The Fatal Eggs (2 page)

But neither the moon nor the Moscow spring
bustle were of the slightest concern to the Professor. He sat on his
three-legged revolving stool turning with tobacco-stained fingers the knob of a
splendid Zeiss microscope, in which there was an ordinary unstained specimen of
fresh amoebas. At the very moment when Persikov was changing the magnification
from five to ten thousand, the door opened slightly, a pointed beard and
leather bib appeared, and his assistant called:

"I've set up the mesentery, Vladimir
Ipatych. Would you care to take a look?"

Persikov slid quickly down from the stool,
letting go of the knob midway, and went into his assistant's room, twirling a
cigarette slowly in his fingers. There, on the glass table, a half-suffocated
frog stiff with fright and pain lay crucified on a cork mat, its transparent
micaceous intestines pulled out of the bleeding abdomen under the microscope.

"Very good," said Persikov, peering
down the eye-piece of the microscope.

He could obviously detect something very
interesting in the frog's mesentery, where live drops of blood were racing
merrily along the vessels as clear as daylight. Persikov quite forgot about his
amoebas. He and Ivanov spent the next hour-and-a-half taking turns at the
microscope and exchanging animated remarks, quite incomprehensible to ordinary
mortals.

At last Persikov dragged himself away,
announcing: "The blood's coagulating, it can't be helped."

The frog's head twitched painfully and its
dimming eyes said clearly: "Bastards, that's what you are..."

Stretching his stiff legs, Persikov got up,
returned to his laboratory, yawned, rubbed his permanently inflamed eyelids,
sat down on the stool and looked into the microscope, his fingers about to move
the knob. But move it he did not. With his right eye Persikov saw the cloudy
white plate and blurred pale amoebas on it, but in the middle of the plate sat
a coloured tendril, like a female curl. Persikov himself and hundreds of his
students had seen this tendril many times before but taken no interest in it,
and rightly so. The coloured streak of light merely got in the way and
indicated that the specimen was out of focus. For this reason it was ruthlessly
eliminated with a single turn of the knob, which spread an even white light
over the plate. The zoologist's long fingers had already tightened on the knob,
when suddenly they trembled and let go. The reason for this was Persikov's
right eye. It tensed, stared in amazement and filled with alarm.

No mediocre mind to burden the
Republic sat by the microscope. No, this was Professor Persikov! All his mental
powers were now concentrated in his right eye. For five minutes or so in
petrified silence the higher being observed the lower one, peering hard at the
out-of-focus specimen. There was complete silence all around. Pankrat had gone
to sleep in his cubby-hole in thes vestibule, and only once there came a
far-off gentle and musical tinkling of glass in cupboards-that was Ivanov going
out and locking his laboratory. The entrance door groaned behind him. Then
came
the Professor's voice. To whom his question was
addressed no one knows.

"What on earth is that? I don't
understand..."

A late lorry rumbled down Herzen Street, making
the old walls of the Institute shake. The shallow glass bowl with pipettes
tinkled on the table.

The Professor turned pale and put his
hands over the microscope, like a mother whose child is threatened by danger.
There could now be no question of Persikov turning the knob. Oh no, now he was
afraid that some external force might push what he had seen out of his field of
vision.

It was a full white morning with a strip of
gold which cut across the Institute's cream porch when the Professor left the
microscope and walked over to the window on stiff legs. With trembling fingers
he pressed a button, dense black shutters blotted out the morning and a wise
scholarly night descended on the room. Sallow and inspired, Persikov placed his
feet apart, staring at the parquet floor with his watering eyes, and exclaimed:
"But how can it be? It's monstrous! Quite monstrous, gentlemen," he
repeated, addressing the toads in the terrarium, who were asleep and made no
reply.

He paused, then went over to the button,
raised the shutters, turned out all the lights and looked into the microscope.
His face grew tense and he raised his bushy yellow eyebrows.

"Aha, aha," he muttered. "It's
gone. I see. I understand," he drawled, staring with crazed and inspired
eyes at the extinguished light overhead.

"It's simple."

Again he let down the hissing shutters and put
on the light. Then looked into the microscope and grinned happily, almost
greedily.

"I'll catch it," he said solemnly
and gravely, crooking his finger.

"I'll catch it. Perhaps the sun
will do it too."

The shutters shot up once more. Now you could
see the sun. It was shining on the walls of the Institute and slanting down
onto the pavements of Herzen Street. The Professor looked through the window,
working out where the sun would be in the afternoon. He kept stepping back and
forwards, doing a little dance, and eventually lay stomach down on the
window-sill.

After that he got down to some important and
mysterious work. He covered the microscope with a bell glass. Then he melted a
piece of sealing-wax in the bluish flame of the Bun-sen burner, sealed the edge
of the glass to the table and made a thumb print on the blobs of wax. Finally
he turned off the gas and went out, locking the laboratory door firmly behind
him.

There was semi-darkness in the Institute
corridors.

The Professor reached Pankrat's door and
knocked for a long time to no effect. At last something inside growled like a
watchdog,
coughed and snorted and Pankrat appeared in the
lighted doorway wearing long striped underpants tied at the ankles. His eyes
glared wildly at the scientist and he whimpered softly with sleep.

"I must apologise for waking you up,
Pankrat," said the Professor, peering at him over his spectacles.
"But please don't go into my laboratory this morning, dear chap. I've left
some work there that must on no account be moved. Understand?"

"Grrr, yessir," Pankrat replied, not
understanding a thing.

He staggered a bit and growled.

"Now listen here, Pankrat, you just wake
up," the zoologist ordered, prodding him lightly in the ribs, which
produced a look of fright on Pankrat's face and a glimmer of comprehension in
his eyes. "I've locked the laboratory," Persikov went on, "so
you need not clean it until I come back.

Understand?"

"Yessir," Pankrat croaked.

"That's fine then, go back to bed."

Pankrat turned round, disappeared inside and
collapsed onto the bed.

The Professor went into the
vestibule. Putting on his grey summer coat and soft hat, he remembered what he
had observed in the microscope and stared at his galoshes for a few seconds, as
if seeing them for the first time. Then he put on the left galosh and tried to
put the right one over it, but it wouldn't go on.

"What an incredible coincidence that he
called me away," said the scientist. "Otherwise I would never have
noticed it. But what does it mean?

The devil only knows
!..
"

The Professor smiled, squinted at his
galoshes, took off the left one and put on the right. "Good heavens! One
can't even imagine all the consequences..." The Professor prodded off the
left galosh, which had irritated him by not going on top of the right, and
walked to the front door wearing one galosh only. He also lost his handkerchief
and went out, slamming the heavy door. On the porch he searched in his pockets
for some matches, patting his sides, found them eventually and set off down the
street with an unlit cigarette in his mouth.

The scientist did not meet a soul all the way
to the church. There he threw back his head and stared at the golden dome. The
sun was licking it avidly on one side.

"Why didn't I notice it before? What a
coincidence! Well, I never!

Silly ass!"
The Professor looked down and stared pensively at his strangely shod feet.
"Hm, what shall I do? Go back to Pankrat? No, there's no waking him. It's
a pity to throw the wretched thing away. I'll have to carry it."

He removed the galosh and set off
carrying it distastefully.

An old car drove out of Prechistenka with
three passengers.
Two men, slightly tipsy, with a garishly
made-up woman in those baggy silk trousers that were all the rage in 1928
sitting on their lap.

"Hey, Dad!" she shouted in a low
husky voice. "Did you sell the other galosh for booze?"

"The old boy got sozzled at the
Alcazar," howled the man on the left, while the one on the right leaned
out of the car and shouted: "Is the night-club in Volkhonka still open,
Dad? That's where we're making for!"

The Professor looked at them sternly over the
top of his glasses, let the cigarette fall out of his mouth and then
immediately forgot they existed. A beam was cutting its way through
Prechistensky Boulevard, and the dome of Christ the Saviour had begun to burn.
The sun had come out.

What had happened was this. When the Professor
put his discerning eye to the microscope, he noticed for the first time in his life
that one particular ray in the coloured tendril stood out more vividly and
boldly than the others. This ray was bright red and stuck out of the tendril
like the tiny point of a needle, say.

Thus, as ill luck would have it, this ray
attracted the attention of the great man's experienced eye for several seconds.

In it, the ray, the Professor detected
something a thousand times more significant and important than the ray itself,
that precarious offspring accidentally engendered by the movement of a microscope
mirror and lens. Due to the assistant calling the Professor away, some amoebas
had been subject to the action of the ray for an hour-and-a-half and this is
what had happened: whereas the blobs of amoebas on the plate outside the ray
simply lay there limp and helpless, some very strange phenomena were taking
place on the spot over which the sharp red sword was poised. This strip of red
was teeming with life. The old amoebas were forming pseudopodia in a desperate
effort to reach the red strip, and when they did they came to life, as if by
magic. Some force seemed to breathe life into them. They flocked there,
fighting one another for a place in the ray, where the most frantic (there was
no other word for it) reproduction was taking place. In defiance of all the
laws which Persikov knew like the back of his hand, they gemmated before his
eyes with lightning speed. They split into two in the ray, and each of the
parts became a new, fresh organism in a couple of seconds. In another second or
two these organisms grew to maturity and produced a new generation in their
turn. There was soon no room at all in the red strip or on the plate, and
inevitably a bitter struggle broke out.

The newly born amoebas tore one
another to pieces and gobbled the pieces up.

Among the newly born lay the corpses
of those who had perished in the fight for survival. It was the best and
strongest who won. And they were terrifying. Firstly, they were about twice the
size of ordinary amoebas and, secondly, they were far more active and
aggressive. Their movements were rapid, their pseudopodia much longer than
normal, and it would be no exaggeration to say that they used them like an
octopus's tentacles.

On the second evening the Professor, pale and
haggard, his only sustenance the thick cigarettes he rolled himself, studied
the new generation of amoebas. And on the third day he turned to the primary
source, i.e., the red ray.

The gas hissed faintly in the Bunsen burner,
the traffic clattered along the street outside, and the Professor, poisoned by
a hundred cigarettes, eyes half-closed, leaned back in his revolving chair.

"I see it all now. The ray brought them
to life. It's a new ray, never studied or even discovered by anyone before. The
first thing is to find out whether it is produced only by electricity, or by
the sun as well," Persikov muttered to himself.

The next night provided the answer to this
question. Persikov caught three rays in three microscopes from the arc light,
but nothing from the sun, and summed this up as follows:

"We must assume that it is not found in
the solar spectrum... Hm, well, in short we must assume it can only be obtained
from electric light." He gazed fondly at the frosted ball overhead,
thought for a moment and invited Ivanov into the laboratory, where he told him
all and showed him the amoebas.

Decent Ivanov was amazed, quite flabbergasted.
Why on earth hadn't a simple thing as this tiny arrow been noticed before?
By anyone, or even by him, Ivanov.
It was really appalling!
Just look...

"Look, Vladimir Ipatych!" Ivanov
said
,
his eye glued to the microscope.

"Look what's happening! They're
growing be" fore my eyes... You must take a look..."

"I've been observing them for three
days," Persikov replied animatedly.

Then a conversation took place between the two
scientists, the gist of which was as follows. Decent Ivanov undertook with the
help of lenses and mirrors to make a chamber in which they could obtain the ray
in magnified form without a microscope. Ivanov hoped, was even convinced, that
this would be extremely simple. He would obtain the
ray,
Vladimir Ipatych need have no doubts on that score. There was a slight pause.