And now – the uncanny, intolerably bright, black, starry, sunny night It was like suddenly becoming deaf: you still see the roaring trumpets, but you only see them: the trumpets are mute, all is silence. The sun was mute.
All this was natural, it was to be expected. We had left the earth’s atmosphere. But everything had happened so quickly, had taken everyone so unawares, that everyone around was cowed, silenced.
And to me – to me it all seemed easier somehow under this mute, fantastic sun: as though, crumpling up for the last time, I had already crossed the inescapable threshold – and my body was somewhere there, below, while I sped through a new world where everything must be so unfamiliar, so upside down…
“Hold the course!” I shouted into the receiver. Or, perhaps, it was not I, but the phonograph in me – and with a mechanical, hinged hand I thrust the command phone into the hands of the Second Builder. And I, shaken from head to foot by the finest molecular trembling, which I alone could feel, ran downstairs, to look for…
The door to the lounge – the one that in an hour would heavily click shut… By the door, someone I did not know – short, with a face like hundreds, thousands of others, a face that would be lost in a crowd. And only his hands were unusual – extraordinarily long, down to his knees, as though taken in a hurry, by mistake, from another human set.
A long arm stretched out, barred the way. “Where to?”
Clearly, he did not know that I knew everything.
Very welclass="underline" perhaps this was as it should be. And looking down on him, deliberately curt, I said, “I am the Builder of the Integral. I supervise the tests. Understand?”
The arm was gone.
The lounge. Over the instruments and maps – gray, bristly heads, and yellow heads, bald, ripe. Quickly, I swept them with a glance, and back, along the corridor, down the hatch, to the engine room. Heat and din of pipes red-hot from the explosions, cranks gleaming in a desperate, drunken dance, the incessant, faintly visible quiver of arrows on the dials…
And finally, at the tachometer – he, with the low forehead bent over a notebook…
“Listen…” The din made it necessary to shout into his ear. “Is she here? Where is she?”
In the shadow under the forehead, a smile. “She? There, in the radio-telephone room…”
I rushed in. There were three of them, all in winged receiving helmets. She seemed a head taller than ever, winged, gleaming, flying – like the ancient Valkyries. And the huge blue sparks above, over the radio antenna, seemed to come from her, and the faint, lightning smell of ozone, also from her.
“Someone… no – you…” I said to her breathlessly (from running). “I must transmit a message down, to the earth, to the dock… Come, I’ll dictate it…”
Next to the apparatus room there was a tiny boxlike cabin. Side by side, at the table. I found her hand, pressed it hard. “Well? What next?”
“I don’t know. Do you realize how wonderful it is to fly, not knowing where – to fly – no matter where… And soon it will be twelve – and who knows what’s to come? And night… Where shall we be at night, you and I? Perhaps on grass, on dry leaves…”
She emanates blue sparks and smells of lightning, and my trembling grows more violent.
“Write down,” I say loudly, still out of breath (with running). “Time, eleven-thirty. Velocity: sixty-eight hundred…”
She, from under the winged helmet, without taking her eyes from the paper, quietly: “She came to me last night with your note… I know – I know everything, don’t speak. But the child is yours? And I sent her there – she is already safe, beyond the Wall. She’ll live…”
Back in the commander’s cabin. Again – the night, delirious, with a black starry sky and dazzling sun; the clock hand on the wall – limping slowly, from minute to minute; and everything as in a fog, shaken with the finest, scarcely perceptible (perceptible to me alone) trembling.
For some reason, it seemed to me: it would be better if all that was about to follow took place not here, but lower, nearer to the earth.
“Halt engines!” I cried into the receiver.
Still moving by inertia, but slower, slower. Now the Integral caught at some hair-thin second, hung for a moment motionless; then the hair broke, and the Integral plunged like a stone – down, faster, faster. And so, in silence, for minutes, dozens of minutes. I heard my own pulse. The clock hand before my eyes crawled nearer and nearer to twelve. And it was clear to me: I was the stone; I-330 was the earth, and I – a stone, thrown by someone’s, hand. And the stone was irresistibly compelled to fall, to crash against the earth, to smash itself to bits… And what if… Below, the hard blue smoke of clouds was already visible… What if…
But the phonograph inside me picked up the receiver with hingelike precision, gave the command: “Low speed.” The stone no longer fell. And now only the four lower auxiliaries – two fore, two aft – puffed wearily, merely to neutralize the Integral’s weight, and the Integral stopped in mid-air with a slight quiver, firmly anchored, about a kilometer from the earth.
Everyone rushed out on deck (it’s almost twelve-time for the lunch bell) and, bending over the glass railing, hurriedly gulped the unknown world below, beyond the Wall. Amber, green, blue: the autumn woods, meadows, a lake. At the edge of a tiny blue saucer, some yellow, bonelike ruins, a threatening, yellow, dry finger – probably the spire of an ancient church, miraculously preserved.
“Look, look! There, to the right!”
There – in a green wilderness – a rapid spot flew like a brown shadow. I had binoculars in my hand; mechanically I brought them to my eyes: chest-deep in the grass, with sweeping tails, a herd of brown horses galloped, and on their backs, those beings – bay, white, raven black…
Behind me: “And I tell you – I saw a face.”
“Go on! Tell it to someone else!”
“Here, here are the binoculars…”
But they were gone now. And endless green wilderness…
And in the wilderness – filling all of it, and all of me, and everyone – the piercing quaver of a belclass="underline" lunchtime, in another minute, at twelve.
The world – scattered in momentary, unconnected fragments. On the steps, somebody’s clanking golden badge – and I don’t care: it crunched under my heel. A voice: “And I say, there was a face!” A dark rectangle: the open door of the lounge. Clenched, white, sharply smiling teeth…
And at the moment when the clock began to strike, with agonizing slowness, without breathing from one stroke to the next, and the front ranks had already begun to move – the rectangle of the door was suddenly crossed over by two familiar, unnaturally long arms:
“Stop!”
Fingers dug into my palm – I-330, next to me.
“Who is he? Do you know him?”
“Isn’t he… Isn’t he one of…”
He stood on someone’s shoulders. Over a hundred faces – his face, like hundreds, thousands of others, yet unique.
“In the name of the Guardians… Those to whom I speak, they hear me, each of them hears me. I say to you – we know. We do not know your numbers as yet, but we know everything. The Integral shall not be yours! The test flight will be completed; and you – you will not dare to make a move now – you will do it, with your own hands. And afterward… But I have finished…”
Silence. The glass squares underfoot are soft as cotton; my feet are soft as cotton. She is beside me – utterly white smile, frenzied blue sparks. Through her teeth, into my ear, “Ah, so you did it? You ‘fulfilled your duty’? Oh, well…”
Her hand broke from my hand, the Valkyrie’s wrathful, winged helmet was now somewhere far ahead. Alone, silent, frozen, I walked like all the others into the lounge…