Part 13

"I was waiting.... I want only one moment.... I only wanted to say ... how happy, how joyous I am for you! You realize of course, that tomorrow or day-after-tomorrow you will be healthy again, as if born anew."

I noticed my papers on the table; the last two pages of my record of yesterday; they were in the place where I left them the night before. If only she knew what I wrote there! Although I did not care after all. Now it was only history; it was the ridiculously far off distance like an image through a reversed opera-glass.

"Yes," I said, "a while ago, while passing through the avenue, I saw a man walking ahead of me. His shadow stretched along the pavement and think of it! his shadow was luminous! I think, more than that, I am absolutely certain that tomorrow all shadows will disappear. Not a shadow from any person or any thing! The sun will be shining through everything."

She, gently and earnestly:

"You are a dreamer! I should not allow my children in school to talk that way."

She told me something about the children; that they were all led in one herd to the Operation; that it was necessary to bind them afterward with ropes; and that one must love pitilessly, "yes, pitilessly," and that she thought she might finally decide to....

She smoothed out the grayish-blue fold of the unif that fell between her knees, swiftly pasted her smiles all over me and went out.

Fortunately the sun did not stop today. The sun was running. It was already sixteen o'clock.... I was knocking at the door, my heart was knocking....

"Come in!"

I threw myself upon the floor near her chair, to embrace her limbs, to lift my head upward and look into her eyes, first into one then into the other, and in each of them to see the reflection of myself in wonderful captivity....

There beyond the wall it looked stormy, there the clouds were leaden,--let them be! My head was overcrowded with impetuous words, and I was speaking aloud, and flying with the sun I knew not where.... No, now we know where we are flying; planets were following me, planets sparkling with flame and populated with fiery, singing flowers and mute planets, blue ones where rational stones were unified into one organized society, and planets which like our own earth had reached already the apex of one hundred per-cent happiness.

Suddenly from above:

"And don't you think that at the apex are, precisely, _stones_ unified into an organized society?" The triangle grew sharper and sharper, darker and darker.

"Happiness ... well?... Desires are tortures, are they not? It is clear therefore, that happiness is where there are no longer any desires, not a single desire any more. What an error, what an absurd prejudice it was, that formerly we would mark happiness with the sign 'plus'! No, absolute happiness must be marked 'minus,'--divine minus!"

I remember I stammered unintelligibly:

"Absolute zero!--minus 273°C."

"Minus 273°--exactly! A somewhat cool temperature. But does it not prove that we are at the summit?"

As before she seemed somehow to speak for me and through me, developing to the end my own thoughts. But there was something so morbid in her tone that I could not refrain ... with an effort I drew out a "No."

"No," I said, "You, you are mocking...."

She burst out laughing loudly, too loudly. Swiftly, in a second, she laughed herself to some unseen edge, stumbled and fell over.... Silence.

She stood up, put her hands upon my shoulders and looked into me for a long while. Then she pulled me toward her and everything seemed to have disappeared save her sharp, hot lips....

"Good-bye."

The words came from afar, from above, and reached me not at once, only after a minute, perhaps two minutes later.

"Why ... why 'good-bye'?"

"You have been ill, have you not? Because of me you have committed crimes. Has not all this tormented you? And now you have the Operation to look forward to. You will be cured of me. And that means--good-bye."

"No!" I cried.

A pitilessly sharp black triangle on a white background.

"What? Do you mean that you don't want happiness?"

My head was breaking into pieces; two logical trains collided and crawled upon each other, rattling and smothering....

"Well, I am waiting. You must choose; the Operation and hundred per-cent happiness, or...."

"I cannot ... without you.... I must not ... without you...." I said, or perhaps I only thought, I am not sure which, but I-330 heard.

"Yes, I know," she said. Then, her hands still on my shoulders and her eyes not letting my eyes go, "Then ... until tomorrow. Tomorrow at twelve. You remember?"

"No, it was postponed for a day. Day-after-tomorrow!"

"So much the better for us. At twelve, day-after-tomorrow!"

I walked alone in the dusky street. The wind was whirling, carrying, driving me like a piece of paper; fragments of the leaden sky were soaring, soaring--they had to soar through the infinite for another day or two....

Unifs of Numbers were brushing my sides,--yet I was walking alone. It was clear to me that all were saved but that there was no salvation for me. For I _do not want_ salvation....

RECORD THIRTY-TWO

I Do Not Believe Tractors A Little Human Splinter

Do you believe that _you will die_? Oh, yes, "Man is mortal. I am a man, consequently...." No, not that; I know that; you know it. But I ask: has it ever happened that you _actually believed_ it? Believed definitely, believed not with your reason but with your _body_, that you actually felt that some day those fingers which now hold this page, will become yellow, icy?...

No, of course you cannot believe this. That is why you have not jumped from the tenth floor to the pavement before now, that is why you eat, turn over these pages, shave, smile, write.

This very thing, yes, exactly this is alive in me today. I know that that small black hand on the clock will slide down here towards midnight, then again it will start to ascend, and it will cross some last border and the improbable tomorrow will have arrived. I _know_ it, but somehow I do not _believe_ it, or perhaps I think that twenty-four hours are twenty-four years. Therefore I am still able to act, to hurry, to answer questions, to climb the rope-ladder to the _Integral_. I am still able to feel how the latter is shaking the surface of the water, and I still understand that I must grasp the railing, and I am still able to feel the cold glass in my hand. I see the transparent, living cranes, bending their long necks, carefully feeding the _Integral_ with the terrible explosive food which the motors need. I still see below on the river the blue veins and knots of water swollen by the wind.... Yet all this seems very distant from me, foreign, flat,--like a draught on a sheet of paper. And it seems to me strange, when the flat, draught-like face of the Second Builder, suddenly asks:

"Well, then. How much fuel for the motors shall we load on? If we count on three, or say three and a half hours...."

I see before me, over a draught, my hand with the counter and the logarithmic dial at the figure 15.

"Fifteen tons. But you'd better take ... yes, better take a thousand."

I said that because I _know_ that tomorrow.... I noticed that my hands and the dial began to tremble.

"A thousand! What do you need such a lot for? That would last a week! No, more than a week!"

"Well, nobody knows...."

I do know....

The wind whistled, the air seemed to be stuffed to the limit with something invisible. I had difficulty in breathing, difficulty in walking, and with difficulty, slowly but without stopping for a second the hand of the Accumulating Tower was crawling, at the end of the avenue. The peak of the Tower reached into the very clouds;--dull, blue, groaning in a subdued way, sucking electricity from the clouds. The tubes of the Musical Tower resounded.

As always--four abreast. But the rows did not seem as firm as usual; they were swinging, bending more and more, perhaps because of the wind. There! They seemed to have stumbled upon something at the corner, and they drew back and stopped, congealed, a close mass, a clot, breathing rapidly; at once all had stretched their necks like geese.

"Look! No look, look--there, quick!"

"_They?_ Are those _they_?"

"Ah, never! Never! I'd rather put my head straight into the Machine...."

"Silence! Are you crazy?"

On the corner the doors of the auditorium were ajar, a heavy column of about fifty people--. The word "people" is not the right one. These were heavy-wheeled automatons bound in iron and moved by an invisible mechanism. Not people but a sort of human-like tractor. Over their heads, floating in the air--a white banner with a golden sun embroidered on it, and the rays of the sun: "We are the first! We have already been operated upon! Follow us, all of you!"

They slowly, unhesitatingly mowed through the crowd, and it was clear that if they had had in their way a wall, a tree, a house, they would have moved on with no more hesitation through wall, tree or house. In the middle of the avenue they fused and stretched out into a chain, arm in arm, their faces turned towards us. And we, a human clot, tense, the hair pricking our heads, we waited. Our necks were stretched out goose-fashion. Clouds. The wind whistled. Suddenly the wings of the chain from right and left bent quickly around us, and faster, faster, like a heavy engine descending a hill, they closed the ring and pulled us toward the yawning doors and inside....

Somebody's piercing cry: "They are driving us in! Run!"

All ran. Close to the wall there still was an open living gate of human beings. Everybody dashed through it, heads forward. Their heads became sharp wedges, so with their ribs, shoulders, hips.... Like a stream of water compressed in a firehose they spurted out in the form of a fan,--and all around me stamping feet, raised arms, unifs.... The double-curved S- with his transparent wing-ears appeared for a moment close before my eyes; he disappeared as suddenly; I was alone among arms and legs appearing for a second and disappearing. I was running....

I dashed to the entrance of a house to stop for a breath, my back close to the door,--and immediately, like a splinter borne by the wind, a human being was thrown towards me.

"All the while I ... I have been following you. I do not want ... do you see? I do not want ... I am ready to...."

Small round hands on my sleeves, round dark blue eyes--it was O-90. She just slipped along my body like a unif which, its hanger broken, slips along the wall to fall upon the floor. Like a little bundle she crumpled below me on the cold door-step, and I stood over her, stroking her head, her face,--my hands were wet. I felt as if I were very big and she very small, a small part of myself. I felt something quite different from what I feel towards I-330. I think that the ancients must have had similar feelings towards their private children.

Below, passing through her hands with which she was covering her face, a voice came to me:

"Every night I ... I cannot! If they cure me.... Every night I sit in the darkness alone and think of _him_, and of what he will look like when I.... If cured I should have nothing to live with--do you understand me? You must ... you must...."

An absurd feeling yet it was there; I really must! Absurd, because this "duty" of mine was nothing but another crime. Absurd, because white and black cannot be one, duty and crime cannot coincide. Or perhaps there is no black and white in life, but everything depends upon the first logical premise? If the premise is that I unlawfully gave her a child....

"It is all right, but don't, only don't ..." I said. "Of course I understand.... I must take you to I-330, as I once offered to, so that she...."

"Yes." (This in a low voice, without uncovering her face.)

I helped her rise. Silently we went along the darkening street, each busy with his own thoughts, or perhaps with the same thought.... We walked between silent leaden houses, through the tense, whipping branches of the wind....

Through the whistling of the wind all at once I heard, as if splashing through ditches, the familiar footsteps coming from some unseen point. At the corner I turned around, and among the clouds, flying upside-down reflected in the dim glass of the pavement I saw S-. Instantly my arms became foreign, swinging out of time, and I began to tell O-90 in a low voice that tomorrow, yes tomorrow, was the day of the first flight of the _Integral_, and that it was to be something that never happened before in all history, great, miraculous.

"Think of it! For the first time in life to find myself outside the limits of our city and see--who knows what is beyond the Green Wall?"

O-90 looked at me extremely surprised, her blue eyes trying to penetrate mine; she looked at my senselessly swinging arms. But I did not let her say a word,--I kept talking, talking.... And within me, apart from what I was saying and audible only to myself a thought was feverishly buzzing and knocking. "Impossible! You must somehow ... you must not lead _him_ to I-330!"

Instead of turning to the right I turned to the left. The bridge submissively bent its back in a slavish way to all three of us, to me, to O-, to him behind. Lights were falling from the houses across the water, falling and breaking into thousands of sparks which danced feverishly, sprayed with the mad white foam of the water. The wind was moaning like a tensely stretched string of a double-basso somewhere not far away. Through this basso, behind, all the while....

The house where I live. At the entrance O- stopped and began:

"No! You promised, did you not, that...."

I did not let her finish. Hastily I pushed her through the entrance and we found ourselves in the lobby. At the controller's desk--the familiar, hanging, excitedly quivering cheeks, a group of Numbers around. They were quarreling about something, heads bending over the banisters on the second floor; they were running downstairs one by one. But about that later. I at once drew O-90 into the opposite, unoccupied corner and sat down with my back to the wall. I saw a dark large-headed shadow gliding back and forth over the sidewalk. I took out my notebook. O-90 in her chair was slowly sinking as if she were evaporating from under her unif, as if her body were thawing, as if only her empty unif were left, and empty eyes taking one into the blue emptiness. In a tired voice:

"Why did you bring me here? You lied to me?"

"No, not so loud! Look here! Do you see? Through the wall?"

"Yes, I see a shadow."

"He is always following me.... I cannot.... Do you understand? I cannot therefore ... I am going to write a few words to I-330. You take the note and go alone. I know he will remain here."

Her body began again to take form and to move beneath the unif; on her face a faint sunrise, dawn. I put the note between her cold fingers, pressed her hand firmly and for the last time looked into her blue eyes.

"Good-bye. Perhaps some day...." She freed her hand. Slightly bending over she slowly moved away, made two steps, turned around quickly and again we were side by side. Her lips were moving; with her lips and with her eyes she repeated some inaudible word. What an unbearable smile! What suffering!

Then the bent-over human splinter went to the door; a bent-over little shadow beyond the wall; without turning around she went on faster, still faster....

I went to U-'s desk. With emotion filling up her indignant gills she said to me:

"They have all gone crazy! He, for instance, is trying to assure me that he himself saw a naked man covered with hair near the Ancient House...."

A voice from the group of empty raised heads;

"Yes. I repeat it, yes."

"Well, what do you think of that? Oh, what a delirium!" The word "delirium" came out of her mouth so full of conviction, so unbending, that I asked myself: "Perhaps it really was nothing but delirium, all that has been going on around me of late?" I glanced at my hairy hand and I remembered: "There are, undoubtedly, some drops of that blood of the sun and woods in you. That is why perhaps you...." No, fortunately it was not delirium; or no, _un_fortunately it was not delirium.

RECORD THIRTY-THREE

This without a Synopsis, Hastily, the Last

_The day._

Quick, to the newspaper! perhaps there.... I read the paper with my eyes (exactly; my eyes now are like a pen, or like a counting machine which you hold and feel in your hands like a tool, something foreign, an instrument). In the newspaper on the first page, in large print:

"THE ENEMIES OF HAPPINESS ARE AWAKE! HOLD TO YOUR HAPPINESS WITH BOTH HANDS. TOMORROW ALL WORK WILL STOP AND ALL THE NUMBERS ARE TO COME TO BE OPERATED UPON. THOSE WHO FAIL TO COME WILL BE SUBMITTED TO THE MACHINE OF THE WELL-DOER."

Tomorrow! How can there be, how can there be any tomorrow?

Following my daily habit, I stretched out my arm (instrument!) to the bookshelf to put today's paper with the rest in a cover ornamented with gold. While doing this: "What for? What does it matter? Never again shall I.... In this cover, never...." And out of my hands, down to the floor it fell.

I stood looking all around, over all my room; hastily I was taking away, feverishly putting into some unseen valise everything I regretted leaving here: my desk, my books, my chair. Upon that chair sat I-330 that day; I was below on the floor.... My bed.... Then for a minute or two I stood and waited for some miracle to happen; perhaps the telephone would ring, perhaps she would say that.... But no, no miracle....

I am leaving, going into the unknown. These are my last lines. Farewell you, my unknown beloved ones, with whom I have lived through so many pages, before whom I have bared my diseased soul, my whole self to the last broken little screw, to the last cracked spring.... I am going....

RECORD THIRTY-FOUR

The Forgiven Ones A Sunny Night A Radio-Walkyrie

Oh, if only I actually had broken myself to pieces! If only I actually had found myself with her in some place beyond the Wall, among beasts showing their yellow tusks; if only I actually had never returned here! It would be a thousand, a million times easier! But now--what? Now to go and choke that--! But would it help? No, no, no! Take yourself in hand, D-503! Set into yourself the firm logical hub; at least for a short while weigh heavily with all your might on the lever, and like the ancient slave, turn the millstones of syllogisms until you have written down and understood everything that happened....

When I boarded the _Integral_, everybody was already there and everybody occupied his place; all the cells of the gigantic hive were filled. Through the glass of the decks,--tiny, ant-like people below, at the telegraph, dynamo, transformers, altimeters, ventilators, indicators, motor, pumps, tubes.... In the saloon people sitting over tables and instruments, probably those commissioned by the Scientific Bureau. Near them the Second Builder and his two aides. All three had their heads down between their shoulders like turtles, their faces gray, autumnal, rayless.

"Well?" I asked.

"Well, somewhat uncanny," replied one of them smiling a gray rayless smile, "Perhaps we shall have to land in some unknown place. And, generally speaking, nobody knows...."

I hardly could bear to look at them, when in an hour or so I was to throw them out with my own hands, to cast them out from the cozy figures of our Tables of Hours, forever to tear them away from the mother's breast of the United State. They reminded me of the tragic figures of "The Three Forgiven Ones"--a story known to all of our school-children. It tells about three Numbers, who by way of experiment were exempted for a whole month from any work.[3] "Go wherever you will, do what you will," they were told. The unhappy three wandered the whole time about the place of their usual work and gazed within with hungry eyes. They would stop on the plazas and for hours busy themselves repeating the motions which they were used to making during certain hours of the day; it became a bodily necessity for them to do so. They would saw and plane the air; with unseen sledge-hammers they would bang upon unseen stakes. Finally, on the tenth day they could bear it no longer; they took one another by the hand, entered the river, and to the accompaniment of the March they waded deeper and deeper until the water forever ended their sufferings.

[3] It happened long ago, in the third century A. T. (After the Tables).

I repeat, it was hard for me to look at them, and I was anxious to leave them.

"I just want to take a glance into the engine-room, and then off!" I said.

They were asking me questions: What voltage should be used for the initial spark, how much ballast water was needed in the tank aft. As if a phonograph were somewhere within me, I was giving quick and precise answers but _I_, my inner self, was busy with its own thoughts.

In the narrow passage gray unifs were passing, gray faces and for a second, one face with its hair low over the forehead, eyes gazing from deep beneath it--it was _that same man_. I understood: _they_ had come and there was no escape from it for me; only minutes remained, a few dozens of minutes.... An infinitesimal, molecular quiver of my whole body. This did not cease to the very end,--it was as if an enormous motor were placed under the very foundation of my body which was so light that the walls, partitions, cables, beams, lights--everything was quivering....

I did not yet know whether _she_ was there. But I had no time.... They were calling me: quick! To the commander's bridge; time to go ... where?

Gray, rayless faces. Below in the water--tense blue veins. Heavy, cast-iron patches of sky. It was so difficult to lift my cast-iron hand and take up the receiver of the commander's telephone!... "Up! Forty-five degrees!"

A heavy explosion--a jerk--a rabid greenish-white mountain of water aft--the deck beneath my feet began to move, soft as rubber; and everything below, the whole life, forever.... For a second, falling deeper and deeper into a sort of funnel, becoming more and more compressed--the icy-blue relief-map of the City, the round bubbles of cupolas, the lonely leaden finger of the Accumulating Tower.... Then instantaneously a cotton curtain of cloud.... We pierced it, and there was the sun and the blue sky! Seconds, minutes, miles--the blue was hardening, fast filling with darkness; like drops of cold silver sweat appeared the stars....

A sad, unbearably bright, black, starry, sunny night.... As if one had become deaf, one still saw that the pipes were roaring, but one only saw, dead silence all about. The sun was mute. It was natural, of course. One might have expected it; we were beyond the terrestrial atmosphere. The transition was so quick, so sudden that everyone became timid and silent. Yet I ... I thought I felt even easier under that fantastic, mute sun. I had bounded over the inevitable border, having left my body somewhere there below, and I was soaring bodiless to a new world, where everything was to be different, upside down.

"Keep the same course!" I shouted into the engine-room, or perhaps it was not I but a phonograph in me, and the same machine with a mechanical, hinge-like movement handed the commander's trumpet to the Second Builder. All permeated by that most delicate, molecular quiver known only to me, I ran down the companionway, to seek....

The door of the saloon.... An hour later it was to latch and lock itself.... At the door stood an unfamiliar Number. He was small, with a face like a hundred or a thousand others which are usually lost in a crowd, but his arms were exceptionally long,--they reached down to the knees as though by mistake they had been taken from another set of human organs and fastened to his shoulders.

The long arm stretched out and barred the way.

"Where do you want to go?"