Definitely Maybe by Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky Read Free Book Online Page B

cognac with some girls, that’s what he’s out doing,” grumbled Malianov.
    Vecherovsky bit his lip.
    “That doesn’t matter. The point is he exists!”
    “Of course he exists! He showed me his papers. Why, did you think they were crooks?”
    “I doubt it.”
    “That’s what I thought. To do that whole story just for a bottle of cognac, and right next door to a sealed apartment.”
    Vecherovsky nodded.
    “And you say—Hartwig’s function! How can I work at a time like this? There’s enough going on.”
    Vecherovsky looked at him intently.
    “Dmitri,” he said. “Didn’t it surprise you that Snegovoi took an interest in your work?”
    “And how! We’d never talked about work before.”
    “And what did you tell him?”
    “Well, in very general terms—in fact, he didn’t insist on details.”
    “And what did he say?”
    “Nothing. I think he was disappointed. He said, ‘There’s the estate, and there’s the water.’ ”
    “What?”
    “ ‘There’s the estate, and there’s the water.’ ”
    “And what is that supposed to mean?”
    “It’s a literary reference. You know, that you ask about the rope, and you get an answer about the sky.”
    “Aha.” Vecherovsky blinked with his bovine lashes, then took a pristine, sparkling ashtray from the windowsill and a pipe and tobacco pouch and began filling the pipe. “Aha … ‘there’s the estate, and there’s the water.’ … I like that. I’ll have to remember it.”
    Malianov waited impatiently. He had great faith in him. Vecherovsky had a totally inhuman brain. Malianov knew no one else who could come up with such completely unexpected conclusions.
    “Well?” he finally demanded.
    Vecherovsky had filled his pipe and was now slowly smoking and savoring it. The pipe made little wheezing sounds. Inhaling, Vecherovsky said:
    “Dmitri … pf-pf-pf … how much have you moved along since Thursday? I think Thursday … pf-pf … was the last time we talked.”
    “What difference does it make?” Malianov asked, annoyed. “I don’t have time for that now.”
    Vecherovsky let those words go right by him. He kept looking at Malianov with his reddish eyes and puffed on his pipe. That was Vecherovsky. He had asked a question, and now he was waiting for an answer. Malianov gave up. He believed that Vecherovsky knew better than he what was important and what wasn’t.
    “I’ve moved along considerably,” he said, and began describing how he reformulated the problem and reduced it to an equation in vector form and then to an integral-differential equation, how he began getting a physical picture of it, how he figured out the M cavities, and how last night he finally figured out that he should use Hartwig’s transformation.
    Vecherovsky listened attentively, without interrupting or asking questions, and only once, when Malianov got carried away, grabbed the solitary piece of paper, and tried to write on the back of it, he stopped him and said, “In words, in words.”
    “But I didn’t have time to act on any of it,” Malianov wound up sadly. “Because first the crazy phone calls began, and then the guy from the store came over.”
    “You didn’t tell me about any of this,” Vecherovsky interrupted.
    “Well, it has nothing to do with it,” Malianov replied. “I could still get some work done with all the telephone calls, but then that Lidochka showed up, and it all went to hell …”
    Vecherovsky was completely enveloped in puffs and plumes of honeyed smoke.
    “Not bad, not bad,” his soft voice said. “But you stopped, I see, at the most interesting spot.”
    “I didn’t stop, I was stopped!”
    “Yes,” said Vecherovsky.
    Malianov struck his knees with his fists. “Damn, I could be doing so much work right now! But I can’t think! Every rustle in my own apartment makes me jump like a psycho … and then there’s that lovely prospect—fifteen years in a prison camp …”
    He brought up the fifteen years