And then—finally—at the tachometer, it was him, his face bent low over a notebook …
“Listen …” (the din: you had to scream into each other’s ears). “Is she here? Where?”
In the shadows, a smile came from under his forehead: “Her? There. In the radio room …”
And I was off. There were three of them in there. All of them in winged earphone helmets. And she was like an ancient Valkyrie— a head higher than usual, winged, glittering, flying—and it was as if there were enormous blue sparks on her radio antennae, which were coming from her, along with a faint smell of ozone and lightning.
“Could anyone … well, you there …” I said to her, panting (from running). “I need to convey a message below, to Earth, to the hangar … Come with me, I’ll dictate …”
Next to the instrument room was a tiny little box of a cabin. We: at the desk, side by side. I found and squeezed her hand tightly: “Well, what now? What happens now?”
“I don’t know. Do you understand how wonderful that is: not knowing and flying wherever … And soon it will be twelve—and who knows what will happen? And then night … where will you and I be tonight? Maybe on the grass, on dried leaves …”
Blue sparks and the smell of lightning come from her and the tremble in me is getting faster.
“Write this down,” I say loudly, still panting in the meantime (from running). “Time: eleven-thirty. Speed: sixty-eight hundred …”
She, from under her winged helmet, not tearing her eyes away from her piece of paper, quietly: “… Yesterday evening she came to me with your note … I know—I know everything: be quiet. But, then, is the baby—yours? I sent her off—she is already there, behind the Wall. She will live …”
I am back in the command room. Again: the crazy night with its black starry sky and blinding sun; slowly, the hand of the clock on the wall is limping from one minute to the next; and everything is dressed in a fine cloud of barely noticeable (except to me) trembles.
And for some reason it seemed that it would be better if all this were to happen not here, but somewhere lower, nearer to the Earth.
“Stop!” I yelled into the engine room.
We were still going forward—by inertia—but slower, slower. And then the Integral caught itself on some hairspring of a second and hung immobile for a blink, until the little hairspring sprang and the Integral dropped like a rock—faster and faster. It continued like this, through silence, through minutes, dozens of minutes (my pulse was audible), as the hand approached 12:00 before my eyes. And I saw it clearly: the rock is me and the Earth is I-330—I was a rock flung by someone, and this rock absolutely had to fall and smash on the ground into smithereens … And what if I just let it … The hard, blue smoke of the rain clouds below us was already appearing … What if …
But instead, the sound device inside me, articulate and accurate, seized the receiver and gave the “slow ahead” command—and the rock stopped falling. And then only the four lower extensions began snorting—two fore and two aft auxiliaries—just enough to paralyze the Integral, and the Integral stood in the air, shuddering, as though firmly anchored at a kilometer or so from the Earth.
Everyone poured out onto the deck (almost 12:00, time for the lunch bell) and rushed to lean over the glass railing, without pausing for breath, swallowing the unknown over-the-wall world there, below. Amber, green, blue: an autumn forest, meadows, a lake. On the edge of the blue saucer: some yellow, bony ruins, a yellow, desiccated, threatening finger (it must be the spire of an ancient church that escaped destruction by some miracle).
“Look! Look! Over there—starboard!”
A quick dot was flying along with a brown shadow through the green desert. I had binoculars in my hands and I mechanically brought them up to my eyes: a herd of horses was galloping through chest-high grasses, their tails raised, and on their backs, those chestnut, white, jet-black …
Behind me: “And I’m telling you that I saw it—a face.”
“Go away! Tell it to someone else!”
“Well, take them, then, take the binoculars!”
But they had disappeared. The infinite green desert …
The tremble of the bell penetrated into that desert, filling it, me, and everyone: lunch, in a minute, at 12:00.
The world was strewn into momentary, disconnected fragments. Someone’s ringing gold badge lay on the steps but it didn’t matter to me: I crunched it under my heel. A voice: “I am telling you— it was a face!” A dark square: the open door of the wardroom. Clenched, white, sharply smiling teeth …
When the clock started to strike infinitely slowly, not pausing for breath from one strike to the next, and the front rows had started to move in—at that moment, the square of the door was crossed out with two familiar and unnaturally long arms: “Stop there!”
Fingers dug into my palms (it was I-330, she was next to me): “Who is this? You know him?”
“Surely he is … isn’t he … ?”
He climbed up on someone’s shoulders. A face (like hundreds of thousands and yet uniquely his own) up above hundreds of faces: “In the name of the Benefactor … You—you know who you are— you will listen to me, every one of you will listen to me. I am telling you: we know. We don’t yet know your digits—but we know you. The Integral won’t be yours! The test flight will be led to its conclusion, and you—you won’t even dare to move—you will complete the mission, with your own hands. And then … well, that’s all …”
Silence. The glass slabs underfoot were soft, wadded, and my legs turned soft and wadded. From her: a totally white smile of mad, blue sparks. Through her teeth, into my ear: “Is this you? Did you ‘fulfill’ your ‘duty’? What have you …”
Her hand: torn away from my hands. Her furious-winged Valkyrie helmet was now somewhere far ahead. I was alone, I froze and, saying nothing, I walked into the wardroom like everyone.
But it wasn’t me, I’m telling you, it wasn’t me! I haven’t mentioned this to anyone, no one except those white mute pages …
Inside me—inaudibly, recklessly, loudly—I screamed this to her. She sat across the table, opposite me, and she didn’t once brush past me with her eyes. Next to her: someone’s ripe-yellow baldness. I could hear (this was I-330): “ ‘Nobility’? But, dearest professor, even a simple philosophical analysis of this word shows that this is a prejudice, a relic of the Ancients, of the feudal epoch. But we …”
I felt: my face was paling and now everyone would see it. But the machine in me went through the fifty mandatory masticatory motions to each bite; I bolted myself in, like I was in an ancient nontransparent house, piling up rocks against the door, covering the windows…
Later, the command receiver was in my hands. Our flight, in its icy final anguish—through the clouds—into the icy, starry-sunny night. Minutes, hours. And, evidently, there was a logical motor working feverishly inside me the whole time (though it wasn’t audible to me myself) because suddenly, at some point in blue space, I saw: my writing desk, the gillish cheeks of U bent over it, a forgotten page of my notes. And it was clear to me: it couldn’t have been anyone but her. It’s all clear to me …
Ah, if only—if only I could get to the radio …
Winged helmets, the smell of blue lightning … I remember I said something loudly to her and I remember her, looking through me, as if I was glass, and from a distance: “I am busy: I am receiving from below. Dictate it to someone else, to her …”
In the tiny little box of a cabin, having thought for a minute, I firmly dictated: “Time: fourteen-forty. Descending! Stop the engines. The end of everything.”
The command room. The mechanical heart of the Integral has stopped, we are falling but my heart … hasn’t managed to fall with us, it has detached and is rising in my throat. Clouds, and then a green dot in the distance, getting greener and more distinct, rushing toward us in a whirlwind: the end is in sight …
The deranged porcelain-white face of the Second Builder. It was
probably him who shoved me aside with one stroke. I hit my head on something, and there was a darkening, a falling and, cloudily, I heard: “Reverse—full speed!”
A sharp jump upward … I don’t remember anything else.
RECORD THIRTY-FIVE
KEYWORDS: Banded. A Carrot. A Killing.
I didn’t sleep all night. All night, thinking about one thing …
My head, after yesterday, was tightly bound up in bandages. Now, these weren’t bandages but a band: a merciless band of glassy steel, riveted onto my head, and I find myself in the same sort of forged circle: I will kill U. I will kill U and then go to I-330 and say: “Now do you believe me?” The most awful part of all this is that the idea of killing—dirtily, anciently, smashing a head with something—is giving me the strange sensation of having something disgustingly sweet in my mouth, and I can’t swallow my spit, and I have to spit it into my handkerchief all the time, and my mouth is dry.
In my closet lay a heavy piston rod that had snapped after casting (I was supposed to look at the structure of the fracture under the microscope). I rolled my records up into a cylinder (let her read them all, up to every last letter), shoved them into the fragment of the rod, and went downstairs. The stairway—of endless stairs— was kind of nasty, slippery and oily, and I was wiping my mouth with the handkerchief the whole time …
Downstairs. My heart thumped. I stopped, took out the rod, went to the monitor’s desk …
But U wasn’t there: just an empty, icy surface. I remembered: all labor had been canceled today. Everyone was supposed to go for the Operation and it made sense: there was no reason for her to be there, there would be no one to monitor here …
On the street. Wind. A sky of rushing, cast-iron slabs. And it could have been a moment from yesterday: the whole world shattered into separate, sharp, independent pieces, and each of them started dropping vertically, then they stopped for a second, hanging in front of me in the air, and then vanished into thin air without a trace.
It was as if all the black, precise letters on this page suddenly shifted, scattered about in fright and there wasn’t one word, just nonsense: scatt-abou-infrig. On the street, there was a crowd, similarly dispersed, without rows: going forward, backward, diagonally, crosswise.
And then there was no one. And, in the space of a second, an image shot past and froze: up on the second floor, in a glass cage, hanging in the air, a man and a woman, in a kiss, standing, her body bent backward to breaking point. It was the last time, forever …
At another corner, a prickly bunch of heads was stirring. Above the heads—unattached, in the air—a flag with the words “Down with the machines! Down with the Operation!” And detaching (from myself), I thought for a second: it can’t be that everyone has such a pain, the kind that can be wrested from one’s insides only if it is taken together with the heart, and that every one of us needs to do something, before … And for a second there was nothing in the whole world except (my) bestial hand with its cast-iron-heavy bundle …
Then: a little boy, facing straight ahead, a shadow under his lower lip. His lower lip was turned outward, like the cuff of a rolled-up sleeve—his whole face was turned outward—and he was shrieking, running from someone, as fast as his legs could carry him, there was stamping coming after him …
The little boy prompted a thought in me… Yes, U should be at school now, I must get there quickly. I ran to the nearest entrance to the subterranean rail.
At the entrance, someone speeding past: “Not running. The train isn’t running today! There …”
I went down. It was total chaos. The reflection of faceted crystal suns. A platform, densely packed with heads. An empty, frozen train.
In the silence: a voice. It’s hers—she’s not visible but I know, I know this stubborn, supple, whiplike, lashing voice—and somewhere here were those sharp triangle eyebrows, jerked up to the temples … I yelled: “Let me! Let me through! I have to …”
But someone’s pincers had me—by the arms, the shoulders— hard as nails. And in the silence, a voice: “… No! Run upstairs! There you will be healed, there you will be fed full of sumptuous happiness, and once you’re satiated, you will slumber evenly and snore to an organized beat—can you not hear this great symphony of snores? You funny ciphers: they want to liberate you of the torturously gnawing question marks that wriggle like worms … But you’re standing here and listening to me instead. Go quickly—upstairs—to the Great Operation! What does it matter to you that I stay here alone? What does it matter to you if I don’t want them to want things for me—if I want to want things for myself—if I want the impossible … ?”
A different voice—slow, heavy: “Aha. The impossible? That means chasing after your idiotic fantasies and letting them swing their tails in front of your nose? No: we’re going to grab that tail and stamp on it, and then …”
“And then—you’ll gobble it up and you’ll start snoring—and then you’ll need a new tail in front of your nose. They say that the Ancients had an animal: a donkey. In order to make it go forward, and continue forward—they attached a carrot to a stick in front of its snout, just far enough away that it couldn’t get at it. But if it did get it, it gobbled it right up …”
Suddenly the pincers let me go; I threw myself into the middle, where she was talking—and at that moment everything began to fall apart, contracted itself. Then a cry from behind: “They’re coming, they’re coming this way!” The lights jumped and went out (someone had cut through the wire) and then: an avalanche, screams, a wheeze, heads, fingers …
I don’t know how long we rolled like that underground. Finally: little steps, twilight, it got lighter, and we were on the street again, fanning out into different directions …
Now: I’m alone again. The wind and twilight were gray, low, and right over your head. Deep in the wet glass of the sidewalk: upside-down lights and walls, and figures, moving around, feet up. The unbelievably heavy bundle in my hand was pulling me into the depths, toward the bottom.
Downstairs, U was still not behind the little desk and her room was empty and dark.
I climbed up to my room and turned on the light. My temples, tautly squeezed by the band, were thumping and I walked around, chained to one and the same circle: the table, the white bundle on the table, the bed, the door, the table, the white bundle … The blinds were lowered in the room on the left. On the right, above an open book: knobbly baldness with an enormous yellow parabola for a forehead. Wrinkles on the forehead: a row of yellow illegible lines. Occasionally our eyes met and then I felt: these yellow lines are about me.
… It happened at exactly 21:00. U herself walked in. One thing distinctly remains in my memory: I was breathing so loudly, and when I heard how I was breathing, I wanted so much to quiet it somehow—but couldn’t.
She sat down, smoothed her unif over her knees. The pink-brown gills quivered.
“Ah, my dear, then it is true—you are injured? I only just found out—just now …”
The rod was on the table in front of me. I jumped up, breathing even louder. She heard it, stopped in mid-word, and also stood up for some reason. I could already see the place on her head, my mouth had a disgusting-sweet … the handkerchief, where was the handkerchief—I spit on the floor.
The cipher on the other side of the wall, to the right (with his yellow, purposeful wrinkles dedicated to me) … It was necessary that he didn’t see it, it would be even more unpleasant to do it if he was to watch it … I pushed the button—without permission—but so what, does it matter anymore? And the blinds fell.
She, obviously, felt it, understood it, and rushed to the door. But I intercepted her and, breathing loudly, not looking down from that place on her head for even a second …
“You … you have gone out of your mind! Don’t you dare …” She backed away and sat down, or more like fell, on the bed, trembling and sticking her hands, palms together, between her knees. All wound up, still holding her firmly with the leash of
my eyes, I slowly put out my hand toward the table—moved only one hand— and grabbed the rod.
“I beg of you! A day—just one day! Tomorrow—really tomorrow, I will go and make everything …”
What is she talking about? I raised it threateningly …
And, to my mind: I killed her. Yes, you, my unknown readers, you have the right to call me a murderer. I know that I would have brought that rod down on her head if she hadn’t screamed: “For the sake of … the sake of … I’ll do it—I … now.”
With shaking hands, she ripped off her unif and an expansive, yellow, pendulous body toppled back onto the bed … And only then did I realize: she thought that I had lowered the blinds so that … in order to … that I wanted to …
It was so unexpected, so stupid, that I burst into laughter. And just then, the tightly wound spring inside me sprang, my hand went weak, the rod rumbled on the floor. Here I saw, with my own eyes, that laughter was the most terrible weapon: you can kill anything with laughter—even murder itself.
I sat at my desk and laughed—a reckless, final laugh—and couldn’t see any way out of this ridiculous situation. I didn’t know how this would have turned out if it had followed its natural course—but then, suddenly, there was a new, external, complicating factor: the telephone rang.
I threw myself at the receiver and grasped it: maybe it’s her? But in the receiver, someone’s unfamiliar voice: “Please hold.”
An agonizing infinite buzzing. From far off: heavy footsteps, getting closer, more booming, more cast-iron, and then …
“D-503? Uh-huh … This is the Benefactor. Report to me at once!”