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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.
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…
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 well: 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 bell: 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…
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.
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