"Well, how is your _Integral_? Will you soon hop off to enlighten the inhabitants of the planets? You'd better hurry up, my boy, or we poets will have produced such a devilish lot that even your _Integral_ will be unable to lift the cargo. 'Every day from eight to eleven' ..." R- wagged his head and scratched the back of it. The back of his head is square; it looks like a little valise (I recalled for some reason an ancient painting "In the Cab"). I felt more lively.
"You too are writing for the _Integral_? Tell me about it. What are you writing about? What did you write today, for instance?"
"Today I did not write; today I was busy with something else." "B-b-busy" sprinkled straight into my face.
R- frowned. "What? What? Well, if you insist I'll tell you. I was busy with the Death Sentence. I was putting the Death Sentence into verse. An idiot--and to be frank, one of our poets.... For two years we all lived side by side with him and nothing seemed wrong. Suddenly he went crazy. 'I,' said he, 'am a genius! And I am above the law.' All that sort of nonsense.... But it is not a thing to talk about."
The fat lips hung down. The varnish disappeared from the eyes. He jumped up, turned around and stared through the wall. I looked at his tightly closed little "valise" and thought, "What is he handling in his little valise now?"
A moment of awkward asymmetric silence. I could not see clearly what was the matter but I was certain there was something....
"Fortunately the antediluvian time of those Shakespeares and Dostoyevskis (or what were their names?) is past," I said in a voice deliberately loud.
R- turned his face to me. Words sprinkled and bubbled out of him as before, but I thought I noticed there was no more joyful varnish to his eyes.
"Yes, dear mathematician, fortunately, fortunately. We are the happy arithmetical mean. As you would put it, the integration from zero to infinity, from imbeciles to Shakespeare. Do I put it right?"
I do not know why (it seemed to me absolutely uncalled for) I recalled suddenly the other one, _her_ tone. A thin invisible thread stretched between her and R- (what thread?). The square-root of minus one began to bother me again. I glanced at my badge; sixteen-twenty-five o'clock! They had only thirty-five minutes for the use of the pink check.