there are some suspicious-looking characters in galoshes round here, and... Professor Persikov of the Fourth University..."

The receiver suddenly cut the conversation short, and Persikov walked away, cursing under his breath.

"Would you like some tea, Vladimir Ipatych?" Maria Stepanovna enquired timidly, peeping into the study.

"No, I would not ... and the devil take the lot of them... What's got into them!"

Exactly ten minutes later the Professor received some new visitors in his study. One of them was pleasant, rotund and very polite, in an ordinary khaki service jacket and breeches. A pince-nez perched on his nose, like a crystal butterfly. In fact he looked like a cherub in patent leather boots.

The second, short and extremely grim, wore civilian clothes, but they seemed to constrict him. The third visitor behaved in a most peculiar fashion. He did not enter the Professor's study, but stayed outside in the dark corridor. The brightly lit study wreathed in clouds of tobacco smoke was entirely visible to him. The face of this third man, also in civilian clothes, was adorned by a tinted pince-nez.

The two inside the study wore Persikov out completely, examining the visiting card, asking him about the five thousand and making him describe what the man looked like.

"The devil only knows," Persikov muttered. "Well, he had a loathsome face. A degenerate."

"Did he have a glass eye?" the small man croaked.

"The devil only knows. But no, he didn't. His eyes darted about all the time."

"Rubinstein?" the cherub asked the small man quietly. But the small man shook his head gloomily.

"Rubinstein would never give cash without a receipt, that's for sure,"

he muttered. "This isn't Rubinstein's work. It's someone bigger."

The story about the galoshes evoked the liveliest interest from the visitors. The cherub rapped a few words down the receiver: "The State Political Board orders house committee secretary Kolesov to come to Professor Persikov's apartment I at once with the galoshes." In a flash Kolesov turned up in thes study, pale-faced and clutching the pair of galoshes.

"Vasenka!" the cherub called quietly to the man sitting in the hall, who got up lethargically and slouched into the study. The tinted lenses had swallowed up his eyes completely.

"Yeh?" he asked briefly and sleepily.

"The galoshes."

The tinted lenses slid over the galoshes, and Persikov thought he saw a pair of very sharp eyes, not at all sleepy, flash out from under the lenses for a second. But they disappeared almost at once.

"Well, Vasenka?"

The man called Vasenka replied in a flat voice: "Well what? They're Polenzhkovsky's galoshes."

The house committee was immediately deprived of Professor Persikov's present. The galoshes disappeared in a newspaper. Highly delighted, the cherub in the service jacket rose to his feet and began to pump the Professor's hand, even delivering a small speech, the gist of which was as follows: it did the Professor honour ... the Professor could rest assured ... he would not be disturbed any more, either at the Institute or at home ... steps would be taken, his chambers were perfectly safe...

"But couldn't you shoot the reporters?" asked Persikov, looking over his spectacles.

His question cheered the visitors up no end. Not only the small gloomy one, but even the tinted one in the hall gave a big smile. Beaming and sparkling, the cherub explained that that was impossible.

"But who was that scoundrel who came here?"

The smiles disappeared at once, and the cherub replied evasively that it was just some petty speculator not worth worrying about. All the same he trusted that the Professor would treat the events of this evening in complete confidence, and the visitors left.

Persikov returned to his study and the diagrams, but he was not destined to study them. The telephone's red light went on, and a female voice suggested that the Professor might like to marry an attractive and amorous widow with a seven-roomed apartment. Persikov howled down the receiver:

"I advise you to get treatment from Professor Rossolimo..." and then the phone rang again.

This time Persikov softened somewhat, because the person, quite a famous one, who was ringing from the Kremlin enquired at length with great concern about Persikov's work and expressed the desire to visit his laboratory. Stepping back from the telephone, Persikov wiped his forehead and took off the receiver. Then trumpets began blaring and the shrieks of the Valkyrie rang in the apartment upstairs. The cloth mill director's radio had tuned in to the Wagner concert at the Bolshoi.