Once he abandoned his zoological refuge to read a paper on his ray and its action on the ovule in the huge hall of the Central Commission for Improving the Living Conditions of Scientists in Prechistenka. This was a great triumph for the eccentric zoologist. The applause in the hall made the plaster flake off the ceiling, while the hissing arc lamps lit up the black dinner jackets of club-members and the white dresses of their ladies. On the stage, next to the rostrum, a clammy grey frog the size of a cat sat breathing heavily in a dish on a glass table. Notes were thrown onto the stage. They included seven love letters, which Persikov tore up. The club president had great difficulty persuading him onto the platform. Persikov bowed angrily. His hands were wet with sweat and his black tie was somewhere behind his left ear, instead of under his chin. Before him in a breathing haze were hundreds of yellow faces and white male chests, when suddenly the yellow holster of a pistol flashed past and vanished behind a white column. Persikov noticed it vaguely and then forgot about it. But after the lecture, as he was walking down the red carpet of the staircase, he suddenly felt unwell. For a second the bright chandelier in the vestibule clouded and Persikov came over dizzy and slightly queasy. He seemed to smell burning and feel hot, sticky blood running down his neck... With a trembling hand the Professor clutched the banisters.

"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.