But no, it wasn’t I – not I! I spoke of it to no one, no one except those white, mute pages… Within me – inaudibly, desperately, loudly – I cried this to her. She sat across the table, opposite me, and she did not once allow her eyes to touch me. Next to her, someone’s ripe-yellow bald head.
I heard (it was I-330 speaking), “ ‘Nobility?’ No, my dearest Professor, even, a simple philological analysis of the word will show that it is nothing but a relic of ancient feudal forms. And we…”
I felt myself go pale – and now everyone would see it… But the phonograph within me performed the fifty prescribed masticating movements for every bite, I locked myself within me as in an ancient, untransparent house – I piled rocks before my door, I pulled down the shades…
Later – the commander’s receiver in my hands; and flight, in icy, final anguish – through clouds – into the icy, starry-sunny night. Minutes, hours. And evidently all this time, at feverish speed, the logical motor, unheard even by me, continued to work within me. For suddenly, at a certain point of blue space, I saw: my writing table, and over it U’s gill-like cheeks, and the forgotten pages of my notes. And it was clear to me: no one but she – everything was clear…
Ah, if I could only… I must, I must get to the radio room… The winged helmets, the smell of blue lightning… I remember – I was speaking to her loudly. And I remember – looking through me as though I were of glass – from far away, “I am busy. I am receiving messages from below. Dictate to her…”
In the tiny cabin, after a moment’s thought, I dictated firmly, “Time – fourteen-forty. Down! Stop engines. The end of everything.”
The command cabin. The Integral’s mechanical heart has been stopped, we are dropping, and my heart cannot keep up; it falls behind, it rises higher and higher into my throat. Clouds – then a distant green spot – ever greener, clearer – rushing madly at us – now – the end…
The white-porcelain twisted face of the Second Builder. It must be he who pushed me with all his strength. My head struck something, and falling, darkening, I heard as through a fog, “Aft engines-full speed!”
A sharp leap upward… I remember nothing else.
Thirty-fifth Entry
Topics: In a Hoop. A Carrot. A Murder
I did not sleep all night. All night – a single thought…
Since yesterday, my head is tightly bandaged. But no: it’s not a bandage – it is a hoop; a merciless tight hoop of glass steel riveted to my head, and I am caught within this single, locked circle: I must kill U. Kill her, and then go to the other and say, “Now you believe?” The most disgusting thing of all is that killing is somehow messy, primitive. Crushing her skull with something – it gives me a strange sensation of something sickeningly sweet in the mouth, and I cannot swallow my saliva, I keep spitting it out into my handkerchief, and my mouth is dry.
In my closet there was a heavy piston rod which had snapped in the casting (I had to examine the structure of the breach under the microscope). I rolled up my notes into a tube (let her read all of me – to the last letter), slipped the rod into the tube, and went downstairs. The staircase was interminable, the stairs disgustingly slippery, liquid; I wiped my lips with my handkerchief all the time…
Below. My heart thumped. I stopped, pulled out the rod, and walked to the control table…
U was not there: an empty, icy board. I remembered – all work was stopped today; everyone was to report for the Operation. Of course, there was no reason for her to be here – no one to register.
In the street. Wind. A sky of flying cast-iron slabs. And – as at a certain moment yesterday – the world was split into sharp, separate, independent fragments, and each, as it hailed down, halted for a second, hung before me in the air – and vanished without a trace.
It was as though the precise, black letters on this page were suddenly to slide off, scatter in terror – here, there – and not a single word, nothing but a senseless jumble: fright-skip-jump… The crowd in the street was also like that-scattered, not in rows – moving forward, back, aslant, across.
And now no one. And for an instant, rushing headlong, everything stood still. There, on the second floor, in a glass cage suspended in the air, a man and a woman – kissing as they stood, her whole body brokenly bent backward. This – forever, for the last time…
At some corner, a stirring, spiky bush of heads. Over the heads – separately, in the air – a banner, words: “Down with the machines! Down with the Operation!” And apart (from me) – I, with a fleeting thought: Is everybody filled with pain that can be torn from within only together with his heart? Must everybody do something, before… And for a second there was nothing in the world except my brutish hand with its heavy, cast iron roll…
A small boy – all of him thrust forward, a shadow under his lower lip. The lower lip is turned out like the cuff of a rolled-up sleeve. His whole face is distorted, turned inside out – he is crying loudly, rushing from someone at full speed – and the stamping of feet behind him…
The boy reminded me: yes, U must be at school today, I must hurry. I ran to the nearest stairs to the underground.
In the doorway, someone, rushing past: “Not running! Trains aren’t running today! There…”
I went down. Utter delirium. Glitter of faceted, crystal suns. Platform densely packed with heads. An empty, motionless train.
And in the silence – a voice. Hers. I could not see her, but I knew this firm, pliant voice like a striking whip – and somewhere, the sharp triangle of eyebrows raised to temples…
I shouted, “Let me! Let me through! I must…”
But someone’s fingers dug into my arms, my shoulders, like a vise, nailing me down. In the silence, the voice: “Run upstairs! They’ll cure you, they’ll stuff you full of rich, fat happiness, and, sated, you will doze off peacefully, snoring in perfect unison – don’t you hear that mighty symphony of snores? Ridiculous people! They want to free you of every squirming, torturing, nagging question mark. And you are standing here and listening to me. Hurry upstairs, to the Great Operation! What is it to you if I stay here – alone? What is it to you if I don’t want others to want for me, if I want to want myself – if I want the impossible…”
Another voice – slow, heavy: “Ah! The impossible? That means running after your stupid fantasies, which wag their tails before your nose? No, we’ll grab them by the tail, and crush them, and then…”
“And then gobble them up and snore – and there will have to be a new tail before your nose. They say the ancients had an animal they called an ass. To force it to go forward, ever forward, they would tie a carrot to the harness shaft before him, just where he could not reach it. And if he reached it and gobbled it down…”
Suddenly the vise released me. I rushed to the middle, where she was speaking. But at that moment everybody surged, crushed together – there was a shout behind: “They’re coming, they’re coming here!” The light flared, went out – someone had cut the wire. An avalanche of bodies, screams, groans, heads, fingers…
I don’t know how long we rolled so through the underground tube. At last, stairs, a dim light, growing lighter – and once more out in the street, fanlike, in all directions.
And now – alone. Wind, gray twilight – low, just overhead. On the wet glass of the pavement – deep, deep – the upside-down lights, walls, figures moving feet up. And the incredibly heavy roll in my hand-pulling me into the depths, to the very bottom.
Downstairs, at the table, – there was still no U, and her room was empty, dark.
I went up to my room, switched on the light. My temples throbbed in the tight circle of the hoop, I was still locked within the same circle: the table, on the table the white roll; bed, door, table, white roll… In the room on the left the shades were down. On the right, over a book – a knobby bald head, the forehead a huge yellow parabola. The wrinkles on the forehead – a row of yellow, illegible lines. Sometimes our eyes would meet, and then I felt: they were about me, those yellow lines.