The
sun was licking it avidly on one side.
"Why didn't I notice it before? What a
coincidence! Well, I never!
Silly ass!"
The Professor looked down and stared pensively at his strangely shod feet.
"Hm, what shall I do? Go back to Pankrat? No, there's no waking him. It's
a pity to throw the wretched thing away. I'll have to carry it."
He removed the galosh and set off
carrying it distastefully.
An old car drove out of Prechistenka with
three passengers. Two men, slightly tipsy, with a garishly
made-up woman in those baggy silk trousers that were all the rage in 1928
sitting on their lap.
"Hey, Dad!" she shouted in a low
husky voice. "Did you sell the other galosh for booze?"
"The old boy got sozzled at the
Alcazar," howled the man on the left, while the one on the right leaned
out of the car and shouted: "Is the night-club in Volkhonka still open,
Dad? That's where we're making for!"
The Professor looked at them sternly over the
top of his glasses, let the cigarette fall out of his mouth and then
immediately forgot they existed. A beam was cutting its way through
Prechistensky Boulevard, and the dome of Christ the Saviour had begun to burn.
The sun had come out.
CHAPTER III.
What had happened was this. When the Professor
put his discerning eye to the microscope, he noticed for the first time in his life
that one particular ray in the coloured tendril stood out more vividly and
boldly than the others. This ray was bright red and stuck out of the tendril
like the tiny point of a needle, say.
Thus, as ill luck would have it, this ray
attracted the attention of the great man's experienced eye for several seconds.
In it, the ray, the Professor detected
something a thousand times more significant and important than the ray itself,
that precarious offspring accidentally engendered by the movement of a microscope
mirror and lens. Due to the assistant calling the Professor away, some amoebas
had been subject to the action of the ray for an hour-and-a-half and this is
what had happened: whereas the blobs of amoebas on the plate outside the ray
simply lay there limp and helpless, some very strange phenomena were taking
place on the spot over which the sharp red sword was poised. This strip of red
was teeming with life. The old amoebas were forming pseudopodia in a desperate
effort to reach the red strip, and when they did they came to life, as if by
magic. Some force seemed to breathe life into them. They flocked there,
fighting one another for a place in the ray, where the most frantic (there was
no other word for it) reproduction was taking place. In defiance of all the
laws which Persikov knew like the back of his hand, they gemmated before his
eyes with lightning speed. They split into two in the ray, and each of the
parts became a new, fresh organism in a couple of seconds. In another second or
two these organisms grew to maturity and produced a new generation in their
turn. There was soon no room at all in the red strip or on the plate, and
inevitably a bitter struggle broke out.
The newly born amoebas tore one
another to pieces and gobbled the pieces up.
Among the newly born lay the corpses
of those who had perished in the fight for survival. It was the best and
strongest who won. And they were terrifying. Firstly, they were about twice the
size of ordinary amoebas and, secondly, they were far more active and
aggressive. Their movements were rapid, their pseudopodia much longer than
normal, and it would be no exaggeration to say that they used them like an
octopus's tentacles.
On the second evening the Professor, pale and
haggard, his only sustenance the thick cigarettes he rolled himself, studied
the new generation of amoebas. And on the third day he turned to the primary
source, i.e., the red ray.
The gas hissed faintly in the Bunsen burner,
the traffic clattered along the street outside, and the Professor, poisoned by
a hundred cigarettes, eyes half-closed, leaned back in his revolving chair.
"I see it all now. The ray brought them
to life. It's a new ray, never studied or even discovered by anyone before. The
first thing is to find out whether it is produced only by electricity, or by
the sun as well," Persikov muttered to himself.
The next night provided the answer to this
question. Persikov caught three rays in three microscopes from the arc light,
but nothing from the sun, and summed this up as follows:
"We must assume that it is not found in
the solar spectrum... Hm, well, in short we must assume it can only be obtained
from electric light." He gazed fondly at the frosted ball overhead,
thought for a moment and invited Ivanov into the laboratory, where he told him
all and showed him the amoebas.
Decent Ivanov was amazed, quite flabbergasted.
Why on earth hadn't a simple thing as this tiny arrow been noticed before? By anyone, or even by him, Ivanov. It was really appalling!
Just look...
"Look, Vladimir Ipatych!" Ivanov
said, his eye glued to the microscope.
"Look what's happening! They're
growing be" fore my eyes... You must take a look..."
"I've been observing them for three
days," Persikov replied animatedly.
Then a conversation took place between the two
scientists, the gist of which was as follows. Decent Ivanov undertook with the
help of lenses and mirrors to make a chamber in which they could obtain the ray
in magnified form without a microscope. Ivanov hoped, was even convinced, that
this would be extremely simple.
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