Fifteenth Entry

Topics: The Bell. The Mirror-Smooth Sea. I Am to Burn Eternally

I had just stepped into the dock where the Integral is being built when the Second Builder hurried to meet me. His face – round, white, as usual – a china plate; and his words, like something exquisitely tasty, served up on the plate: “Well, while it pleased you to be sick the other day, we had, I’d say, quite a bit of excitement here in the chiefs absence.”

“Excitement?”

“Oh, yes! The bell rang at the end of the workday, and everybody began to file out. And imagine – the doorman caught a man without a number. I’ll never understand how he managed to get in. He was taken to the Operational Section. They’ll know how to drag the why and how out of the fellow…” (All this with the tastiest smile.)

The Operational Section is staffed with our best and most experienced physicians, who work under the direct supervision of the Benefactor Himself. They have a variety of instruments, the most effective of them all the famous Gas Bell. Essentially, it is the old school laboratory experiment: a mouse is placed under a glass jar and an air pump gradually rarefies the air inside it… And so on. But, of course, the Gas Bell is a much more perfect apparatus, using all sorts of gases. And then, this is no longer torture of a tiny helpless animal. It serves a noble end: it safeguards the security of the One State – in other words, the happiness of millions. About five centuries ago, when the Operational Section was first being developed, there were some fools who compared the Section to the ancient Inquisition, but that is as absurd as equating a surgeon performing a tracheotomy with a highwayman; both may have the same knife in then-hands, both do the same thing – cut a living man’s throat – yet one is a benefactor, the other a criminal; one has a + sign, the other a –…

All this is entirely clear – within a single second, at a single turn of the logical machine. Then suddenly the gears catch on the minus, and something altogether different comes to ascendancy – the key ring, still swaying in the door. The door had evidently just been shut, yet I-330 was already gone, vanished. That was something the machine could not digest in any way. A dream? But even now I felt that strange sweet pain in my right shoulder – I-330 pressing herself against the shoulder, next to me in the fog. “Do you like fog?” Yes, I love the fog… I love everything, and everything is firm, new, astonishing, everything is good…

“Everything is good,” I said aloud.

“Good?” The china eyes goggled at me. “What is good about this? If that unnumbered one had managed… it means that they are everywhere, all around us, at all times… they are here, around the Integral, they…”

“Who are they?”

“How would I know who? But I feel them, you understand? All the time.”

“And have you heard about the newly invented operation – excision of the imagination?” (I had myself heard something of the kind a few days earlier.)

“I know about it. But what has that to do with..?”

“Just this: in your place, I would go and ask to be operated on.”

Something distinctly lemon-sour appeared on the plate. The good fellow was offended by the hint that he might possibly possess imagination… Oh, well, only a week ago I would have been offended myself. Not today. Today I know that I have it, that I am ill. I also know that I don’t want to be cured. I don’t, and that’s all there is to it We ascended the glass stairs. Everything below was as clearly visible as if it were spread out on the palm of my hand.

You, who read these notes, whoever you may be – you have a sun over your heads. And if you have ever been as ill as I am now, you know what the sun is like – what it can be like – in the morning. You know that pink, transparent, warm gold, when the very air is faintly rosy and everything is suffused with the delicate blood of the sun, everything is alive: the stones are alive and soft; iron is alive and soft; people are alive, and everyone is smiling. In an hour, all this may vanish, in an hour the rosy blood may trickle out, but for the moment everything lives. And I see something pulsing and flowing in the glass veins of the Integral. I see – the Integral is pondering its great, portentous future, the heavy load of unavoidable happiness it will carry upward, to you, unknown ones, who are forever searching and never finding. You shall find what you seek, you shall be happy – it is your duty to be happy, and you do not have much longer to wait.

The body of the Integral is almost ready: a graceful, elongated ellipsoid made of our glass – as eternal as gold, as flexible as steel. I saw the transverse ribs and the longitudinal stringers being attached to the body from within; in the stern they were installing the base for the giant rocket motor. Every three seconds, a blast; every three seconds the mighty tail of the Integral will eject flame and gases into cosmic space, and the fiery Tamerlane of happiness will soar away and away…

I watched the men below move in regular, rapid rhythm, according to the Taylor system, bending, unbending, turning like the levers of a single huge machine. Tubes glittered in their hands; with fire they sliced and welded the glass walls, angles, ribs, brackets. I saw transparent glass monster cranes rolling slowly along glass rails, turning and bending as obediently as the men, delivering their loads into the bowels of the Integral. And all of this was one: humanized machines, perfect men. It was the highest, the most stirring beauty, harmony, music… Quick! Below! To join them, to be with them!

And now, shoulder to shoulder, welded together with them, caught up in the steel rhythm… Measured movements; firmly round, ruddy cheeks; mirror-smooth brows, untroubled by the madness of thought. I floated on the mirror-smooth sea. I rested.

Suddenly one of them turned to me serenely. “Better today?”

“Better? What’s better?”

“Well, you were out yesterday. We had thought it might be something dangerous…” A bright forehead, a childlike, innocent smile.

The blood rushed to my face. I could not, could not lie to those eyes. I was silent, drowning…

The gleaming white round china face bent down through the hatch above. “Hey! D-503! Come up, please! We’re getting a rigid frame here with the brackets, and the stress…”

Without listening to the end, I rushed up to him. I was escaping ignominiously, in headlong flight I could not raise my eyes. The glittering glass stairs flashed under my feet, and every step increased my hopelessness: I had no place here – I, the criminal, the poisoned one. Never again would I merge into the regular, precise, mechanical rhythm, never again float on the mirrorlike untroubled sea. I was doomed to burn forever, to toss about, to seek a corner where to hide my eyes-forever, until I finally found strength to enter that door and…

And then an icy spark shot through me: I – well, I didn’t matter; but I would also have to tell about her, and she, too, would be…

I climbed out of the hatch and stopped on the deck. I did not know where to turn now, I didn’t know why I had come there. I looked up. The midday-weary sun was rising dully. Below me was the Integral, gray-glassy, unalive. The rosy blood had trickled out It was clear to me that all of this was merely my imagination, that everything remained as it had been before, yet it was also clear…

“What’s wrong with you, 508, are you deaf? I have been calling and calling… What’s the matter?” The Second Builder shouted into my ear. He must have been shouting for a long time.

What’s the matter with me? I have lost the rudder. The motor roars, the aero quivers and rushes at full speed, but there is no rudder, no controls, and I don’t know where I’m flying: down-to crash into the ground in a moment, or up-into the sun, into the flames…

Sixteenth Entry

Topics: Yellow. Two-Dimensional Shadow. Incurable Soul

I have not written anything for several days, I don’t know how many. All the days are one day. All the days are one color – yellow, like parched, fiery sand. And there is not a spot of shadow, not a drop of water… On and on endlessly over the yellow sand. I cannot live without her, yet since she vanished so incomprehensibly that day in the Ancient House, she…

I have seen her only once since that day, during the daily walk. Two, three, four days ago – I do not know; all the days are one. She flashed by, filling for a second the yellow, empty world. And, hand in hand with her, up to her shoulder, the double-bent S and the paper-thin doctor. And there was a fourth one – I remember nothing but his fingers: they would fly out of the sleeves of his unif like clusters of rays, incredibly thin, white, long. I-330 raised her hand and waved to me. Over her neighbor’s head she bent toward the one with the ray-like fingers. I caught the word Integral. All four glanced back at me. Then they were lost in the gray-blue sky, and again – the yellow, dessicated road.

That evening she had a pink coupon to visit me. I stood before the annunciator and implored it, with tenderness, with hatred, to click, to register in the white slot: I-330. Doors slammed; pale, tall, rosy, swarthy numbers came out of the elevator; shades were pulled down on all sides. She was not there. She did not come.

And possibly, just at this very moment, exactly at twenty-two, as I am writing this, she stands with closed eyes, leaning against someone with her shoulder, saying to someone, “Do you love?” To whom? Who is he? The one with the raylike fingers, or the thick-lipped, sputtering R? Or S?

S… Why am I constantly hearing his flat steps all these days, splashing as through puddles? Why is he following me all these days like a shadow? Before me, beside me, behind – a gray-blue, two-dimensional shadow. Others pass through it, step on it, but it is invariably here, bound to me as by some invisible umbilical cord. Perhaps this cord is she – I-330? I don’t know. Or perhaps they, the Guardians, already know that I…

Suppose you were told: Your shadow sees you, sees you all the time. Do you understand me? And suddenly you have the strangest feeling: your hands are not your own, they interfere with you. And I catch myself constantly swinging my arms absurdly, out of time with my steps. Or suddenly I feel that I must glance back, but it’s impossible, no matter how I try, my neck is rigid, locked. And I run, I run faster and faster, and feel with my back – my shadow runs faster behind me, and there is no escape, no escape anywhere…

Alone, at last, in my room. But here there is something else – the telephone. I pick up the receiver. “Yes, I-330, please.” And again I hear a rustle in the receiver, someone’s steps in the hall, past her room – and silence… I throw down the receiver – I can’t, I can’t endure it any longer. I must run there, to her.

This happened yesterday. I hurried there, and wandered for an hour, from sixteen to seventeen, near the house where she lives. Numbers marched past me, row after row. Thousands of feet stepped rhythmically, a million-footed monster floated, swaying, by. And only I was alone, cast out by a storm upon a desert island, seeking, seeking with my eyes among the gray-blue waves.

A moment, and I shall see the sharply mocking angle of the eyebrows lifted to the temples, the dark windows of the eyes, and there, within them, the burning fireplace, the stirring shadows. And I will step inside directly, I will say, “You know I cannot live without you. Why, then…” I will use the warm, familiar “thou” – only “thou.”

But she is silent. Suddenly I hear the silence, I do not hear the Music Plant, and I realize it is past seventeen, everybody else is gone, I am alone, I am late. Around me – a glass desert, flooded by the yellow sun. In the smooth glass of the pavement, as in water, I see the gleaming walls suspended upside down, and myself, hung mockingly head down, feet up.

I must hurry, this very second, to the Medical Office to get a certificate of illness, otherwise they’ll take me and… But perhaps that would be best? To stay here and calmly wait until they see me and take me to the Operational Section – and so put an end to everything, atone for everything at once.

A faint rustle, and a doubly bent shadow before me. Without looking, I felt two steel-gray gimlets drill into me. With a last effort, I smiled and said – I had to say something – “I… I must go to the Medical Office.”

“What’s the problem, then? Why do you stand here?”

Absurdly upside down, hung by the feet, I was silent, burning up with shame. “Come with me,” S said harshly. I followed obediently, swinging my unnecessary, alien arms. It was impossible to raise my eyes; I walked all the way through a crazy, upside-down world: some strange machines, their bases up; people glued antipodally to the ceiling; and, lower still, beneath it all, the sky locked into the thick glass of the pavement. I remember: what I resented most of all was that, for this last time in my life, I was seeing everything in this absurdly upside-down, unreal state. But it was impossible to raise my eyes.

We stopped. A staircase rose before me. Another step, and I would see the figures in white medical smocks, the huge, mute Bell…

With an enormous effort, I finally tore my eyes away from the glass underfoot, and suddenly the golden letters of MEDICAL OFFICE burst into my face. At that moment it had not even occurred to me to wonder why he had spared me, why he had brought me here instead of to the Operational Section. At a single bound I swung across the steps, slammed the door firmly behind me, and took a deep breath. I felt: I had not breathed since morning, my heart had not been beating – and it was only now that I had taken my first breath, only now that the sluices in my breast had opened…

There were two of them: one short, with tubby legs, weighing the patients with his eyes as though lifting them on horns; the other paper-thin, with gleaming scissor-lips, his nose a finest blade… The same one. I rushed to him as to someone near and dear, mumbling about insomnia, dreams, shadows, a yellow world. The scissor-lips gleamed, smiled.

“You’re in a bad way! Apparently, you have developed a soul.”

A soul? That strange, ancient, long-forgotten word. We sometimes use the words “soul-stirring,” “soulless,” but “soul”…?

“Is it… very dangerous?” I muttered.

“Incurable,” the scissors snapped.

“But… what, essentially, does it mean? I somehow don’t… don’t understand it.”

“Well, you see… How can I explain it to you?… You are a mathematician, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then – take a plane, a surface – this mirror, say. And on this surface are you and I, you see? We squint against the sun. And here, the blue electric spark inside that tube, and there – the passing shadow of an aero. All of it only on the surface, only momentary. But imagine this impermeable substance softened by some fire; and nothing slides across it any more, everything enters into it, into this mirror world that we examined with such curiosity when we were children. Children are not so foolish, I assure you. The plane has acquired volume, it has become a body, a world, and everything is now inside the mirror – inside you: the sun, the blast of the whirling propeller, your trembling lips, and someone else’s. Do you understand? The cold mirror reflects, throws back, but this one absorbs, and everything leaves its tracer-forever. A moment, a faint line on someone’s face – and it remains in you forever. Once you heard a drop fall in the silence, and you hear it now…”

“Yes, yes, exactly…” I seized his hand. I heard it now – drops falling slowly from the washstand faucet And I knew: this was forever. “But why, why suddenly a soul? I’ve never had one, and suddenly… Why… No one else has it, and I…?”

I clung even more violently to the thin hand; I was terrified of losing the lifeline.

“Why? Why don’t you have feathers, or wings-only shoulder blades, the base for wings? Because wings are no longer necessary, we have the aero, wings would only interfere. Wings are for flying, and we have nowhere else to fly: we have arrived, we have found what we had been searching for. Isn’t that so?”

I nodded in confusion. He looked at me with a scalpel-sharp laugh. The other heard it, pattered in from his office on his tubby feet, lifted my paper-thin doctor, lifted me on his horn-eyes.

“What’s the trouble? A soul? A soul, you say? What the devil! We’ll soon return to cholera if you go on that way. I told you” (raising the paper-thin one on his horns) “ – I told you, we must cut out imagination. In everyone… Extirpate imagination. Nothing but surgery, nothing but surgery will do…”

He saddled his nose with huge X-ray glasses, circled around and around me for a long time, peered through the bones of my skull, examining the brain, and writing something in his book.

“Curious, most curious I Listen, would you consent to… to being preserved in alcohol? It would be extremely useful to the One State… It would help us prevent an epidemic… Of course, unless you have some special reasons to…”

“Well, you see,” said the thin one, “Number D-503 is the Builder of the Integral, and I am sure it would interfere with…”

“U-um.” The other grunted and pattered back to his office.

We remained alone. The paper-thin hand fell lightly, gently on my hand, the profile face bent close to mine. He whispered, “I’ll tell you in confidence – you are not the only one. It was not for nothing that my colleague spoke about an epidemic. Try to remember – haven’t you noticed anything like it, very much like it, very similar in anyone else?” He peered at me closely. What was he hinting at? Whom did he mean? Could it be…?

“Listen.” I jumped up from the chair.

But he was already speaking loudly about other things. “As far as your insomnia and your dreams, I can suggest one thing – do more walking. Start tomorrow morning, go out and take a walk… well, let’s say to the Ancient House.”

He pierced me with his eyes again, smiling his thinnest smile. And it seemed to me – I saw quite clearly a word, a letter, a name, the only name, wrapped in the finest tissue of that smile… Or was this only my imagination again?

I could barely wait until he wrote out a certificate of illness for that day and the next. Silently I pressed his hand once more, and ran out. My heart, fast and light as an aero, swept me up and up. I knew – some joy awaited me tomorrow. What was it?