In front of me—in projection on the diagram—is the number fifteen on the logarithmic dial of the calculator in my hand.
“Fifteen tons. But we’d better take … yes, let’s take a hundred …”
This was because I knew, you see, that tomorrow …
And I can see in the corner of my eye that my hand holding the dial is just noticeably shaking.
“A hundred? Why such a large mass? That’s, what, enough for a week? Why—much more than a week!”
“Well, what if … who knows …”
I know …
The wind whistles through air that is tightly packed to its very top with something invisible. It is hard for me to breathe, hard to walk, and it’s hard for the arrow on the clock of the Accumulator Tower over there, at the end of the avenue, which is slowly crawling along without stopping for even a second. The Tower’s dull blue spire is in the clouds, howling obliviously as it sucks in electricity. The pipes of the Music Factory are howling.
As usual, we are in rows, in fours. But the rows are somehow flimsy—maybe it’s the wind that is making them waver and bend more and more. Then on the corner we bumped into something and flooded back into a solid, stiffened, packed, quickly breathing wad—and everyone immediately grew long goosenecks.
“Look! No, look—over there, quick!”
“Them! It’s them!”
“… But I—never—no way! No way—I’d rather put my head in the Machine …”
“Quiet! You crazy …”
On the corner, the door of an auditorium was wide open and a slow, bulky column of about fifty people was coming through it. But “people” is not quite right: there were no feet to them but some kind of heavy forged wheel being turned by an invisible axle. They weren’t people but sort of person-looking tractors. Above their heads, flapping in the wind was a white flag, with a golden sun sewn onto it, and in its rays was the inscription: “We are the first! We have been Operated! Everyone follow us!”
Slowly, irrepressibly, they plowed through the crowd—and it was clear that if there had been a wall, a tree, or a building in their path they wouldn’t have stopped and would have plowed through the wall, the tree, the building. Now they had reached the middle of the avenue. Screwed together at the arm, they stretched out in a chain, their faces toward us. And we, a tense wad, bristling with heads, are waiting. Goosenecks stretched out. Clouds. The wind is whistling.
Suddenly the wings of the chain, from the right and from the left, quickly bend inward and come at us—faster and faster, like a heavy machine going downhill—and squeeze around us in a ring … toward the gaping doors, through the doors, inside …
Someone’s piercing cry: “They’re driving us in! Run!”
And everyone darts. Just by the wall there is still a narrow gap in the living ring and everyone heads toward it, heads pointed forward, heads momentarily as sharp as wedges, with sharp elbows, ribs, shoulders, sides. Like a spurt of water forced out of a fire hose, they spray out in a fan of scattered stamping feet, swinging arms, and unifs. Out of nowhere, for an instant, a vision: a twice-bent, S-like body with transparent wing-ears. And then he is gone, has vanished through the earth, and I am alone among ticking second hands and legs on the run …
I was pausing for breath in some entranceway with my back firmly to the doors and just then, toward me, like the wind, came a tiny human sliver.
“I was … I was behind you the whole time … I don’t want—you understand—I don’t want to … I agree to …”
Tiny round hands and round blue eyes were at my sleeve: it was her, it was O. And then she somehow slipped down the wall and settled onto the ground. She huddled in a little ball down there on the cold steps, and I stood above her, stroking her head, her face (my hands became wet). I felt: I was very big and she was completely small—a small part of me myself. It was totally different from what I feel toward I-330 and I now imagine that it must be a similar feeling to that of the Ancients toward their private children.
Below, through hands covering her face, a barely audible: “Every night, I … I can’t—if they cure me … Every night I—alone in the dark, I think about the baby—what it’ll be like, what I’ll be like with it … I will have nothing to live for—you understand? And you must—you must …”
A ridiculous feeling but I was sure of it: yes, I must help. Ridiculous, because it was a duty and yet another crime. Ridiculous, because a white duty cannot, at the same time, be a black duty and a crime—they can’t coincide. Life is either blackless or whiteless and its color only depends on a basic, logical premise. And if the premise is that I gave her a child illegally …
“Well, good—don’t cry, don’t cry …” I say. “You understand: I must lead you to I-330—like I suggested before—so that she can …”
“Yes.” (Quietly, not taking her hands away from her face.)
I helped her to stand up. And, saying nothing, each thinking about our own things or, maybe, about the exact same thing, we went along the darkening street, among mute, leaden buildings, through the taut, whipping branches of the wind …
At some transparent, tense point, through the whistle of the wind, I heard familiar puddle-squelching footsteps behind me. At the crossroads, I looked around: among the over-turned, rushing clouds reflected in the dim glass of the street, I saw an S. At that moment my arms became extraneous and were swinging out of time, and I am loudly telling O that tomorrow… yes, tomorrow is the first flight of the Integral and it will be completely unprecedented, miraculous, and awe-inspiring.
O is dumbfounded and looks at me roundly, bluely, looks at my loudly, senselessly swinging arms. But I don’t let her say a word—I talk and talk. But inside, separately—only audible to myself— there were thoughts, feverishly buzzing and clashing: “I must not … I somehow have to … I must not lead him with us to I-330 …”
Instead of turning left, I turned right. The bridge offered up its obedient, slavishly bowed-over spine to the three of us: me, O, and S behind us. The lights from the illuminated buildings on the other bank poured out onto the water, smashing into thousands of feverishly jumping sparks, spattered with rabid foam. The wind was droning—as though there is a tight bass string somewhere in the middle-sky. And through the bass, behind us, still …
My building. At the doors O stopped, and started on something: “No, but you promised …”
But I didn’t let her finish; I hurriedly pushed open the door and we were inside, in the vestibule. Above the monitor desk: the familiar, anxiously quivering, drooping cheeks. A dense bunch of ciphers all around—there was some kind of disagreement—and heads were hanging over the railings on the second floor, and then running down the stairs one by one. But I’ll come to that later, later … Just then I quickly carried O over to the opposite corner, sat with my back to the wall (there, behind the wall, I saw a dark, big-headed shadow crawling along the sidewalk, back and forth), and pulled out my notebook.
O slowly settled down into her chair as if, under her unif, her body was evaporating, melting, and there was only an empty dress and empty eyes that sucked you into a blue void. She was tired: “Why did you bring me here? You lied to me.”
“No … Quiet! Look over there: do you see—behind the wall?”
“Yes. A shadow.”
“He is behind me all the time … I cannot. You understand— I must not … I will now write two words—you will take them and go alone. I know he will stay here.”
A ripe body started to rustle again under her unif, her stomach rounded out slightly, and on her cheeks, barely noticeable: a dawn, a sunrise.
I slipped the note into her cold fingers, squeezed her hand tightly, and my eyes sipped from her blue eyes for the last time.
“Farewell! Maybe one day …”
She pulled back her hand. Stooping over, she slowly went off. Two steps and she quickly turned—she was next to me again. Her lips were stirring. From her eyes, from her lips, from all of her: some kind of word, over and
over and over again to me. What an unbearable smile, what pain …
And then this stooping human sliver was at the doorway, then it was a tiny shadow behind the wall, not looking back, going quickly and then quicker still …
I walked up to U’s little desk. With anxiously, indignantly blown-out gills, she said to me: “Do you see? It’s like everyone has gone out of their minds! That one there swears that he saw some kind of person, naked and covered with fur, near the Ancient House.”
From the dense group of bristling heads, a voice: “Yes! And I’ll repeat it again: I definitely saw it.”
“So, how do you like that, eh? What a lot of gibberish.”
And she was so convinced and disdainful of this “gibberish” that I asked myself: isn’t that just what’s been going on in me and around me recently—isn’t it all really “gibberish”?
But I glanced at my hairy hand and remembered: “You probably have a few drops of sunny forest blood in you. Maybe that’s why I also … you …”
No, fortunately it is not gibberish. No, unfortunately it is not gibberish.
RECORD THIRTY-THREE
KEYWORDS: (No Keywords. In Haste. The Last.)
The day had arrived.
Quick: get the Gazette, it may be in there … I read the Gazette with my eyes (exactly that: my eyes are now like a pen, like a meter that you hold, feel, in your hands—they are external, they are an instrument).
There, in large type, on the whole page:
THE ENEMIES OF HAPPINESS ARE NOT SLUMBERING. HOLD ON TO HAPPINESS WITH BOTH HANDS! TOMORROW WORK WILL BE SUSPENDED AND ALL CIPHERS WILL APPEAR FOR THE OPERATION. THOSE WHO FAIL TO APPEAR WILL BE SUBJECTED TO THE MACHINE OF THE BENEFACTOR.
Tomorrow! Can there be—can there possibly be any tomorrow?
In the inertia of my daily routine, I reach my hand (the instrument) over to the bookshelf and place today’s Gazette with the others, in the gold-painted binder. Along the way: “Why am I doing this? Does it matter? I won’t ever return to this room …”
And the Gazette goes from my hand to the floor. And I stand and look around the whole, whole, whole room. I am hurrying to collect things—I’m feverishly cramming everything that it seems a shame to leave behind into an invisible suitcase. The table. Books. The chair. I-330 once sat on that chair while I was below, on the floor … The bed.
Then for a minute, two, I wait ridiculously for some kind of miracle: maybe the telephone would ring, maybe she would tell me to …
No. No miracle …
I walk off—into the unknown. These are my last lines. Farewell to you, unknown, you, dear readers, with whom I have lived for so many pages, to whom, sick with a soul, I showed all of myself, to the last stripped screw, to the last snapped spring …
I am walking off …
RECORD THIRTY-FOUR
KEYWORDS: The Released. A Sunny Night. Radio Valkyrie.
Oh, if only I had actually smashed myself and all the others to smithereens; if only I had actually found myself somewhere behind the Wall, together with her, among the beasts baring their yellow fangs; if only I had actually never returned here again. It would have been a thousand, a million times easier. But now what? Go and strangle that woman? As if that would help anything!
No, no, no! Take hold of yourself, D-503. Affix yourself to a firm logical axle. Lean on the lever with all your strength for a time and, like the ancient slave, turn the millstones of syllogisms. Until you’ve written it down, you won’t get your head around what happened …
When I boarded the Integral, everyone was already all assembled, everyone was in their places, all the honeycombs of the gigantic glass hive were filled. There were tiny, antlike people below, under the glass of the decks, standing at telegraphs, dynamos, transformers, altimeters, valves, arrows, motors, pumps, pipes. In the wardroom, some were bent over panels and instruments, probably under command of the Bureau of Science. And next to them: the Second Builder with two of his assistants.
All three of them had turtle-like heads drawn into their shoulders, their faces gray, autumnal, rayless …
“Well, what’s happening?” I asked.
“Well … it’s a bit grim …” One of them smiled grayishly, raylessly. “Who knows where we’ll have to land. Anyone’s guess, really.”
It was unbearable for me to look at them—at those whom I would forever throw from the comforting numbers of the Table of Hours, whom I would tear from the maternal breast of the One State forever, with my very own hands, in one hour’s time. They reminded me of the tragic figures of The Three Released—a story that every schoolchild knows. It’s a story about three ciphers who, for the sake of experiment, were released from work for a month: to do what they wanted to do and go where they wanted to go.7 These unlucky types loitered around the place they usually worked and peeped inside with hungry eyes. They stood in plazas for hours at a time; they performed the very movements that were appointed to that hour of the day as needed by their organism: they sawed and planed the air, they rattled invisible hammers, thumping on invisible blocks. And, finally, on the tenth day, they couldn’t bear it anymore: linking arms, they walked into the water and to the sound of the March, they plunged deeper and deeper, until the water ended their torment …
I repeat: it was hard for me to look at them. I hurried to leave.
“I’m just checking the engine room,” I said, “and then off we go.”
I was asked about something—about which voltage to use for liftoff and how much water ballast was needed in the aft cisterns. There was some sort of sound device in me and it responded to all the questions quickly and precisely, without stopping, while I was with other thoughts inside.
And suddenly in the little narrow corridor, something came to me, inside, and from that moment, basically, it all began.
In the narrow little corridor, gray unifs and gray faces flashed past, and among them, for a second, was that one with the hair pulled down low and the eyes under his forehead. I understood: they were here, and there was nowhere for me to go and only minutes remained, a few dozens of minutes … There was the smallest, molecular shiver all over my body as if it was generated by a motor (it didn’t stop until it was all over), but my body’s building was so light and all the walls, partitions, cables, beams, lights—everything was shivering …
I still don’t know if she is here or not. But now there is no time left—they’ve sent for me, they want me upstairs in the command room as quick as possible: it’s time to be on our way … but where to?
Gray faces, rayless. Tense, blue veins below, on the water. Grave, cast-iron layers of sky. And I raise my similarly cast-iron hand and take hold of the receiver of the command telephone. “Upward— forty-five degrees!”
A muffled explosion—a jolt—a violent, white-green mountain of water at the stern. The deck, soft and rubbery underfoot, is departing and everything below, the whole of life, forever … A second later everything below is tightening up and falling deeper and deeper into some sort of funnel: the protuberant, icy-blue sketch of the city, the round little bubbles of the cupolas, the lonely lead finger of the Accumulator Tower. Then: a fleeting wadded curtain of clouds. We break through and then: sun, blue sky. Seconds, minutes, miles and the blueness quickly hardens, filling with darkness, and stars come through like drops of cold, silver sweat …
And here was an awesome, unbearably bright, black, starry, sunny night. As if you suddenly turned deaf: you can still see that the pipes are roaring but you are only seeing it—the pipes are mute, it is silent. And so was the sun—mute.
This was all natural—it was what we must have expected. We had left the Earth’s atmosphere. But it was all so quick, so arresting, that everyone all around blanched and quieted. But I—I felt things ease under this fantastical, mute sun. It was as if, having had my last contraction, I had already crossed an unavoidable threshold and my body was left behind somewhere there, below, while I was flying off to the new world where everything would be unusual,
upside-down …
“Hold steady,” I cried to the engine room—or perhaps it wasn’t me but that sound device inside me—and the machine, with a mechanical hinged arm, thrust the command receiver over to the Second Builder. I was dressed in fine, molecular shivers, audible only to myself—I ran downstairs, to look for …
The door to the wardroom: in an hour it would clatter sternly and lock … An unfamiliar, shortish cipher stood by the door. He had a face like the hundreds and thousands that get lost in a crowd, but his arms were unusually long, down to his knees (it was as if they had been hastily taken from a different human gene pool by mistake).
A long arm extended and barred the way: “Where are you going?”
It was clear to me: he doesn’t know that I know everything. Fine: maybe that’s how it should be. And, looking down, purposefully, sharply: “I am the Builder of the Integral. And I—am in charge of this test flight. Understood?”
The arm was gone.
The wardroom. Over the instruments and the maps: heads, circumnavigated with bristling gray, and other heads, yellow, bald, ripe. Quickly, I scooped up everyone—in one glance—and went backward, along the corridor, along the gangway, downstairs to the engine room. There: the heat and the din from the scorching, blasting pipes; the reckless, drunken, never-pausing squats of the glittering cranks; and the dials trembling just slightly …