Wearily, “Why did you bring me here? You lied to me!”
“No… Be quiet! Look that way – you see, behind the wall?”
“Yes, A shadow.”
“He follows me all the time… I cannot. You understand – I must not. I’ll write two words – you’ll take the note and go alone. I know he will remain here.”
The body stirred again under the unif, the belly rounded out a little; on the cheeks – a faint, rosy dawn.
I slipped the note into her cold fingers, firmly pressed her hand, dipped my eyes for the last time into her blue eyes.
“Good-by! Perhaps, some day we shall…” She took away her hand. Stooping, she walked off slowly… Two steps, and quickly she turned – and was again next to me. Her lips moved. With her eyes, her lips, all of herself – a single word, saying a single word to me – and what an unbearable smile, what pain…
And then, a bent tiny human splinter in the doorway, a tiny shadow behind the wall – without looking back, quickly, ever more quickly…
I went over to U’s desk. Excitedly, indignantly inflating her gills, she said to me, “You understand – they all seem to have lost their heads! He insists that he has seen some human creature near the Ancient House – naked and all covered with fur…”
From the dense cluster of heads, a voice: “Yes! I’ll say it again – I saw it, yes.”
“Well, what do you think of that? The man’s delirious!”
And this “delirious” of hers was so sure, so unbending that I asked myself: Perhaps all of it, all that’s been happening to me and around me lately is really nothing but delirium?
But then I glanced at my hairy hands, and I remembered: “There must be a drop of forest blood in you… Perhaps that’s why I…”
No – fortunately, it is not delirium. No – unfortunately, it is not delirium.
Thirty-third Entry
Topics: No outline, hurriedly, the last
Quick, the newspaper. Perhaps it… I read it with my eyes (precisely – my eyes are now like a pen, a calculator, which you hold in your hands and feel – it is apart from you, an instrument).
In bold type, across the front page:
The enemies of happiness are not sleeping. Hold on to your happiness with both hands! Tomorrow all work will halt – all numbers shall report for the Operation. Those who fail to do so will be subject to the Benefactor’s Machine.
Tomorrow! Can there be – will there be a tomorrow?
By daily habit, I stretch my hand (an instrument) to the bookshelf to add today’s Gazette to the others, in the binding stamped with the gold design. And on the way: What for? What does it matter? I shall never return to this room.
The newspaper drops to the floor. And I stand up and look around the room, the whole room; I hastily take with me, gather up into an invisible valise, all that I’m sorry to leave behind. The table. The books. The chair. I-330 sat in it that day, and I – below, on the floor… The bed…
Then, for a minute or two – absurdly waiting for some miracle. Perhaps the telephone will ring, perhaps she’ll say that…
No. There is no miracle.
I am leaving – into the unknown. These are my last lines. Good-by, beloved readers, with whom I’ve lived through so many pages, to whom, having contracted the soul sickness, I have exposed all of myself, to the last crushed little screw, the last broken spring…
I am leaving.
Thirty-fourth Entry
Topics: The Excused Ones. Sunny Night. Radio Valkyrie
Oh, if I had really smashed myself and all the others to smithereens, if I had really found myself with her somewhere behind the Wall, among beasts baring their yellow fangs, if I had never returned here! It would have been a thousand, a million times easier. But now – what? To go and strangle that… But how would that help?
No, no, no! Take yourself in hand, D-503. Set yourself upon some firm logical axis – if only for a short time, bear down on the lever with all your strength, and, like an ancient slave, turn the millstones of syllogisms – until you write down, think over everything that happened…
When I boarded the Integral, everybody was already there, each at his post; all the cells in the gigantic glass beehive were full. Through the glass decks – tiny human ants below, near the telegraphs, dynamos, transformers, altimeters, valves, indicators, engines, pumps, tubes. In the lounge – a group of unknown men over schemes and instruments, probably assigned there by the Scientific Bureau. And with them, the Second Builder with two of his assistants.
All three with their heads drawn, turtlelike, into their shoulders, their faces – gray, autumnal, joyless.
“Well?” I asked.
“Oh… A bit nervous…” one of them said with a gray, lusterless smile. “Who knows where we may have to land? And generally, it’s uncertain…
It was unbearable to look at them – at those whom I would in an hour, with my own hands, eject from the comfortable figures of the Table of Hours, tearing them away from the maternal breast of the One State. They reminded me of the tragic figures of the “Three Excused Ones,” whose story is known to every schoolboy. It is a story of how three numbers were, by way of an experiment, excused from work for a month: do what you like, go where you wish. The wretches loitered near their usual places of work, peering inside with hungry eyes; they stood in the street hour after hour, repeating the motions which had already become necessary to their organisms at the given times of day: they sawed and planed the air, swung invisible hammers, struck invisible blocks. And, finally, on the tenth day, unable to endure it any longer, they linked hands, walked into the water, and to the sounds of the March, went deeper and deeper, until the water put an end to their misery…
I repeat: it was painful for me to look at them; I hurried to leave them.
“I will check the machine compartment,” I said, “and then – we’re off.”
They asked me questions: what voltage was to be used for the starting blast, how much water ballast for the stern tank. There was a phonograph inside me: it answered all questions promptly and precisely, while I continued inwardly without interruption with my own thoughts.
This happened long ago, in the third century after the introduction of the Table.
Suddenly, in a narrow passageway, something reached me, within – and from that moment it all began.
In the narrow passageway gray unifs, gray faces flickered past me, and, for a second, one face: hair low on the forehead, deep-set eyes – that same man. I understood: they were here, and there was no escape from all this anywhere, and only minutes remained – a few dozen minutes… The tiniest molecular shivers ran through my body (they did not stop to the very end) – as though a huge motor had been set up within me, and the structure of my body was too slight for it, and so the walls, the partitions, the cables, the beams, the lights – everything trembled…
I did not know yet whether she was there. But there was no more time now – I was called upstairs, to the command cabin: it was time to go… Where?
Gray, lusterless faces. Tense blue veins below, in the water. Heavy, cast-iron layers of sky. And how hard to lift my cast-iron hand, to pick up the receiver of the command telephone.
“Up – 45 degrees!”
A dull blast – a jolt – a frenzied white-green mountain of water aft – the deck slipping away from underfoot – soft, rubbery – and everything below, all of life, forever… For a second we were falling deeper and deeper into some funnel, and everything contracted: the icy-blue relief map of the city, the round bubbles of its cupolas, the solitary leaden finger of the Accumulator Tower. Then a momentary cottonwool curtain of clouds-we plunged through it-sun and blue sky. Seconds, minutes, miles – the blue was rapidly congealing, filling up with darkness, and stars emerged like drops of silvery, cold sweat…