Arkady Strugatsky - Tale of the Troika

It was bad enough that our hopes of at least getting out the Black Box and our Talking Bedbug were completely shattered after the historic conversation in front of the hotel. After all, the enemy was armed with the Great Round Seal, and we couldn’t counter that.

But now it was a question of our own future.

The historic conversation in front of the hotel had gone something like this. No sooner had I driven the dusty car up to the hotel than Eddie appeared on the steps out of nowhere. He was grumpy.

Eddie: Excuse me, Lavr Fedotovich. Could you spare me a few minutes?

(Lavr Fedotovich breathes heavily, licks mosquito bites on arm, waits for the car door to be opened for him.)

Khlebovvodov (peevishly): The session is over.

Eddie (frowning): I would like to know when our requisitions will be complied with.

Lavr Fedotovich (to Farfurkis): Beer is good to drink.

Khlebowodov (jealously): That’s right! The people love beer.

(Exeunt all from car.)

Commandant (to Eddie): Don’t you worry, we’ll look into your requisitions the very next year.

Eddie (suddenly satanic): I demand an end to this red tape! (He stands in the doorway, blocking the path.)

Lavr Fedotovich: Harrumph. Difficulties? Comrade Khlebovvodov, get rid of them.

Eddie (exploding): I demand immediate consideration of our requisitions!

Me (gloomily): Drop it, it’s hopeless.

Commandant (frightened): Jesus Christ, in the name of Our Lady of Tmuskorpion, I beg you.

(Tumultuous scene. Khlebovvodov stops in front of Eddie and measures him from head to toe with his eyes. Eddie quickly releases his excess rage in the form of small bolts of lightning. A gathering of curiosity-seekers. Shout from an open window: “Let ’im have it! What are you staring at? Right in his ugly mug!” Farfurkis whispers to Lavr Fedotovich.)

Lavr Fedotovich: Harrumph. There is an opinion that our talented young people should be promoted. The motion is to establish Comrade Privalov as chauffeur to the Troika and to name Comrade Amperian as official replacement for our ailing Comrade Vybegallo, with the salary difference paid in full. Comrade Farfurkis, please write a draft of the decree. A copy goes below. (Walks straight at Eddie. Eddie’s innate politeness wins out. He lets the older man pass and even holds the door for him. I am stunned, can barely see or hear.)

Commandant (joyously shaking my hand): Congratulations on your promotion, Comrade Privalov! See, everything is working out.

Lavr Fedotovich (stopping in doorway): Comrade Zubo!

Commandant: Yes sir!

Lavr Fedotovich (joking): You sweated it out today, Comrade Zubo, so why don’t you go down to the steambaths?

(Horrible laughter of exiting Troika. Curtain.)

Remembering that scene and remembering that from now on I was fated to be the Troika’s chauffeur, I stubbed my cigarette and rasped:

“We have to beat it.”

“We can’t,” Eddie said. “It would be disgraceful.”

“And staying isn’t?”

“That’s disgraceful, too,” Eddie agreed. “But we are scouts. No one has relieved us of our duties. We have to bear the unbearable. We must, Alex! We have to go to the session.”

I groaned but could not think of a rejoinder.

We washed, we dressed, we even had breakfast. We went out into the city, where everyone was busy with useful and necessary work. We bore our pain stoically. We were pitiful.

At the entrance to the Colony, I was attacked by old man Edelweiss. Eddie pulled out a ruble, but it did not have its usual effect. Material goods no longer interested the old man: he was seeking spiritual riches. He wanted me to join in as sponsor of his project to perfect his heuristic aggregate. I was to start by drawing up a plan that would cover the period the old man would spend in graduate school.

Five-minutes’ conversation was enough to blacken my vision and bring bitter words to the tip of my tongue. Terrible impulses clamored for release. In desperation I began spouting some nonsense about self-teaching computers. The old man listened to me, mouth agape, drinking in every syllable—I think he memorized the nonsense word for word. Then it came to me. Like an experienced provocateur, I asked him if his machine were a complex enough aggregate. He began assuring me passionately that it was unbelievably complex, that sometimes even he himself did not know what went where.

“Wonderful,” I said. “It is a well-known fact that complex electronic machines can teach themselves and propagate themselves. We don’t need self-propagation just yet, but it is our duty to teach Mashkin’s machine to type texts on its own, without a human intermediary, as soon as possible. How will we do this? We will use the well-known and widely used method of protracted training.”

“The Monte Carlo method,” added Eddie.

“That’s right, the Monte Carlo method. The best feature of this method is its simplicity. You take a sufficiently long text, like Bream’s Animal Life, for instance. Mashkin sits at his aggregate and starts typing word for word, line for line, page for page. The analyzer will analyze. (And the thinker will think, Eddie added.) That’s right, think. And thus the aggregate will start to learn. Before you can say boo, it will start typing on its own. Here’s a ruble to get you started. Go to the library and pick up a copy of Animal Life.”

Edelweiss hopped off to the library, and we went off on our way, cheered by our little victory over the local forces, our first victory on the seventy-sixth floor, and happy that Edelweiss would no longer get underfoot, driving us crazy with his nonsense. Now he would be sitting at his Remington, pounding the keys with the utmost dedication. It would take him a long time to get through Bream. And when he did, we would give him the thirty-volume Dickens, and then, God willing, we would take on the ninety-volume Tolstoy—with all the prefaces, articles, notes, and commentaries.

As we entered the meeting room, the commandant was reading aloud, and the plumbers and Vybegallo were listening and nodding. We sat down quietly, got a grip on ourselves, and started listening, too. For some time we didn’t understand a thing and didn’t even try to, but we finally gathered that they were looking into the complaints, applications, and declarations received from the populace. Fedya had told us that they did this once a week.

It befell us to listen to several letters.

The schoolchildren of the village of Vuniukhino reported the local hag Zoia. Everybody says that she is a witch, that she causes crop failures, and that she turned her grandson, a former straight A student, Vasilii Kormilitsyn, into a juvenile delinquent and a dropout just because he took her leg down to the refuse heap. The schoolchildren asked them to investigate this witch, in which they did not believe, being good Pioneers, and have the scientists explain how she ruined crops and turned good students into bad, and couldn’t they change her faults into strengths, so that she could change failing students into top ones.

A group of tourists had seen a green scorpion the size of a cow around Lopukhi. The scorpion’s mysterious rays put the guards to sleep, and he made off into the woods with a month’s supply of groceries. The tourists offered their services in catching the monster, as long as their travel expenses were taken care of.

An inhabitant of Tmuskorpion, P. P. Zaiadlyi, expressed his un-happiness with the fact that the municipal park was littered with all kinds of monsters that made a simple walk impossible. It was all the fault of Commandant Zubo, who used the leftovers from the colony kitchen to feed three personal pigs and his parasitic no-good brother-in-law.