathsome reptiles, who were advancing on Moscow in a semi-circle from the
west, south-west and south.
They were killed off by the frost. The foul hordes could not survive
two days of minus eighteen degrees centigrade, and come the last week of
August, when the frost disappeared leaving only damp and wet behind it,
moisture in the air and trees with leaves dead from the unexpected cold,
there was nothing to fight. The catastrophe was over. The forests, fields
and boundless marshes were still covered with coloured eggs, some bearing
the strange pattern unfamiliar in these parts, which Feight, who had
disappeared no one knew where, had taken to be muck, but these eggs were now
completely harmless. They were dead, the embryos inside them had been
killed.
For a long time afterwards these vast expanses were heavy with the
rotting corpses of crocodiles and snakes brought to life by the ray
engendered in Herzen Street under a genius's eye, but they were no longer
dangerous. These precarious creations of putrid tropical swamps perished in
two days, leaving a terrible stench, putrefaction and decay over three
provinces. There were epidemics and widespread diseases from the corpses of
reptiles and people, and the army was kept busy for a long time, now
supplied not with poison gas, but with engineering equipment, kerosene tanks
and hoses to clean the ground. It completed this work by the spring of 1929.
And in the spring of 'twenty-nine Moscow began to dance, whirl and
shimmer with lights again. Once more you could hear the old shuffling sound
of the mechanical carriages, a crescent moon hung, as if by a thread, over
the dome of Christ the Saviour, and on the site of the two-storey Institute
which burnt down in August 'twenty-eight they built a new zoological palace,
with Docent Ivanov in charge. But Persikov was no more. No more did people
see the persuasive crooked finger thrust at them or hear the rasping
croaking voice. The world went on talking and writing about the ray and the
catastrophe of '28 for a long time afterwards, but then the name of
Professor Vladimir Ipatievich Persikov was enveloped in mist and
extinguished, like the red ray discovered by him on that fateful April
night. No one succeeded in producing this ray again, although that refined
gentleman, Pyotr Stepanovich Ivanov, now a professor, occasionally tried.
The first chamber was destroyed by the frenzied crowd on the night of
Persikov's murder. The other three chambers were burnt on the Red Ray State
Farm in Nikolskoye during the first battle of the aeroplanes with the
reptiles, and it did not prove possible to reconstruct them. Simple though
the combination of the lenses with the mirror-reflected light may have been,
it could not be reproduced a second time, in spite of Ivanov's efforts.
Evidently, in addition to mere knowledge it required something special,
something possessed by one man alone in the whole world, the late Professor
Vladimir Ipatievich Persikov.