Chapter VII: Part 7

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?"

It was clear that he was not aware I knew everything. All right! Perhaps it was necessary that it should be so. From above him, in a deliberately significant tone I said:

"I am the Builder of the _Integral_ and I am directing the test flight. Do you understand?"

The arm drew away.

The saloon. Heads covered with bristles, gray iron bristles, and yellow heads, and bald, ripe heads were bent over the instruments and maps. Swiftly, with a glance, I gathered them in with my eyes, off I ran, back along the long passage, then through the hatch into the engine-room. There it was hot from the red tubes, overheated by the explosions; a constant roar,--the levers were dancing their desperate drunken dance, quivering ceaselessly with a barely noticeable quiver; the arrows on the dials.... There! At last! Near the tachometer, a notebook in his hand, was that man with the low forehead.

"Listen," I shouted straight into his ear (because of the roar), "Is she here? Where is she?"

"She? There at the radio."

I dashed over there. There were three of them, all with receiving helmets on. And she seemed a head taller than usual, wingy, sparkling, flying like an ancient walkyrie, and those bluish sparks from the radio seemed to emanate from her,--from her also that ethereal, lightning-like odor of ozone.

"Someone--well, you for instance," I said to her, panting from having run, "I must send a message down to earth, to the docks. Come, I shall dictate it to you."

Close to the apparatus there was a small box-like cabin. We sat at the table side by side. I found her hand and pressed it hard.

"Well, what is going to happen?"

"I don't know. Do you realize how wonderful it is? To fly without knowing where ... no matter where? It will soon be twelve o'clock and nobody knows what.... And when night.... Where shall you and I be tonight? Perhaps somewhere on the grass, on dry leaves...."

Blue sparks emanated from her and the odor of lightning, and the vibration became more and more frequent within me.

"Write down," I said loudly, panting (from having run), "Time: eleven-twenty; speed 5800...."

"Last night she came to me with your note. I know ... I know everything; don't talk.... But the child is yours. I sent her over; she is already beyond the Wall. She will live...."

I was back on the commander's bridge, back in the delirious night with its black, starry sky and its dazzling sun. The hands of the clock on the table were slowly moving from minute to minute. Everything was permeated by a thin, hardly perceptible quivering (only I noticed it). For some reason a thought passed through my head: it would be better if all this took place not here but somewhere below, nearer to earth.

"Stop!" I commanded.

We kept moving by inertia, but more and more slowly. Now the _Integral_ was caught for a second by an imperceptible little hair--for a second it hung motionless, then the little hair broke and the _Integral_ like a stone dashed downward with increasing speed. That way in silence, minutes, tens of minutes passed. My pulse was audible; the hand of the clock before my eyes came closer and closer to twelve. It was clear to me I was a stone; I-330 the earth; and the stone was under irresistible compulsion to fall downward, to strike the earth and break into small particles. What if...? Already the hard blue smoke of the clouds appeared below.... What if...? But the phonograph within me with a hinge-like motion and precision took the telephone and commanded: "Low speed!" The stone ceased falling. Only the four lower tubes were growling, two ahead and two aft, only enough to hold the _Integral_ motionless, and the _Integral_, only slightly trembling, stopped in the air as if anchored, about one kilometer from the earth.

Everybody came out on deck, (it was shortly before twelve, before the sounding of the dinner-gong) and leaned over the glass railing; hastily, in huge gulps, they swallowed the unknown world which lay below, beyond the Green Wall. Amber, blue, green, the autumnal woods, prairies, a lake. At the edge of a little blue saucer, some lone yellow debris, a threatening, dried-out yellow finger,--it must have been the tower of an ancient "church" saved by a miracle....

"Look, there! Look! There to the right!"

There (over the green desert) a brown blot was rapidly moving. I held a telescope in my hands and automatically I brought it to my eyes: the grass reaching their chests, a herd of brown horses was galloping, and on their back--_they_, black, white, and dark....

Behind me:

"I assure you, I saw a face!"

"Go away! Tell it to someone else!"

"Well, look for yourself! Here is the telescope."

They had already disappeared. Endless green desert, and in that desert, dominating it completely and dominating me, and everybody--the piercing vibrations of the gong; dinner time, one minute to twelve.

For a second the little world around me became incoherent, dispersed. Someone's brass badge fell to the floor. It mattered little. Soon it was under my heel. A voice: "And I tell you, it was a face!" A black square, the open door of the main saloon. White teeth pressed together, smiling.... And at that moment, when the clock began slowly, holding its breath between beats, to strike, and when the front rows began to move towards the dining saloon, the rectangle of the door was suddenly crossed by the two familiar, unnaturally long arms:

"STOP!"

Someone's fingers sank piercing into my palm. It was I-330. She was beside me.

"Who is it, do you know him?"

"Is he not ... is he not?..."

He was already lifted upon somebody's shoulders. Above a hundred other faces, his face like hundreds, like thousands of other faces yet unique among the rest....

"In the name of the Guardians! You, to whom I talk, _they_ hear me, every one of them hears me,--I talk to you: _we know_! We don't know your numbers yet but we know everything else. The _Integral_ shall not be yours! The test flight will be carried out to the end and you yourselves, you will not dare to make another move! You with your own hands will help to go on with the test and afterward ... well, I have finished!"

Silence. The glass plates under my feet seemed soft, cotton-like. My feet too,--soft, cotton-like. Beside me--she with a dead-white smile, angry blue sparks. Through her teeth to me:

"Ah! It is your work! You did your 'duty'! Well...." She tore her hand from mine; the walkyrie helmet with indignant wings was soon to be seen some distance in front of me. I was alone, torpid, silent. Like everyone else I followed into the dining saloon.

But it was not I, not I! I told nobody, save these white, mute pages.... I cried this to her within me, inaudibly, desperately, loudly. She was across the table, directly opposite me and not once did she even touch me with her gaze. Beside her, someone's ripe, yellow, bald head. I heard (it was I-330's voice):

"'Nobility' of character! But my dear professor, even a superficial etymological analysis of the word shows that it is a superstition, a remnant of the ancient feudal epoch. We...."

I felt I was growing pale,--and that they would soon notice it. But the phonograph within me performed the prescribed fifty chewing movements for every bite. I locked myself into myself as though into an opaque house; I threw up a heap of rocks before my door and lowered the window-blinds....

Afterward, again the telephone of the commander was in my hands and again we made the flight with icy, supreme anxiety through the clouds into the icy, starry, sunny night. Minutes, hours passed.... Apparently all that time the logical motor within me was working feverishly at full speed. For suddenly somewhere at a distant point of the dark blue space I saw my desk, and the gill-like cheeks of U- over it and the forgotten pages of my records! It became clear to me; nobody but she ... everything was clear to me!

If only I could reach the radio-room soon ... wing-like helmets, the odor of blue lightnings ... I remember telling her something in a low voice and I remember how she looked _through_ me and how her voice seemed to come from a distance:

"I am busy. I am receiving a message from below. You may dictate yours to her."

The small, box-like little cabin.... I thought for a second and then dictated in a firm voice:

"Time 14:40. Going down. Motors stopped. The end of all."

The commander's bridge. The machine-heart of the _Integral_ stopped; we were falling; my heart could not catch up and would remain behind and rise higher and higher into my throat.... Clouds.... And then a distant green spot--everything green, more and more distinct, running like a storm towards us. "Soon the end."

The porcelain-like white distorted face of the Second Builder! It was he who struck me with all his strength; I hurt my head on something; and through the approaching darkness while falling I heard:

"Full speed--aft!"

A brusque jolt upward....

RECORD THIRTY-FIVE

In a Ring
A Carrot
A Murder

I did not sleep all night. The whole night but one thought.... As a result of yesterday's mishap my head is tightly bandaged,--it seems to me not a bandage but a ring, a pitiless ring of glass-iron, riveted about my head. And I am busy with the same thought, always the same thought in my riveted circle: to kill U-. To kill U- and then go to her and say: "Now do you believe?" What is most disquieting is that to kill is dirty, primitive. To break her head with something--the thought of it gives me a peculiar sensation of something disgustingly sweet in my mouth, and I am unable to swallow my saliva; I am always spitting into my handkerchief, yet my mouth feels dry.

I had in my closet a heavy piston-rod which cracked during the casting and which I brought home in order to find out the cause of the cracking with a microscope. I made my manuscript into a tube (let her read me to the last letter!), pushed the broken piston into that tube and went downstairs. The stairway seemed endless, the steps disgustingly slippery, liquid. I had to wipe off moisture from my mouth very frequently. Downstairs ... my heart dropped. I took out the piston and went to the controller's table, but she was not there; instead an empty, icy desk with ink-blots. I remembered that today all work was stopped; everybody was to go to be operated upon. Hence there was no need for her to stay here. There was nobody to be registered....

The street. It was windy. The sky seemed to be composed of soaring panels of cast-iron. And exactly as it seemed for one moment yesterday, the whole world was broken up into separate, sharp, independent fragments, and each of these fragments was falling at full speed; each would stop for a second, hang before me in the air and disappear without trace. It was as if the black, precise letters on this page should suddenly move apart and begin to jump hither and thither in fright, so that there was not a word on the page, only nonsensical "ap," "jum," "wor." The crowd seemed just as nonsensical, dispersed (not in rows), going forward, backward, diagonally, transversely....

Then nobody. For a second while I was dashing at full speed, suddenly stopping, I saw on the second floor in the glass cage hanging in the air,--a man and a woman--a kiss; she standing with her whole body bent backward brokenly: "This is for the last time, forever...."

At a corner a thorny, moving bush of heads. Above the heads, separate, floating in the air, a banner: "Down with the machines! Down with the Operation!" And (distinct from my own self) I thought: "Is it possible that each one of us bears such a pain, that it can be removed only with his heart.... That something must be done to each one, before he...." For a second everything disappeared for me from the world, except my beast-like hand with the heavy cast-iron package it held....

A boy appeared. He was running, a shadow under his lower lip. The lower lip turned out like the cuff of a rolled-up sleeve. His face was distorted; he wept loudly; he was running away from somebody. Stamping of feet was heard behind him....

The boy reminded me: "U- must be in school. I must hurry!" I ran to the nearest opening of the Underground Railway. At the entrance someone passed me and said, "Not running. No trains today ... there!" I descended. A sort of general delirium was reigning. The glitter of cut-crystal suns; the platform packed closely with heads. An empty, torpid train.

In the silence--a voice. I could not see her but I knew, I knew that intense, living, flexible, whip-like, flogging voice! I felt there that sharp triangle of brows drawn to the temples....

"Let me! Let me reach her! I must!..."

Someone's tentacles caught my arm, my shoulders. I was nailed. In the silence I heard:

"No. Go up to them. There they will cure you; there they will overfeed you with that leavened happiness. Satiated, you will slumber peacefully, organized, keeping time and snoring sweetly. Is it possible that you do not yet hear that great symphony of snoring? Foolish people! Don't you realize that they want to liberate you from these gnawing, worm-like, torturing question marks? And you remain standing here and listening to me? Quick! Up! To the Great Operation! What is your concern, if I remain here alone? What does it matter to you if I want to struggle, hopelessly struggle? So much the better! What does it matter to you that I do not want others to desire for me? I want to desire for myself. If I desire the impossible...."

Another voice, slow, heavy:

"Ah, the impossible! Which means to run after your stupid fancies; those fancies would whirl from under your very noses like a tail. No, we shall catch that tail, and then...."

"And then--swallow it and fall snoring; a new tail will become necessary. They say the ancients had a certain animal which they called 'Ass.' In order to make it go forward they would attach a carrot to a bow held in front of its nose, so that it could not reach it.... If it had caught and swallowed it...."

The tentacles suddenly let me go; I threw myself towards the place she was speaking from; but at that very moment everything was brought to confusion. Shouts from behind: "They are coming here! Coming here!" The lights twinkled and went out,--someone cut the cable,--and everything was like a lava of cries, groaning, heads, fingers....

I do not know how long we were rolled about that way in the underground tube. I only remember that steps were felt, dusk appeared, becoming brighter and brighter, and again we were in the street, dispersing fan-wise in different directions.

Again I was alone. Wind. Gray, low twilight crawling over my head. In the damp glass of the sidewalk, somewhere very deep, there were light topsy-turvy walls and figures moving along, feet upward. And that terribly heavy package in my hands pulled me down into that depth to the bottom.

At the desk again. U- was not yet there; her room was dark and empty. I went up to my room and turned on the light. My temples tightly bound by the iron ring were pulsating. I paced and paced, always in the same circle: my table, the white package on the table, the bed, my table, the white package on the table.... In the room to my left the curtains were lowered. To my right: the knotty bald head over a book, the enormous parabolic forehead. Wrinkles on the forehead like a series of yellow, illegible lines. At times our eyes met and then I felt that those lines were about me.

... It happened at twenty-one o'clock exactly. U- came in on her own initiative. I remember that my breathing was so loud that I could hear it and that I wanted to breathe less noisily but was unable to.

She sat down and arranged the fold of her unif on her knees. The pinkish-brown gills were waving.

"Oh, dear, is it true that you are wounded? I just learned about it, and at once I ran...."

The piston was before me on the table. I jumped up, breathing even louder. She heard, and stopped half-way through a word and rose. Already I had located the place on her head; something disgustingly sweet was in my mouth.... My handkerchief! I could not find it. I spat on the floor.

The fellow with the yellow fixed wrinkles which think of me! It was necessary that he should not see. It would be even more disgusting if he could.... I pressed the button. (I had no right to do that, but who cared about rights then?) The curtains fell.

Evidently she felt and understood what was coming for she rushed to the door. But I was quicker than she and I locked the door with the key, breathing loudly and not taking my eyes for a second away from that place on her head....

"You ... you are mad! How dare you...." She moved backward towards the bed, put her trembling hands between her knees.... Like a tense spring, holding her firmly with my gaze, I slowly stretched out my arm towards the table (only one arm could move), and I snatched the piston.

"I implore you! One day--only one day! Tomorrow I shall go and attend to the formalities...."

What was she talking about? I swung my arm.... And I consider I killed her. Yes, you my unknown readers, you have the right to call me murderer. I know that I should have dealt the blow on her head had she not screamed:

"For ... for the sake ... I agree.... I ... one moment...." With trembling hands she tore off her unif;--a large, yellow, drooping body, she fell upon the bed....

Then I understood; she thought that I pulled the curtains ... in order to ... that I wanted....

This was so unexpected and so stupid that I burst out laughing. Immediately the tense spring within me broke and my hand weakened and the piston fell to the floor.

Here I learned from personal experience that laughter is the most terrible of weapons; you can kill anything with laughter, even murder. I sat at my table and laughed desperately; I saw no way out of that absurd situation. I don't know what would have been the end if things had run their natural course, for suddenly a new factor in the arithmetical chain: the telephone rang.

I hurried, grasped the receiver. Perhaps she ... I heard an unfamiliar voice:

"Wait a minute."

Annoying, infinite buzzing. Heavy steps from afar, nearer and louder like cast-iron, and....

"D-503? The Well-Doer speaking. Come at once to me."

Ding! He hung up the receiver. Ding! like a key in a keyhole.

U- was still in bed, eyes closed, gills apart in the form of a smile. I picked up her clothes, threw them on her and said through clenched teeth:

"Well. Quick! Quick!"

She raised her body on her elbow, her breasts hanging down to one side, eyes round. She became a figure of wax.

"What?"

"Get dressed, that is what!"

Face distorted, she firmly snatched her clothes and said in a flat voice, "Turn away...."

I turned away, pressed my forehead against the glass. Light, figures, sparks, were trembling in the black, wet mirror.... No, all this was I, myself,--within me.... What did he call me for? Is it possible that he knows already about her, about me, about everything?

U-, already dressed, was at the door. I made a step toward her and pressed her hand as hard as though I hoped to squeeze out of it drop by drop what I needed.

"Listen.... Her name, you know whom I am talking of,--did you report her name? No? Tell the truth, I must.... I care not what happens, but tell the truth!"

"No."

"No? But why not, since you...."

Her lower lip turned out like the lip of that boy and her face ... tears were running down her cheeks.

"Because I ... I was afraid that if I did you might ... you would stop lov-- Oh, I cannot, I could not!"

I understood. It was the truth. Absurd, ridiculous, human truth. I opened the door.

RECORD THIRTY-SIX

Empty Pages
The Christian God
About My Mother

It is very strange that a kind of empty white page should be left in my head. How I walked there, how I waited (I remember I had to wait), I know nothing about it; I remember not a sound, not a face, not a gesture, as if all communicating wires between me and the world were cut.

When I came to, I found myself standing before Him; I feared to raise my eyes,--I saw only His enormous cast-iron hands upon His knees. Those hands weighed upon Him, bending His knees with their weight. He was slowly moving His fingers. His face was somewhere above as if in fog. And, only because His voice came to my ear from such a height, it did not roar like thunder, it did not deafen me but appeared to be an ordinary human voice.

"Then you too, you the Builder of the _Integral_! You, whose lot it was to become the greatest of all _conquistadores_! You whose name was to have been at the head of a glorious, new chapter of the history of the United State! You...."

Blood ran to my head, to my cheeks,--and here again a white page; only the pulsation in my temples and the heavy voice from above; but I remember not a word. Only when He became silent I came to and noticed how His hand moved heavily like a thousand pounds, and crawled slowly,--a finger threatened me.

"Well! Why are you silent? Is it true, or not? Executioner? So!"

"So," I repeated submissively. And then I clearly heard every word of His.

"Well then? Do you think I am afraid of the word! Did you ever try to take off its shell and look into its inner meaning? I shall tell you.... Remember a blue hill, a crowd, a cross? Some up on the hill, sprinkled with blood, are busy nailing a body to the cross; others below, sprinkled with tears, are gazing upward. Does it not seem to you that the part which those above must play is the more difficult, the most important part? If it were not for them, how could that magnificent tragedy ever have been staged? True, they were hissed by the dark crowd but for that the author of the tragedy, God, should have remunerated them the more liberally, should he not? And the Christian, most clement God himself, who burnt on a slow fire all the infidels, is he not an executioner? Was the number of those burned by the Christians less than the number of burned Christians? Yet (you must understand this!), yet this God was for centuries glorified as the God of love! Absurd? Oh, no. Just the contrary. It is rather a patent for the imperishable wisdom of man, written in blood. Even at the time when he still was wild and hairy man knew that real, algebraic love for humanity must inevitably be inhuman, and that the inevitable mark of truth is cruelty, just as the inevitable mark of fire is its property of causing the sensation of burning. Could you show me a fire that would not hurt? Well, prove now your point! Proceed! Argue!"

How could I argue? How could I argue when those thoughts were once mine, though I was never able to dress them in such a splendid, tempered armor. I remained silent.

"If your silence is intended to mean that you agree with me, then let us talk as adults do after the children have gone to bed; let us talk to the logical end. I ask: what was it that man from his diaper age dreamed of, tormented himself for, prayed for? He longed for that day when someone would tell him what happiness is and then would chain him to it. What else are we doing now? The ancient dream about a paradise.... Remember: there in paradise they know no desires any more, no pity, no love; there they are all--blessed. An operation has been performed upon their centre of fancy; that is why they are blessed, angels, servants of God.... And now, at the very moment when we have caught up with that dream, when we hold it like this": (He clenched his hand so, that if he had held a stone in it sap would have run out!) "At the moment when all that was left for us was to adorn our prize and distribute it amongst all in equal pieces, at that very moment you, you...."

The cast-iron roar was suddenly broken off. I was as red as a piece of iron on an anvil, under the moulding sledge-hammer. This seemed to have stopped for a second, hanging in air, and I waited, waited ... until suddenly:

"How old are you?"

"Thirty-two."

"Just double the age, and as simple as at sixteen! Listen. Is it possible that it really never occurred to you that _they_ (we do not yet know their names but I am certain you will disclose them to us), that _they_ were interested in you only as the Builder of the _Integral?_ only in order to be able through the use of you--"

"Don't! Don't!" I cried. But it was like protecting yourself with your hands and crying to a bullet: you may still be hearing your own "don't" but the bullet meanwhile has burned you through, and writhing with pain, you are prostrated on the ground.

Yes, yes; the Builder of the _Integral_.... Yes, yes.... At once there came back to me the angry face of U- with twitching, brick-red gills, on that morning when both of them....

I remember now, clearly, how I raised my eyes and laughed. A Socrates-like, bald-headed man was sitting before me; and small drops of sweat dotted the bald surface of his cranium.

How simple, how magnificently trivial everything was! How simple! Almost to the point of being ridiculous. Laughter was choking me and bursting forth in puffs; I covered my mouth with my hand and rushed wildly out....

Steps. Wind. Damp, leaping fragments of lights and faces.... And while running: "No! Only to see her! To see her once more!"

Here again, an empty white page. All I remember is feet; not people, just feet; hundreds of feet, confusedly stamping feet, falling from somewhere on the pavement; a heavy rain of feet.... And some cheerful, daring voice, and a shout that was probably for me: "Hey, hey! Come here! Come along with us!"

Afterward--a deserted square heavily overloaded with tense wind. In the middle of the square a dim, heavy threatening mass--the Machine of the Well-Doer; and a seemingly unexpected image arose within me in response to the sight of the Machine: a snow-white pillow and on the pillow a head thrown back, and half-closed eyes and a sharp, sweet line of teeth.... All this seemed so absurdly, so terribly connected with the Machine. I know _how_ this connection has come about but I do not yet want to see it nor to say it aloud--I don't want to! I do not!

I closed my eyes, sat down on the steps which lead upwards to the Machine. I must have been running for my face was wet. From somewhere very far away cries were coming. But nobody heard them; nobody heard me crying: "Save me from it--save me!"

If only I had a mother as the ancients had,--my mother, _mine_, for whom I should be not the Builder of the _Integral_ and not D-530, not a molecule of the United State but merely a living human piece, a piece of herself, a trampled, smothered, a cast-off piece.... And though I were driving the nails into the cross or being nailed to it (perhaps it is the same), she would hear what no one else could hear; her old grown-together wrinkled lips....

RECORD THIRTY-SEVEN

Infusorian
Doomsday
Her Room

This morning while we were in the refectory, my neighbor to my left whispered to me in a frightened tone:

"But why don't you eat? Don't you see, they are looking at you!"

I had to pluck up all my strength to show a smile. I felt it--like a crack in my face; I smiled and the borders of the crack drew apart wider and wider; it was quite painful.

What followed was this: no sooner had I lifted the small cube of paste upon my fork, than my fork jerked from my hand and tinkled against the plate, and at once the tables, the walls, the plates, the air even, trembled and rang; and outside too, an enormous, iron, round roar reaching the sky--floating over heads and houses it died away in the distance in small, hardly perceptible circles like those upon water.

I saw faces instantaneously grow faded and bleached; I saw mouths filled with food suddenly motionless and forks hanging in air. Then everything became confused, jumped off the centuries-old tracks, everybody jumped up from his place (without singing the Hymn!) and confusedly, in disorder, hastily finishing chewing, choking, grasping one another.... They were asking: "What? What happened? What?..." And the disorderly fragments of the Machine which was once perfect and great, fell down in all directions,--down the elevators, down the stairs.... Stamping of feet.... Pieces of words like pieces of torn letters carried by the wind....

The same outpour from the neighboring houses. A minute later the avenue seemed like a drop of water under a microscope: the infusoria locked up in the transparent, glass-like drop of water were tossing around, to the sides, up and down.

"Ah!" Some one's triumphant voice. I saw the back of a neck and a finger pointing to the sky. I remember very distinctly a yellow-pinkish nail and under the nail a crescent crawling out as if from under the horizon. The finger was like a compass; all eyes were raised to the sky.

There, running away from an invisible pursuit, masses of cloud were rushing upon each other; and colored by the clouds the aeros of the Guardians, with their tubes like antennae, were floating. And farther to the west--something like.... At first nobody could understand what it was, even I, who knew (unfortunately) more than the others. It was like a great hive of black aeros swarming somewhere at an extraordinary height--they looked like hardly noticeable, swiftly moving points.... Nearer and nearer.... Hoarse, guttural sounds began to reach the earth and finally we saw _birds_ just over our heads! They filled the sky with their sharp, black, descending triangles. The stormy wind drove them down and they began to land on the cupolas, on the roofs, poles and balconies.

"Ah--ah!" and the triumphant back of the neck turned, and I saw that man with the protruding forehead but it seemed that the title, so to speak, was all that was left of him: he seemed to have crawled out from under his forehead and on his face, around the eyes and lips, bunches of rays were growing. Through the noise of the wind and wings and cawing, he cried to me:

"Do you realize? Do you realize! They have blown up the Wall! The Wall has been blown up! Do you _understand_?"

Somewhere in the background, figures with their heads drawn in were hastily rushing by, and into the houses. In the middle of the pavement a mass of those who had been already operated upon; they moved towards the west....

... Hairy bunches of rays around the lips and eyes.... I grasped his hands:

"Tell me. Where is she? Where is I-330? There? Beyond the Wall or...? I must.... Do you hear me? At once.... I cannot...."

"Here!" he shouted in a happy, drunken voice, showing strong yellow teeth, "here in town, and she is acting! Oh, we are doing great work!"

Who are those "we"? Who am I?

There were about fifty around him. Like him, they seemed to have crawled out from under their foreheads. They were loud, cheerful, strong-toothed, swallowing the stormy wind. With their simple, not at all terrible-looking electrocutors (where did they get them?) they started to the west, towards the operated ones, encircling them, keeping parallel to forty-eighth avenue....

Stumbling against the tightly-drawn ropes woven by the wind, I was running to her. What for? I did not know. I was stumbling.... Empty streets.... The city seemed foreign, wild, filled with the ceaseless, triumphant, hubbub of birds. It seemed like the end of the world, _Doomsday_.

Through the glass of the walls in quite a few houses (this cut into my mind) I saw male and female Numbers in shameless embraces--without curtains lowered, without pink checks, in the middle of the day!...

The house--her house; the door ajar. The lobby, the control desk, all was empty. The elevator had stopped in the middle of its shaft. I ran panting up the endless stairs. The corridor. Like the spokes of a wheel figures on the doors dashed past my eyes; 320, 326, 330,--I-330! Through the glass wall everything in her room was seen to be upside down, confused, creased. The table overturned, its legs in the air like a beast. The bed was absurdly placed away from the wall, obliquely. Strewn over the floor--fallen, trodden petals of the pink checks.

I bent over and picked up one, two, three of them; all bore the name D-503. I was on all of them, drops of myself, of my molten, poured-out self. And that was all--that was left....

Somehow I felt they should not lie there on the floor and be trodden upon. I gathered a handful of them, put them on the table and carefully smoothed them out, glanced at them and ... laughed aloud! I never knew it before but now I know, and you too, know, that laughter may be of different colors. It is but a distant echo of an explosion within us; it may be the echo of a holiday, red, blue and golden fireworks, or at times it may represent pieces of human flesh exploded into the air....

I noticed an unfamiliar name on some of the pink checks. I do not remember the figures but I do remember the letter--F. I brushed the stubs from the table to the floor, stepped on them, on myself, stamped on them with my heels,--and went out....

I sat in the corridor on the window-sill in front of her door and waited long and stupidly. An old man appeared. His face was like a pierced, empty bladder with folds; from beneath the puncture something transparent was still slowly dripping. Slowly, vaguely I realized--tears. And only when the old man was quite far off I came to and exclaimed:

"Please ... listen.... Do you know ... Number I-330?"

The old man turned around, waved his hand in despair and stumbled farther away....

I returned home at dusk. On the west side the sky was twitching every second in a pale blue electric convulsion:--a subdued, heavy roar was proceeding from that direction. The roofs were covered with black charred sticks,--birds.

I lay down; and instantly like a heavy beast sleep came and stifled me....

RECORD THIRTY-EIGHT

I Don't Know What Title--Perhaps the Whole Synopsis May Be Called a Cast-off Cigarette-butt.

I awoke. A bright glare painful to look at. I half closed my eyes. My head seemed filled with some caustic blue smoke. Everything was enveloped in fog and through the fog:

"But I did not turn on the light ... then how is it...."

I jumped up. At the table, leaning her chin on her hand and smiling, was I-330, looking at me.

She was at the very table at which I am now writing. Those ten or fifteen minutes are already behind me, cruelly twisted into a very firm spring. Yet it seems to me that the door closed after her only a second ago and that I could still overtake her and grasp her hand,--and that she might laugh out and say....

I-330 was at the table. I rushed towards her.

"You? You! I have been.... I saw your room.... I thought you...." But midway I hurt myself upon the sharp, motionless spears of her eyelashes and I stopped. I remembered: she looked at me in the same way before,--in the _Integral_. It was urgent to tell her everything in one second and in such a way that she should believe--or she would never....

"Listen, I-330, I must.... I must ... everything! No, no, one moment--let me have a glass of water first."

My mouth was as dry as though it were lined with blotting paper. I poured a glass of water but I could not.... I put the glass back upon the table, and with both hands firmly grasped the carafe.

Now I noticed that the blue smoke was from a cigarette. She brought the cigarette to her lips and with avidity she drew in and swallowed the smoke as I did water; then she said:

"Don't. Be silent. Don't you see it matters little? I came anyway. They are waiting for me below.... Do you want these minutes which are our last...?"

Abruptly she threw the cigarette on the floor and bent backwards over the side of the chair to reach the button in the wall (it was quite difficult to do so), and I remember how the chair swayed slightly, how two of its legs were lifted. Then the curtains fell.

She came close to me and embraced me. Her knees, through her dress, were like a slow, gentle, warm, enveloping and permeating poison....

Suddenly (it happens at times) you plunge into sweet, warm sleep--when all at once, as if something pricks you, you tremble and your eyes are again widely open. So it was now; there on the floor in her room were the pink checks stamped with traces of footsteps, one of them bore the letter F. and some figures.... Plus and minus fused within my mind into one lump.... I could not say even now what sort of a feeling it was but I crushed her so that she cried out with pain....

One more minute out of these ten or fifteen; her head thrown back, lying on the bright white pillow, her eyes half closed, a sharp, sweet line of teeth.... And all this reminded me in an irresistible, absurd, torturing way about something forbidden, something not permissible at that moment. More tenderly, more cruelly, I pressed her to myself, more bright grew the blue traces of my fingers....

She said, without opening her eyes (I noticed this), "They say you went to see the Well-Doer yesterday, is it true?"

"Yes."

Then her eyes opened widely and with delight I looked at her and saw that her face grew quickly paler and paler, that it effaced itself, disappearing,--only the eyes remained.

I told her everything. Only for some reason, what I don't know--(no, it is not true, I know the reason) I was silent about one thing: His assertion at the end that they needed me only in order....

Like the image on a photographic plate in a developing fluid, her face gradually reappeared; the cheeks, the white line of teeth, the lips. She stood up and went to the mirror-door of the closet. My mouth was dry again. I poured water but it was revolting to drink it; I put the glass back on the table and asked:

"Did you come to see me because you wanted to inquire...?"

A sharp, mocking triangle of brows drawn to the temples looked at me from the mirror. She turned around to say something but said nothing.

It was not necessary; I knew.

To bid her good-bye, I moved my foreign limbs, struck the chair with them. It fell upside down, dead, like the table in her room. Her lips were cold ... just as cold was once the floor, here, near my bed....

When she left I sat down on the floor, bent over the cigarette-butt....

I cannot write any more--I no longer want to!

RECORD THIRTY-NINE

The End

All this was like the last crystal of salt thrown into a saturated solution; quickly, needle-like crystals began to appear, to grow more substantial and solid. It was clear to me; the decision was made and tomorrow morning _I shall do it_! It amounts to suicide but perhaps then I shall be re-born. For only what is killed can be re-born.

Every second the sky twitched in convulsion there in the west. My head was burning and pulsating inside; I was up all night and I fell asleep only at about seven o'clock in the morning when the darkness of the night was already dispelled and becoming gray and when the roofs crowded with birds became visible....

I woke up; ten o'clock. Evidently the bell did not ring today. On the table--left from yesterday--there stood the glass of water. I gulped the water down with avidity and I ran; I had to do it quickly, as quickly as possible.

The sky was deserted, blue, all eaten up by the storm. Sharp corners of shadows.... Everything seemed to be cut out of blue autumnal air--thin, dangerous to touch; it seemed so brittle, ready to disperse into glass dust. Within me something similar; I ought not to think; it was dangerous to think, for....

And I did not think, perhaps I did not even see properly; I only registered impressions. There on the pavement, thrown from somewhere, branches were strewn; their leaves were green, amber and cherry-red. Above, crossing each other, birds and aeros were tossing about. Here below heads, open mouths, hands waving branches.... All this must have been shouting, buzzing, chirping....

Then--streets empty as if swept by a plague. I remember I stumbled over something disgustingly soft, yielding yet motionless. I bent down--a corpse. It was lying flat, the legs apart. The face.... I recognized the thick negro lips which even now seemed to sprinkle with laughter. His eyes, firmly screwed in, laughed into my face. One second.... I stepped over him and ran. I could no longer.... I had to have everything done as soon as possible, or else I felt I would break, I would break in two like an overloaded sail....

Luckily it was not more than twenty steps away; I already saw the sign with the golden letters: "The Bureau of Guardians." At the door I stopped for a moment to gulp down as much air as I could and stepped in.

Inside, in the corridor stood an endless chain of numbers, holding small sheets of paper and heavy note-books. They moved slowly, advancing a step or two and stopping again. I began to be tossed about along the chain, my head was breaking to pieces; I pulled them by the sleeves, I implored them as a sick man implores to be given something that would even at the price of sharpest pain end everything, forever.

A woman with a belt tightly clasped around her waist over the unif and with two distinctly protruding squatty hemispheres tossing about as if she had eyes on them, chuckled at me:

"He has a belly-ache! Show him to the room second door to the right!"