But I won't connive at breaches of the rules, either... this is a meeting of the Night Watch top management. I have to warn Ilya straight away that some of what he hears will be new to him, and under normal circumstances he would never have heard it. So he must not talk about it. Not to anyone.'
'What exactly is that?' Ilya asked, adjusting his spectacles.
'Probably... probably everything that you are about to hear.'
'A bit more than just "some of it",' Ilya said, with a nod. 'Whatever you say. If you like, I'm willing to accept the mark of the Avenging Fire.'
'We can dispense with the formalities,' said Geser. He took a small metal box out of his desk and began rummaging in it. Meanwhile I carried on looking round with my usual curiosity. What made the boss's office so interesting was the huge number of little items that he kept because he needed them for his work or simply as souvenirs. Something like Pliushkin's bins in Dead Souls, or a child's box in which he keeps his most cherished 'treas ures', or the apartment of some absent-minded collector who's always forgetting what it is that he actually collects. And the most amazing thing was that nothing ever disappeared, even though there was almost no space left in the cabinets: new exhibits were added all the time.
This time my attention was caught by a small terrarium. It didn't have a lid, and there was a piece of paper glued to its side, with the letters OOO (or the numbers 000). Standing inside the terrarium was a stupid little toy made in China ?a small plastic toilet, with a tarantula squatting on it in a regal pose. At first I thought the spider was dead or made of plastic, but then I noticed its eyes glinting and its mandibles moving. There was another spider crawling across the glass walls: fat and round, looking like a hairy ball with legs. Every now and then the spider stopped and spat a drop of green venom onto the glass, clearly aiming at something outside. At the same time something showered down off the spider into the terrarium. There were some other spiders moving around on the bottom, greedily reaching out their legs to catch the treat. The fortun ate ones who managed to grab something began jumping up and down for joy.
'Interested?' Geser asked, without looking up.
'Uh-huh... what is it?'
'A simulation. You know I like to study self-contained social groups.'
'And what does this simulation represent?'
'A very interesting social structure,' Geser said evasively. 'In its basic form it should have become the traditional jar of spiders. But here we have two principal spiders, one of whom has taken up a dominant position by climbing onto a high point, while the other is acting as if he is providing protection against external aggression and caring for the members of the community. As long as the dominant spiders remain active, this simulation can continue to function with minimal internal aggression. I just have to spray the inhabitants with beer every now and then to relax them.'
'But doesn't anyone ever try to climb out?' Ilya asked. 'There's no lid...'
'Only very rarely. And only the ones who get fed up of being a spider in a jar. In the first place, the illusion of conflict is constantly maintained. And in the second place, the experimental subjects regard being in the jar as something out of the ordinary' Geser finally took some object out of his box and said, 'All right, that's enough of the small talk. Here is the first thing for you to think about. What is it?'
We stared in silence at the grey lump of concrete that looked as if it had been chipped out of a wall.
'Don't use magic!' Geser warned us.
'I know,' Semyon said guiltily. 'I remember that incident. A radio microphone. They tried to put it in here in the 1950s... or was it the 1960s? When we were the "Non-Ferrous Mining Equipment Assembly Trust". Some bright guys from the KGB, wasn't it?'
'That's right,' said Geser. 'Back then they were very keen on looking for spies, and on a sudden impulse they decided to check us ... we had provoked certain suspicions in the "organs" ... It was a good thing that we had our own eyes and ears in the KGB. We organised a campaign of misinformation, certain vigilant comrades managed to get others rebuked for the pointless squandering of expensive equipment... And