She sat down just behind me, on the left. I glanced back; she obediently took her eyes away from the table with the child; her eyes turned to me, entered me, and again: she, I, and the table on the stage—three points, and through these points-lines, projections of some inevitable, still unseen events.
I walked home along the green, twilit street, already gleaming with lights here and there. I heard all of myself ticking like a clock. And the hands of the clock would in a moment step across some figure—I would do something from which there would be no drawing back. She, I-330, needs someone to think she is with me. And I need her, and what do I care for her “need.” I will not be a blind for someone else—I won’t.
Behind me, familiar steps, as though splashing through puddles. I no longer glance back; I know-it is S. He’ll follow me to the door, then he will probably stand below, on the sidewalk, his gimlets drilling up, into my room—until the shades fall, concealing someone’s crime…
He, my Guardian Angel, put a period to my thoughts. I decided—No, I won’t. I decided.
When I came into my room and switched on the light, I did not believe my eyes: near the table stood O. Or, rather, hung, like an empty dress that had been taken off the body. It was as though not a single spring remained under her dress; her arms drooped, springless; her legs, her voice hung limply.
“I… about my letter. You received it? Yes? I must know the answer, I must—right now.”
I shrugged. Gloating, as if she were to blame for everything, I looked at her brimming blue eyes and delayed to answer. Then, with enjoyment, stabbing her with every separate word, I said, “An answer? Well… You are right. Completely. About everything.”
“Then…” (she tried to cover her trembling with a smile, but I saw it). “Very well! I’ll go-I’ll go at once.”
She hung over the table. Lowered eyes, limp arms, legs. The crumpled pink coupon of the other one was still on the table. I quickly opened the manuscript of “We” and hid the coupon—more, perhaps, from myself than from O.
“You see, I’m still writing. Already 170 pages… It’s turning into something so unexpected…”
A voice, a shadow of a voice: “Do you remember… on page seven… I let a drop fall, and you…”
Blue saucers-silent, hurried drops over the brim, down the cheeks, and words, hurried, over the brim. “I can’t, I will go in a moment… I’ll never again… let it be as you say. But I want, I must have your child-give me a child and I will go, I’ll go!”
I saw all of her trembling under her unif, and I felt: in a moment, I too… I put my hands behind my back and smiled.
“You seem to be anxious for the Benefactor’s Machine?”
And her words, like a stream over the dam: “It doesn’t matter! But I will feel, I’ll feel it within me. And then, if only for a few days… To see, to see just once the little crease, here—like that one, on the table. Only one day!”
Three points: she, I, and the tiny fist there, on the table, with the plump fold…
Once, I remember, when I was a child, we were taken to the Accumulator Tower. On the very top landing, I bent over the glass parapet. Below, dots of people, and my heart thumped sweetly: What if? At that time I had merely seized the rail more firmly; now, I jumped.
“So you want it? Knowing that…”
Eyes dosed, as if facing the sun. A wet, radiant smile. “Yes, yes! I do!”
I snatched the pink coupon from under the manuscript—the other’s coupon—and ran downstairs, to the controller on duty. O caught my hand, cried out something, but I understood her words only when I returned.
She sat on the edge of the bed, her hands locked tightly between her knees. “That was… her coupon?”
“What does it matter? Well, yes, hers.”
Something cracked. Or, perhaps, O merely stirred. She sat, hands locked in her knees, silently.
“Well? Hurry…” I roughly seized her hand, and red spots (tomorrow they’ll be blue) appeared on her wrist, by the plump childlike fold.
That was the last. Then—a click of the switch, all thought extinguished, darkness, sparks—I flew over the parapet, down…
Twentieth Entry
Discharge—this is the most fitting definition. Now I see that it was precisely like an electrical discharge. The pulse of my recent days had grown ever drier, ever faster, ever more tense; the poles came ever closer—a dry crackling—another millimeter: explosion, then—silence.
Everything in me is very quiet and empty now, as in a house when everyone is gone and you are lying alone, sick, and hearing with utmost clarity the sharp, metallic ticking of your thoughts.
Perhaps this “discharge” has cured me finally of my tormenting “soul,” and I’ve become again like all of us. At least, I can now visualize without any pain O on the steps of the Cube; I can see her in the Gas Bell. And if she names me there, in the Operational Section, it does not matter: in my last moment I shall piously and gratefully kiss the punishing hand of the Benefactor. Suffering punishment is my right in relation to the One State, and I will not yield this right. We, the numbers of our State, should not, must not give up this right—the only, and therefore the most precious, right that we possess.
My thoughts tick quietly, with metallic clarity. An unseen aero carries me off into the blue heights of my beloved abstractions. And there, in the purest, most rarefied air, I see my idea of “right” burst with the snap of a pneumatic tire. And I see clearly that it is merely a throwback to one of the absurd prejudices of the ancients—their notion of “rights.”
There are clay ideas, and there are ideas forever carved of gold or of our precious glass. And, in order to determine the material of which an idea is made, it is enough to pour upon it a single drop of strong acid. One of these acids was known to the ancients too: reductio ad finem. I believe this is what they called it. But they were afraid of this poison, they preferred to see even a day heaven, even a toy heaven, rather than blue nothing. But we, thanks to the Benefactor, are adults, we need no toys.
Well, then, suppose a drop of acid is applied to the idea of “rights.” Even among the ancients, the most mature among them knew that the source of right is might, that right is a function of power. And so, we have the scales: on one side, a grain, on the other a ton; on one side “I,” on the other “We,” the One State. Is it not clear, then, that to assume that the “I” can have some “rights” in relation to the State is exactly like assuming that a gram can balance the scale against the ton? Hence, the division: rights to the ton, duties to the gram. And the natural path from nonentity to greatness is to forget that you are a gram and feel yourself instead a millionth of a ton.
You, pink-cheeked, full-bodied Venusians, and you, Uranians, sooty as blacksmiths, I hear your murmur of objections in my blue silence. But you must learn to understand: everything great is simple; only the four rules of arithmetic are eternal and immutable. And only an ethic built on the four rules can be great, immutable, and eternal. This is the ultimate wisdom, the summit of the pyramid, which people, flushed with perspiration, kicking and gasping, have been climbing for centuries. And from this summit, all that is below, in the depths, where the residual something surviving in us from our savage ancestors still stirs like a heap of miserable worms, is alike. From this summit all these are alike: the unlawful mother—O; the murderer; the madman who dared to fling his verses into the face of the One State. And the judgment meted out to them is alike: untimely death. This is that divine justice the stone-house people had dreamed of in the rosy, naive light of the dawn of history. Their “God” punished blasphemy against the Holy Church as sternly as murder.