“And just what is it that you do here?”

“Is that really any business of the fire safety service?” the man asked thoughtfully. “Well…we guard Moscow against manifestations of evil.”

“You’re joking!” said the inspector, giving the duty pointsman a dour look.

“Not at all.”

A middle-aged, Eastern-looking man walked in without knocking on the door. The duty pointsman quickly got to his feet as he entered.

“Well, now, what have we got here?” the newcomer asked.

“One item left in the accounts office, one in the toilet, one in the fire safety board on the second floor,” the duty pointsman replied eagerly. “Everything’s in order, Boris Ignatievich.”

The inspector turned pale.

“Las, we haven’t got a fire safety board on the second floor,” Boris Ignatievich observed.

“I created an illusion,” Las replied boastfully. “It was very realistic.”

Boris Ignatievich nodded and said, “All right. But you didn’t notice the other two bugs in the programmers’ room. I think this is not the first time our guest has combined the duties of fire inspector and spy…am I right?”

“What do you think you’re-” the man began, and then stopped.

“You feel very ashamed of carrying out industrial espionage,” said Boris Ignatievich. “It’s disgusting! And you used to be an honest man…once. Do you remember how you went to help build the Baikal-Amur Railroad? And not just for the money. You wanted the romantic dream, you wanted to be part of some great effort.”

Tears began running down the inspector’s cheeks. He nodded.

“And do you remember when you were accepted into the Young Pioneers?” Las asked cheerfully. “How you stood in line, thinking about how you would devote all your strength to the victory of Communism? And when the group leader tied your tie for you, she almost touched you with her big, bouncy tits…”

“Las,” Boris Ignatievich said in an icy voice. “I am constantly amazed at how you ever became a Light One.”

“I was in a good mood that day,” Las declared. “I dreamed I was still a little boy, riding a pony…”

“Las!” Boris Ignatievich repeated ominously.

The duty pointsman fell silent.

The silence that followed was broken by the fire safety inspector’s sobbing. “I…I’ll tell you everything… I went to the Baikal-Amur Railroad to avoid paying alimony…”

“Never mind that,” Boris Ignatievich said gently. “Tell us about being asked to plant bugs in our office.”

Chapter 1

“I THINK YOU CAN GUESS WHY I’VE GATHERED YOU ALL TOGETHER,” Gesar said.

There were five of us in the boss’s office. Gesar himself, Olga, Ilya, Semyon, and me.

“What’s to guess,” Semyon muttered. “You’ve gathered all the Higher and first-level Others. Svetlana’s the only one missing.”

“Svetlana’s not here because she’s not on the staff of the Night Watch,” Gesar said, and frowned. “I’ve no doubt that Anton will tell her everything. I won’t even attempt to forbid it. But I won’t connive at breaches of the rules, either… This is a meeting of the Night Watch top management. Ilya, I have to warn you straightaway that some of what you hear will be new to you, and under normal circumstances you would never have heard it. So you must not talk about it. Not to anyone.”

“What exactly is ‘it’?” 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 Gesar. He took a small metal box out of his desk and began rummaging in it. Meanwhile I carried on looking around 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-though it was hard to say which was which. Something like Pliushkin’s bins in Gogol’s book Dead Souls, or a child’s box in which he keeps his most cherished “treasures,” or the apartment of some absentminded collector who’s always forgetting what it is 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, bearing 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 fortunate ones who managed to grab something began jumping up and down for joy.

“Interested?” Gesar 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,” Gesar 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 with 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.” Gesar 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 gray lump of concrete that looked as if it had been chipped out of a wall.

“Don’t use magic!” Gesar warned us.

“I know,” Semyon said guiltily. “I remember that incident. A radio microphone. They tried to put it in here in the fifties…or was it the sixties? When we were the ‘Nonferrous Mining Equipment Assembly Trust.’ Some bright guys from the KGB, wasn’t it?”

“That’s right,” said Gesar. “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…It was a good thing that we had our own eyes and ears in the KGB. We organized a campaign of misinformation, certain vigilant comrades managed to get others rebuked for the pointless squandering of expensive equipment…and what about this?”

A huge steel screw glinted in Gesar’s hands. To be quite honest, I didn’t even know that they made screws that large.

“I doubt if you know about this,” Gesar told us. “It’s the only attempt…at least, I hope it is…ever made by the Dark Ones to spy on us using human means. In 1979. I had a very difficult conversation with Zabulon, and afterward we signed an appendix to the agreement on prohibited methods of conflict.”

The screw was put back into the box. Two tiny brown tablets were taken out.