Authors: Mikhail Bulgakov
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
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
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.