Monday Begins on Saturday by Arkadi & Boris Strugatsky

Author:Arkadi & Boris Strugatsky [Strugatsky, Arkadi & Boris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science
ISBN: 9780879973360
Publisher: Daw Books
Published: 1964-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 3

Verse is unnatural, no one speaks in verse… Never descend to poetry, my boy.

C. Dickens

They kept on repairing the Aldan all night. When I went to Electronics next morning, the sleepy and annoyed engineers were sitting on the floor berating Cristobal Joseevich in uninspired invective. They were calling him a Scythian, barbarian, and Hun, who had gained access to computers. Their despair was so complete that for a while they actually listened to my advice and attempted to follow it. But then the chief arrived, a certain Savaof Baalovich Uni, and I was immediately displaced from the machine. Moving out of the way, I sat down at my desk and observed how Savaof Baalovich was divining the essence of the damage.

He was very old, but strong and sinewy, sunburned with a shiny bald head and closely shaved cheeks, dressed in a blinding white tussah suit. This man was regarded with great reverence by everyone. I saw for myself once how he was reading Modest Matveevich a lecture in a soft voice, and the menacing Modest Matveevich was bowing and repeating, “I understand. My fault. It won’t happen again…” A kind of monstrous energy emanated from Savaof Baalovich. It was noted that in his presence watches gained time, and the tracks of elementary particles, curved by a magnetic field, would straighten out. All the same, he was not a magus. At least, not a practicing magus. He didn’t go through walls, never transgressed anyone, and never created his own doubles, though he worked an inordinate lot. He was the head of the Technical Maintenance Department, knew all the technology in the Institute to the finest detail, and was a consultant to the Kitezhgrad magitechnic plant. In addition, he was involved in the most unexpected matters far removed from his profession.

I learned about his past only recently. In olden times, S.B. Uni was the leading magus on Earth. Cristobal Junta and Gian Giacomo were pupils of his students. Evil was exorcised with his name. Jinn bottles were sealed with his name. King Solomon wrote him letters of passionate admiration and erected temples in his honor. He seemed to be all-powerful. And then, sometime in the middle of the sixteenth century, he did become all-powerful. Having achieved a numerical solution of the integro-differential Equation of Perfection, which was postulated by some titan before the Ice Age, he acquired the ability to perform any miracle. Each of the magi had his own limits. Some were unable to rid themselves of the growth on their ears. Others were in possession of the generalized Lomonosov-Lavoisier law, but were powerless before the second law of thermodynamics. Still others—and they were very few—could stop time, but only in Riemann space and only for a short period. Savaof Baalovich was omnipotent He could do anything. And he could do nothing. Because the limiting boundary of the Equation of Perfection proved to be the condition that the miracle must not harm anyone. Not one intelligent being. On Earth or anywhere in any other part of the universe.

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