The Fatal Eggs (10 page)

Shukin, the GPU agent at Dugino Station, was a
very brave man. He said thoughtfully to his companion, the ginger-headed
Polaitis: "Well, let's go. Eh? Get the motorbike." Then he paused for
a moment and added, turning to the man who was sitting on the bench: "Put
the flute down."

But instead of putting down the flute, the
trembling grey-haired man on the bench in the Dugino GPU
office,
began weeping and moaning. Shukin and Polaitis realised they would have to pull
the flute away. His fingers seemed to be stuck to it. Shukin, who possessed
enormous, almost circus-like strength, prised the fingers away one by one. Then
they put the flute on the table.

It was early on the sunny morning of the day
after Manya's death.

"You come too," Shukin said to
Alexander Semyonovich, "and show us where everything is." But Feight
shrank back from him in horror, putting up his hands as if to ward off some
terrible vision.

"You must show us," Polaitis added
sternly. "Leave him alone. You can see the state he's in."

"Send me to Moscow," begged
Alexander Semyonovich, weeping.

"You really don't want to go back to the
farm again?"

Instead of replying Feight shielded himself
with his hands again, his eyes radiating horror.

"Alright then," decided Shukin.
"You're really not in a fit state... I can see that. There's an express
train leaving shortly, you can go on it."

While the station watchman helped Alexander
Semyonovich, whose teeth were chattering on the battered blue mug, to have a
drink of water, Shukin and Polaitis conferred together. Polaitis took the view
that nothing had happened. But that Feight was mentally ill and it had all been
a terrible, hallucination. Shukin, however, was inclined to believe that a boa
constrictor had escaped from the circus on tour in the town of Grachevka.

The sound of their doubting whispers
made Feight rise to his feet. He had recovered somewhat and said, raising his
hands like an Old Testament prophet:

"Listen to me. Listen. Why don't you
believe me? I saw it. Where is my wife?"

Shukin went silent and serious and immediately
sent off a telegram to Grachevka. On Shukin's instructions, a third agent began
to stick closely to Alexander Semyonovich and was to accompany him to Moscow.
Shukin and Polaitis got ready for the journey. They only had one electric
revolver, but it was good protection. A 1927 model, the pride of French
technology for shooting at close range, could kill at a mere hundred paces, but
had a range of two metres in diameter and within this range any living thing
was exterminated outright. It was very hard to miss. Shukin put on this shiny
electric toy, while Polaitis armed himself with an ordinary light machine-gun,
then
they took some ammunition and raced off on the
motorbike along the main road through the early morning dew and chill to the
state farm. The motorbike covered the twelve miles between the station and the
farm in a quarter of an hour (Feight had walked all night, occasionally hiding
in the grass by the wayside in spasms of mortal terror), and when the sun began
to get hot, the sugar palace with columns appeared amid the trees on the hill
overlooking the winding River Top. There was a deathly silence all around. At
the beginning of the turning up to the state farm the agents overtook a peasant
on a cart. He was riding along at a leisurely pace with a load of sacks, and
was soon left far behind. The motorbike drove over the bridge, and Polaitis
sounded the horn to announce their arrival. But this elicited no response
whatsoever, except from some distant frenzied dogs in Kontsovka. The motorbike
slowed down as it approached the gates with verdigris lions. Covered with dust,
the agents in yellow gaiters dismounted, padlocked their motorbike to the iron
railings and went into the yard. The silence was eery.

"Hey, anybody around?" shouted
Shukin loudly.

But no one answered his deep voice. The agents
walked round the yard, growing more and more mystified. Polaitis was scowling.
Shukin began to search seriously, his fair eyebrows knit in a frown. They
looked through an open window into the kitchen and saw that it was empty, but
the floor was covered with broken bits of white china.

"Something really has happened to them,
you know. I can see it now.

Some catastrophe," Polaitis
said.

"Anybody there?
Hey!" shouted Shukin, but the only reply was an echo from the kitchen
vaults. "The devil only knows! It couldn't have gobbled them all up, could
it? Perhaps they've run off somewhere. Let's go into the house."

The front door with the colonnaded veranda was
wide open. The palace was completely empty inside. The agents even climbed up
to the attic, knocking and opening all the doors, but they found nothing and
went out again into the yard through the deserted porch.

"We'll walk round the outside to the
conservatory," Shukin said. "We'll give that a good going over and we
can phone from there too."

The agents set off along the brick path, past
the flowerbeds and across the backyard, at which point the conservatory came
into sight.

"Wait a minute," whispered Shukin,
unbuckling his revolver. Polaitis tensed and took his machine-gun in both
hands. A strange, very loud noise was coming from the conservatory and
somewhere behind it. It was like the sound of a steam engine.
"Zzzz-zzzz," the conservatory hissed.

"Careful now," whispered Shukin, and
trying not to make a sound the agents stole up to the glass walls and peered
into the conservatory.

Polaitis immediately recoiled, his face white
as a sheet. Shukin froze, mouth open and revolver in hand.

The conservatory was a terrible writhing mass.
Huge snakes slithered across the floor, twisting and intertwining, hissing and
uncoiling, swinging and shaking their heads. The broken shells on the floor
crunched under their bodies. Overhead a powerful electric lamp shone palely,
casting an eery cinematographic light over the inside of the conservatory. On
the floor lay three huge photographic-like chambers, two of which were dark and
had been pushed aside, but a small deep-red patch of light glowed in the third.

Snakes of all sizes were crawling
over the cables, coiling round the frames and climbing through the holes in the
roof. From the electric lamp
itself
hung a jet-black
spotted snake several yards long, its head swinging like a pendulum. There was
an occasional rattle amid the hissing, and a strange putrid pond-like smell
wafted out of the conservatory. The agents could just make out piles of white
eggs in the dusty corners, an enormous long-legged bird lying motionless by the
chambers and the body of a man in grey by the door, with a rifle next to him.

"Get back!" shouted Shukin and began
to retreat, pushing Polaitis with his left hand and raising his revolver with
his right. He managed to fire nine hissing shots which cast flashes of green
lightning
all round. The noise swelled terribly as in
response to Shukin's shots the whole conservatory was galvanised into frantic
motion, and flat heads appeared in all the holes. Peals of thunder began to
roll over the farm and echo on the walls. "Rat-tat-tat-tat," Polaitis
fired, retreating backwards. There was a strange four-footed shuffling behind
him. Polaitis suddenly gave an awful cry and fell to the ground. A
brownish-green creature on bandy legs, with a huge pointed head and a cristate
tail, like an enormous lizard, had slithered out from behind the barn, given
Polaitis a vicious bite in the leg, and knocked him over.

"Help!" shouted Polaitis. His left
arm was immediately snapped up and crunched by a pair of jaws, while his right,
which he tried in vain to lift, trailed the machine-gun over the ground. Shukin
turned round in confusion.

He managed to fire once, but the shot
went wide, because he was afraid of hitting his companion. The second time he
fired in the direction of the conservatory, because amid the smaller
snake-heads a huge olive one on an enormous body had reared up and was
slithering straight towards him. The shot killed the giant snake, and Shukin
hopped and skipped round Polaitis, already half-dead in the crocodile's jaws,
trying to find the right spot to shoot the terrible monster without hitting the
agent. In the end he succeeded. The electric revolver fired twice, lighting up
everything around with a greenish flash, and the crocodile shuddered and
stretched out rigid, letting go of Polaitis. Blood gushed out of his sleeve and
mouth. He collapsed onto his sound right arm, dragging his broken left leg. He
was sinking fast.

"Get out... Shukin," he sobbed.

Shukin fired a few more shots in the direction
of the conservatory, smashing several panes of glass. But behind him a huge
olive-coloured coil sprang out of a cellar window, slithered over the yard,
covering it entirely with its ten-yard-long body and wound itself round
Shukin's legs in a flash.

It dashed him to the ground, and the
shiny revolver bounced away. Shukin screamed with all his might,
then
choked, as the coils enfolded all of him except his
head. Another coil swung round his head, ripping off the scalp, and the skull
cracked. No more shots were heard in the farm. Everything was drowned by the
all-pervading hissing. In reply to the hissing the wind wafted distant howls
from Kontsovka, only now it was hard to say who was howling, dogs or people.

In the editorial office of Izvestia the lights
were shining brightly, and the fat duty editor was laying out the second
" column
with telegrams "Around the Union
Republics". One galley caught his eye. He looked at it through his
pince-nez;

and
laughed, then
called the proof-readers and the maker-up and showed them it. On the narrow
strip of damp paper they read: "Grachevka, Smolensk Province. A hen that
is as big as a horse and kicks like a horse has appeared in the district. It
has bourgeois lady's feathers instead of a tail."

The compositors laughed themselves silly.

"In my day," said the duty editor,
chuckling richly, "when I was working for Vanya Sytin on The Russian Word
they used to see elephants when they got sozzled. That's right. Now it's
ostriches."

The compositors laughed.

"Yes, of course, it's an ostrich,"
said the maker-up. "Shall we put it in, Ivan Vonifatievich?"

"Are you crazy?" the editor replied.
"I'm surprised the secretary let it through. It was written under the
influence alright."

"Yes, they must have had a drop or
two," agreed the compositors, and the maker-up removed the ostrich report
from the desk.

So it was that Izvestia came out next day
containing, as usual, a mass of interesting material but no mention whatsoever
of the Grachevka ostrich.

Decent Ivanov, who was
conscientiously reading Izvestia in his office, rolled it up and yawned,
muttering: "Nothing of interest," then put on his white coat. A
little later the Bunsen burners went on in his room and the frogs started
croaking. In Professor Persikov's room, however, there was hell let loose. The
petrified Pankrat
Stood
stiffly to attention.

"Yessir, I will," he was saying.

Persikov handed him a sealed packet and told
him: "Go at once to the head of the Husbandry Department, and tell him
straight that he's a swine. Tell him that I said so. And give him this
packet."

"That's a nice little errand and no
mistake," thought the pale-faced Pankrat and disappeared with the packet.

Persikov fumed angrily.

"The devil only knows what's going
on," he raged, pacing up and down the office and rubbing his gloved hands.
"It's making a mockery of me and zoology. They're bringing him pile upon
pile of those blasted chicken eggs, when I've been waiting two months for what
I really need. America's not that far away! It's sheer inefficiency!
A real disgrace!"
He began counting on his fingers.
"Catching them takes, say, ten days at the most, alright then, fifteen,
well, certainly not more than twenty, plus two days to get them to London, and
another one from London to Berlin. And from Berlin it's only six hours to get
here. It's an utter disgrace!"

He snatched up the phone in a rage and began
ringing someone.

Everything in his laboratory was ready for
some mysterious and highly dangerous experiments. There were strips of paper to
seal up the doors, divers' helmets with snorkels and several cylinders shining
like mercury with labels saying "Volunteer-Chem" and "Do not
touch" plus the drawing of a skull and cross-bones on the label.

It took at least three hours for the Professor
to calm down and get on with some minor jobs.
Which is what he
did.
He worked at the Institute until eleven in the evening and
therefore had no idea what was happening outside 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."