"Is anything the matter, Vladimir Ipatych?" he was besieged by anxious voices on all sides.
"No, no," Persikov replied, pulling himself together. "I'm just rather tired. Yes. Kindly bring me a glass of water."
It was a very sunny August day.
This disturbed the Professor, so the blinds were pulled down.
One flexible standing reflector cast a pencil of sharp light onto the glass table piled with instruments and lenses.
The exhausted Persikov was leaning against the back of his revolving chair, smoking and staring through clouds of smoke with dead-tired but contented eyes at the slightly open door of the chamber inside which a red sheaf of light lay quietly, warming the already stuffy and fetid air in the room.
There was a knock at the door.
"What is it?" Persikov asked.
The door creaked lightly, and in came Pankrat.
He stood to attention, pallid with fear before the divinity, and announced:
"Feight's come for you, Professor."
The ghost of a smile flickered on the scientist's face.
He narrowed his eyes and said:
"That's interesting.
Only I'm busy."
'"E says 'e's got an official warrant from the Kremlin."
"Fate with a warrant?
That's a rare combination," Persikov remarked. "Oh, well, send him in then!"
"Yessir," Pankrat replied, slithering through the door like a grass-snake.
A minute later it opened again, and a man appeared on the threshold.
Persikov creaked his chair and stared at the newcomer over the top of his spectacles and over his shoulder.
Persikov was very isolated from real life. He was not interested in it. But even Persikov could not fail to notice the main thing about the man who had just come in.
He was dreadfully old-fashioned.
In 1919 this man would have looked perfectly at home in the streets of the capital. He would have looked tolerable in 1924, at the beginning. But in 1928 he looked positively strange.
At a time when even the most backward part of the proletariat, bakers, were wearing jackets and when military tunics were a rarity, having been finally discarded at the end of 1924, the newcomer was dressed in a double-breasted leather jacket, green trousers, foot bindings and army boots, with a big old-fashioned Mauser in the cracked yellow holster at his side.
The newcomer's face made the same impression on Persikov as on everyone else, a highly unpleasant one.
The small eyes looked out on the world with a surprised, yet confident expression, and there was something unduly familiar about the short legs with their flat feet.
The face was bluish-shaven.
Persikov frowned at once.
Creak' ing the screw mercilessly, he peered at the newcomer over his spectacles, then through them, and barked:
"So you've got a warrant, have you?
Where is it then?"
The newcomer was clearly taken aback by what he saw.
In general he was not prone to confusion, but now he was confused.
Judging by his eyes, the thing that impressed him most was the bookcase with twelve shelves stretching right up to the ceiling and packed full of books.
Then, of course, the chambers which, hell-like, were flooded with the crimson ray swelling up in the lenses.
And Persikov himself in the semi-darkness by sharp point of the ray falling from the reflector looked strange and majestic in his revolving chair.
The newcomer stared at him with an expression in which sparks of respect flashed clearly through the self-assurance, did not hand over any warrant, but said:
"I am Alexander Semyonovich Feight!"
"Well then?
So what?"
"I have been put in charge of the Red Ray Model State Farm," the newcomer explained.
"So what?"
"And so I have come to see you on secret business, comrade."
"Well, I wonder what that can be.
Put it briefly, if you don't mind."
The newcomer unbuttoned his jacket and pulled out some instructions typed on splendid thick paper.
He handed the paper to Persikov, then sat down uninvited on a revolving stool.
"Don't push the table," said Persikov with hatred.
The newcomer looked round in alarm at the table, on the far edge of which a pair of eyes glittered lifelessly like diamonds in a damp dark opening.