FOREWORD

In submitting this book to the American public the translator has this to say.
The artistic and psychological sides of the novel are hardly to be
discussed in a preface. Great as the art of a writer may be and profound as
his psychology may seem to one, the impression is largely a matter of
individual variations, and this side must naturally be left to each
individual’s judgment and sensibilities.
There is, however, one side of the matter which deserves particular
mention and motivated emphasis.
It is perhaps for the first time in the history of the last few decades that a
Russian book, inspired by Russian life, written in Russia and in the Russian
language, should see its first light not in Russia but abroad, and not in the
language it was originally written but translated into a foreign tongue.
During the darkest years of Russian history, in the ’forties, ’sixties, ’eighties
and ’nineties of the last century, many Russian writers were forced by
oppression and reaction to live abroad and to write abroad, yet their
writings would reach Russia, as they were intended primarily for the
Russian reader and Russian life. Most of Turgenev’s novels were written
while he was in France, and with the exception of his last short story which
he dictated on his deathbed, all his novels and stories were written in
Russian. Hertzen, Kropotkin, and at one time Dostoevsky, were similarly
obliged to write while away from their native land.
Here is a book written by an artist who lived and still lives in Russia, and
whose intimate love for Russia and her suffering is so great that he finds it
impossible to leave Russia even in these days of stress and sorrow. But his
book may not appear in the country where it was written. It is a great
tragedy—this spiritual loneliness of the artist who cannot speak to his own
people. In bringing out this book in English, the author tries to address
himself to the world without having the opportunity of being heard by his
own people. This situation, however, is to a great extent symbolic of the
spiritual mission of Zamyatin, for no matter what the language in which he
originally writes, and no matter how typically national his artistic
perception and intuition, he is essentially universal and his vision
transcends the boundaries of a purely national art. Moreover, is it not true
that the more genuinely national a man’s art, and the more sincerely
national his personality, the more is he universal? Abraham Lincoln is more
than an American national figure, and I doubt if the appeal Lincoln’s
personality makes would be universal as it is if he were not so typically
American. It is difficult to find personalities more national than Tolstoy or
Dostoevsky, and this is perhaps the reason why they stand out as two of the
most typically universal minds with a universal appeal that the nineteenth
century gave us.
Zamyatin is not so great as the men referred to above, but despite his
youth, he already proves to be the bearer of that quality of greatness which
characterizes a personality with a universal appeal.
We is, as Zamyatin himself calls it, the most jocular and the most earnest
thing he has thus far written. It is a novel that puts most poignantly and
earnestly before every thoughtful reader the most difficult problem that
exists today in the civilized world—the problem of preservation of the
independent original creative personality. Our civilization today depends
upon the energetic movement of great masses of people. Wars, revolutions,
general strikes—all these phenomena involve great masses, large groups,
enormous mobs. Despite the fact that there is hardly a corner in the world
today where the average man does not make the trite complaint, “What we
need is leadership,” the world today seems for a time at least to have lost its
capacity for producing real leaders. For our great successes in mechanical
civilization, our exceptional efforts in efficiency, tend to bring into play
large numbers rather than great individualities. What under these conditions
is the lot of a creative individuality? What the tragedy of an independent
spirit under present conditions is, is pointed out in an unique way in We.
The problem of creative individuality versus mob is today not a mere
Russian problem. It is as poignant under Bolshevist dictatorship as it is in
Ford’s factory.
Of course the sincere, honest and frank treatment of this problem seems
offensive to anyone who prefers to be a member of a mob or keep this or
that part of humanity in the state of a mob. That is why We could not see
light in Russia, and will probably be disliked by those whose spiritual
activities are reduced to the mechanical standards of a mechanical
civilization which is devoid of original creative effort.
A few words about the method by which Zamyatin tries to drive home to
the reader his main ideas. It is the method of “Laughter through tears,” to
use an old expression of Gogol. It is the form which is dictated by profound
love for humanity, mixed with pity and hatred of those factors which are the
cause of the disindividualization of man today. It is the old emotion of the
ancient Catul: “Odi et amo.” Zamyatin laughs in order to hide his tears,
hence amusing as We may seem and really is, it barely conceals a profound
human tragedy which is universal today.
The reader may be interested in knowing something about Zamyatin
himself. Zamyatin does not like to tell about himself and the translator does
not think he has the right to tell more than to quote Zamyatin’s own answer
to a request addressed to him a couple of years ago to write his
autobiography:

“I see you want my autobiography by all means, but I assure

you that you will have to limit yourself only to an outside
inspection and get but a glimpse, perhaps, into the dark
windows. I seldom ask anybody to enter.
“As to the outside, you will see a lonely child without
playmates, lying on a Turkish divan, hind-side up, reading a
book, or under the grand piano while his mother plays Chopin.
Two steps away from Chopin, just outside the window with the
geraniums, in the middle of the street, there is a small pig tied
to a stake and hens fluttering in the dust.
“If you are interested in the geography, here it is—Lebedyan,
in the most Russian Tambov province about which Tolstoy and
Turgenev wrote so much. Chronology?—The end of the
’eighties and early ’nineties, then Voronesh, the Gymnasium
pension, boredom and rabid dogs on Main Street. One of these
dogs got me by the leg. At that time I loved to make different
experiments on myself, and I decided to wait and see whether I
would or would not get the rabies and what is most important, I
was very curious: What would I feel when the time would
come for the rabies (about two weeks after the bite)? I felt a
great many things, but two weeks later I did not get the rabies,
therefore I announced to the inspector in the school that I got
the rabies and must go at once to Moscow for vaccination.
“In the Gymnasium I would get A plus for composition and
was not always on good terms with mathematics. Perhaps
because of that (sheer stubbornness) I chose the most
mathematical career—the shipbuilding department of the
Petrograd Polytech.
“Thirteen years ago in the month of May—and that May was
remarkable in that the snow covered the flowers—I
simultaneously finished my work for my diploma and my first
short story. The short story was published in the old
Obrazovanye.
“Well, what else do you want? That meant that I was going
to write short stories and was going to publish them. Therefore
for the following three years I wrote about nothing but ice
cutters, steam engines, refillers and The Theoretical
Exploration of the Works of Floating Steam Shovels. I couldn’t
help myself. I was attached to the chair of Ship Architecture
and busied myself with teaching in the shipbuilding faculty,
where I teach until now.
“If I mean anything in Russian Literature, I owe this
completely to the Petrograd Secret Service. In 1911 this service
exiled me from Petrograd and I was forced to spend two years
in a non-populated place in Lachta. There, in the midst of the
white winter silence and the green summer silence, I wrote my
‘Provincial.’ After that the late Ismaylov expressed in print his
belief that I wore very high boots and was a long-haired
provincial type, carrying a heavy stick, and he was later very
much surprised that I ‘didn’t look a bit like that.’ Incidentally,
‘not a bit like that’ I became in England where, during the War,
I spent about two years, building ships and visiting the ruins of
ancient castles. I listened to the banging of the German
Zeppelin bombs and wrote a short novel The Islanders.
“I regret immensely that I did not witness the Russian
Revolution in February and know only the October Revolution,
because it was in October, a life preserver around my body and
 all the lights out, passing German submarines, that I returned to
Petrograd. Because of this I felt like one who never having
been in love gets up one morning and finds himself married
about ten years.
“Now I write little, perhaps because my requirements
towards myself become greater. Three new volumes are in the
hands of the publisher and begin to be published only now. The
fourth will be my novel We, the funniest and most earnest thing
I have written. However, the most serious and most interesting
novels I never wrote. They happened to me in my life.”

Zamyatin continues to live in Russia and continues to live with Russia,

but such is the sarcasm of Fate that the first Russian novel giving a real
synthesis of the Russian revolution and its greater universal meaning, this
novel written by Zamyatin, should remain unknown to the Russians in
Russia.

GREGORY ZILBOORG.
New York, 1924.
WE
 RECORD ONE

An announcement—The wisest of lines—A

poem.

This is merely a copy, word by word, of what was published this morning in
the State newspaper:

“In another hundred and twenty days the building of the

Integral will be completed. The great historic hour is near,
when the first Integral will rise into the limitless space of the
universe. A thousand years ago your heroic ancestors subjected
the whole earth to the power of the United State. A still more
glorious task is before you—the integration of the indefinite
equation of the Cosmos by the use of the glass, electric, fire-
breathing Integral. Your mission is to subjugate to the grateful
yoke of reason the unknown beings who live on other planets,
and who are perhaps still in the primitive state of freedom. If
they will not understand that we are bringing them a
mathematically faultless happiness, our duty will be to force
them to be happy. But before we take up arms, we shall try the
power of words.
“In the name of The Well-Doer, the following is announced
herewith to all Numbers of the United State:
“Whoever feels capable must consider it his duty to write
treatises, poems, manifestoes, odes and other compositions on
the greatness and the beauty of the United State.
“This will be the first load which the Integral will carry.
 “Long live the United State! Long live the Numbers!! Long
live the Well-Doer!!!”

I feel my cheeks are burning as I write this. To integrate the colossal,

universal equation! To unbend the wild curve, to straighten it out to a
tangent—to a straight line! For the United State is a straight line, a great,
divine, precise, wise line, the wisest of lines!
I, D-503, the builder of the Integral, I am only one of the many
mathematicians of the United State. My pen, which is accustomed to
figures, is unable to express the march and rhythm of consonance; therefore
I shall try to record only the things I see, the things I think, or to be more
exact, the things we think. Yes, we; that is exactly what I mean, and “We”
shall, therefore, be the title of my records. But this will only be a derivative
of our life—of our mathematical, perfect life in the United State. If this be
so, will not this derivative be a poem in itself, despite my limitations? It
will. I believe, I know it.
I feel my cheeks are burning as I write this. I feel something similar to
what a woman probably feels when for the first time she senses within
herself the pulse of a tiny, blind, human being. It is I, and at the same time it
is not I. And for many long months it will be necessary to feed it with my
life, with my blood, and then with a pain at my heart, to tear it from myself
and lay it at the feet of the United State.
Yet I am ready, as everyone, or nearly everyone of us, is. I am ready.
 RECORD TWO

Ballet—Square harmony—X.

Spring. From behind the Green Wall from some unknown plains the wind
brings to us the yellow honeyed pollen of flowers. One’s lips are dry from
this sweet dust. Every moment one passes one’s tongue over them.
Probably, all women whom I meet in the street (and men certainly also),
have today sweet lips. This disturbs somewhat my logical thinking. But the
sky! The sky is blue. Its limpidness is not marred by a single cloud. (How
primitive was the taste of the ancients, since their poets were always
inspired by these senseless, formless, stupidly rushing accumulations of
steam!) I love, I am sure it will not be an error if I say we love, only such a
sky—a sterile, faultless sky. On such days the whole universe seems to be
moulded of the same eternal glass, like the Green Wall, and like all our
buildings. On such days one sees into the very blue depth of things. One
sees their wonderful equations, hitherto unknown. One sees them in
everything, even in the most ordinary everyday things.
Here is an example: this morning I was on the dock where the Integral is
being built, and I saw the lathes; blindly, with abandon, the balls of the
regulators were rotating; the cranks were swinging from side to side with a
glimmer; the working-beam proudly swung its shoulder; and the
mechanical chisels were dancing to the melody of an unheard Tarantella. I
suddenly perceived all the music, all the beauty, of this colossal, of this
mechanical ballet, illumined by light blue rays of sunshine. Then the
thought came: why beautiful? Why is a dance beautiful? Answer: because it
is an unfree movement. Because the deep meaning of the dance is contained
in its absolute, ecstatic submission, in the ideal non-freedom. If it is true that
our ancestors would abandon themselves in dancing at the most inspired
moments of their lives (religious mysteries, military parades) then it means
only one thing: the instinct of non-freedom has been characteristic of
human nature from ancient times, and we in our life of today, we are only
consciously—
I was interrupted. The switchboard clicked. I raised my eyes—O-90, of
course! In half a minute she herself will be here to take me for the walk.
Dear O-! She always seems to me to look like her name, O-. She is
approximately ten centimeters shorter than the required Maternal Norm.
Therefore she appears all round; the rose-colored O of her lips is open to
meet every word of mine. She has a round soft dimple on her wrist.
Children have such dimples. As she came in, the logical flywheel was still
buzzing in my head, and following its inertia, I began to tell her about my
new formula which embraced the machines and the dancers and all of us.
“Wonderful, isn’t it!” I asked.
“Yes, wonderful … Spring!” she replied, with a rosy smile.
You see? Spring! She talks about Spring! Females! … I became silent.
We were down in the street. The avenue was crowded. On days when the
weather is so beautiful the afternoon personal hour is usually the hour of the
supplementary walk. As always the big Musical Tower was playing with all
its pipes, the March of the United State. The Numbers, hundreds, thousands
of Numbers in light blue unifs (probably a derivative of the ancient
uniform) with golden badges on the chest—the State number of each one,
male or female—the Numbers were walking slowly, four abreast, exaltedly
keeping the step. I, we four, were but one of the innumerable waves of a
powerful torrent. To my left, O-90 (if one of my long-haired ancestors were
writing this a thousand years ago, he would probably call her by that funny
word, mine), to my right, two unknown Numbers, a she-Number and a he-
Number.
Blue sky, tiny baby suns in each one of our badges; our faces are
unclouded by the insanity of thoughts. Rays. … Do you picture it?
Everything seems to be made of a kind of smiling, a ray-like matter. And
the brass measures: Tra-ta-ta-tam. … Tra-ta-ta-tam … stamping on the
brassy steps which sparkle in the sun; with every step you rise higher and
higher into the dizzy blue heights. … Then, as this morning on the dock,
again I saw as if for the first time in my life, the impeccably straight streets,
the glistening glass of the pavement, the divine parallelopipeds of the
transparent dwellings, the square harmony of the grayish-blue rows of
Numbers. And it seemed to me that not past generations, but I myself, had
won a victory over the old god and the old life, that I myself had created all
this. I felt like a tower: I was afraid to move my elbow, lest the walls, the
cupola and the machines should fall to pieces.
Then without warning—a jump through centuries: I remembered
(apparently through an association by contrast) a picture in the museum, a
picture of an avenue of the twentieth century, a thundering many-colored
confusion of men, wheels, animals, billboards, trees, colors, and birds. …
They say all this once actually existed!
It seemed to me so incredible, so absurd, that I lost control of myself and
laughed aloud. A laugh, as if an echo of mine, reached my ear from the
right. I turned. I saw white, very white, sharp teeth, and an unfamiliar
female face.
“I beg your pardon,” she said, “but you looked about you like an inspired
mythological god on the seventh day of creation. You look as though you
are sure that I, too, was created by you, by no one but you. It is very
flattering.”
All this without a smile, even with a certain degree of respect—(she may
know that I am the builder of the Integral). In her eyes nevertheless, in her
brows, there was a strange irritating X, and I was unable to grasp it, to find
an arithmetical expression for it. Somehow I was confused; with a
somewhat hazy mind, I tried logically to motivate my laughter.
“It was absolutely clear that this contrast, this impassable abyss, between
the things of today and of years ago—”
“But why impassable?” (What bright, sharp teeth!) “One might throw a
bridge over that abyss. Please imagine: a drum battalion, rows—all this
existed before and consequently—”
“Oh, yes, it is clear,” I exclaimed.
It was a remarkable intersection of thoughts. She said almost in the same
words the things I wrote down before the walk! Do you understand? Even
the thoughts! It is because nobody is one, but one of. We are all so much
alike—
“Are you sure?” I noticed her brows which rose to the temples in an
acute angle—like the sharp corners of an X. Again I was confused, casting
a glance to the right, then to the left. To my right—she, slender, abrupt,
resistantly flexible like a whip, I-330 (I saw her number now). To my left,
O-, totally different, made all of circles with a childlike dimple on her wrist;
and at the very end of our row, an unknown he-Number, double-curved like
the letter S. We were all so different from one another. …
The one to my right, I-330, apparently caught my confused eye, for she
said with a sigh, “Yes, alas!”
I don’t deny that this exclamation was quite in place, but again there was
something in her face or in her voice. …
With an abruptness unusual for me, I said, “Why ‘alas’? Science is
developing and if not now, then within fifty or one hundred years—”
“Even the noses will—”
“Yes, noses!” This time I almost shouted, “Since there is still a reason, no
matter what, for envy. … Since my nose is button-like and someone else’s
is—”
“Well your nose is rather classic, as they would say in the ancient days,
although your hands—No, no, show me your hands!”
I hate to have anyone look at my hands; they are covered with long
hair—a stupid atavism. I stretched out my hand and said as indifferently as I
could, “Apelike.”
She glanced at my hand, then at my face.
“No, a very curious harmony.”
She weighed me with her eyes as though with scales. The little horns
again appeared at the corners of her brows.
“He is registered in my name,” exclaimed O-90 with a rosy smile.
I made a grimace. Strictly speaking, she was out of order. This dear O-,
how shall I say it? the speed of her tongue is not correctly calculated; the
speed per second of her tongue should be slightly less than the speed per
second of her thoughts—at any rate not the reverse.
At the end of the avenue the big bell of the Accumulating Tower
resounded seventeen. The personal hour was at an end. I-330 was leaving
us with that S-like he-Number. He has such a respectable, and I noticed
then, such a familiar face. I must have met him somewhere, but where I
could not remember. Upon leaving me I-330 said with the same X-like
smile:
“Drop in day after tomorrow at auditorium 112.”
I shrugged my shoulders: “If I am assigned to the auditorium you just
named—”
She, with a peculiar, incomprehensible certainty: “You will.”
 The woman had upon me a disagreeable effect, like an irrational
component of an equation which you cannot eliminate. I was glad to remain
alone with dear O-, at least for a short while. Hand in hand with her, I
passed four lines of avenues; at the next corner she went to the right, I to the
left. O- timidly raised her round blue crystalline eyes:
“I would like so much to come to you today and pull down the curtains,
especially today, right now. …”
How funny she is. But what could I say to her? She was with me only
yesterday and she knows as well as I that our next sexual day is day-after-
tomorrow. It is merely another case in which her thoughts are too far ahead.
It sometimes happens that the spark comes too early to the motor.
At parting I kissed her twice—no, I shall be exact, three times, on her
wonderful blue eyes, such clear, unclouded eyes.
 RECORD THREE

A coat—A wall—The tables.

I looked over all that I wrote down yesterday and I find that my descriptions
are not sufficiently clear. That is, everything would undoubtedly be clear to
one of us but who knows to whom my Integral will some day bring these
records? Perhaps you, like our ancestors, have read the great book of
civilization only up to the page of nine hundred years ago. Perhaps you
don’t know even such elementary things as the Hour Tables, Personal
Hours, Maternal Norm, Green Wall, Well-Doer. It seems droll to me and at
the same time very difficult, to explain these things. It is as though, let us
say, a writer of the twentieth century should start to explain in his novel
such words as coat, apartment, wife. Yet if his novel had been translated for
primitive races, how could he have avoided explaining what a coat meant? I
am sure that the primitive man would look at a coat and think, “What is this
for? It is only a burden, an unnecessary burden.” I am sure that you will feel
the same, if I tell you that not one of us has ever stepped beyond the Green
Wall since the Two Hundred Years’ War.
But, dear readers, you must think, at least a little. It helps.
It is clear that the history of mankind as far as our knowledge goes, is a
history of the transition from nomadic forms to more sedentary ones. Does
it not follow that the most sedentary form of life (ours) is at the same time,
the most perfect one? There was a time when people were rushing from one
end of the earth to another, but this was the prehistoric time when such
things as nations, wars, commerce, different discoveries of different
Americas still existed. Who has need of these things now?
I admit humanity acquired this habit of a sedentary form of life not
without difficulty and not at once. When the Two Hundred Years’ War had
destroyed all the roads which later were overgrown with grass, it was
probably very difficult at first. It seemed uncomfortable to live in cities
which were cut off from each other by green debris. But what of it? Man
soon after he lost his tail probably did not learn at once how to chase away
flies without its help. I am almost sure that at first he was even lonesome
without his tail, but now, can you imagine yourself with a tail? Or can you
imagine yourself walking in the street naked, without clothes? (It is possible
you go without clothes still.) Here we have the same case. I cannot imagine
a city which is not clad with a Green Wall; I cannot imagine a life which is
not clad with the figures of our Tables.
Tables. … Now even, purple figures look at me austerely yet kindly from
the golden background of the wall. Involuntarily I am reminded of the thing
which was called by the ancients, “Sainted Image,” and I feel a desire to
compose verses, or prayers which are the same. Oh, why am not I a poet, so
as to be able properly to glorify the Tables, the heart and pulse of the United
State!
All of us and perhaps all of you read in childhood while in school, that
greatest of all monuments of ancient literature, the Official Railroad Guide.
But if you compare this with the Tables, you will see side by side graphite
and diamonds. Both are the same, carbon. But how eternal, transparent,
how shining the diamond! Who does not lose his breath when he runs
through the pages of the Guide? The Tables transformed each one of us,
actually, into a six-wheeled steel hero of a great poem. Every morning with
six-wheeled precision, at the same hour, at the same minute, we wake up,
millions of us at once. At the very same hour millions like one we begin our
work, and millions like one, we finish it. United into a single body with a
million hands, at the very same second, designated by the Tables, we carry
the spoons to our mouths; at the same second we all go out to walk, go to
the auditorium, to the halls for the Taylor exercises and then to bed.
I shall be quite frank: even we have not attained the absolute, exact
solution of the problem of happiness. Twice a day, from sixteen to
seventeen o’clock and from twenty-one to twenty-two, our united powerful
organism dissolves into separate cells; these are the personal hours
designated by the Tables. During these hours you would see the curtains
discreetly drawn in the rooms of some; others march slowly over the
pavement of the main avenue or sit at their desks as I sit now. But I firmly
believe, let them call me an idealist and a dreamer, I believe that sooner or
later we shall somehow find even for these hours, a place in the general
formula. Somehow, all of the 86,400 seconds will be incorporated in the
Tables of Hours.
I have had opportunity to read and hear many improbable things about
those times when human beings still lived in the state of freedom, that is, an
unorganized primitive state. One thing has always seemed to me the most
improbable: how could a government, even a primitive government, permit
people to live without anything like our Tables—without compulsory
walks, without precise regulation of the time to eat, for instance? They
would get up and go to bed whenever they liked. Some historians even say
that in those days the streets were lighted all night; and all night people
went about the streets.
That I cannot understand; true, their minds were rather limited in those
days. Yet they should have understood, should they not, that such a life was
actually wholesale murder, although slow murder, day after day? The State
(humanitarianism) forbade in those days the murder of one person, but it
did not forbid the killing of millions slowly and by half. To kill one, that is,
to reduce the general sum of human life by fifty years, was considered
criminal, but to reduce the general sum of human life by fifty million years
was not considered criminal! Is it not droll? Today this simple mathematical
moral problem could easily be solved in half a minute’s time by any ten-
year-old Number, yet they couldn’t do it! All their Immanuel Kants together
couldn’t do it! It didn’t enter the heads of all their Kants to build a system
of scientific ethics, that is, ethics based on adding, subtracting, multiplying
and dividing.
Further, is it not absurd that their State (they called it State!) left sexual
life absolutely without control? However, whenever and as much as they
wanted. … Absolutely unscientific like beasts; and like beasts they blindly
gave birth to children! Is it not strange to understand gardening, chicken-
farming, fishery (we have definite knowledge that they were familiar with
all these things), and not to be able to reach the last step in this logical
scale, namely, production of children—not to be able to discover such
things as Maternal and Paternal Norms?
It is so droll, so improbable, that while I write this I am afraid lest you,
my unknown future readers, should think I am merely a bad jester. I feel
almost as though you may think I simply want to mock you and with a most
serious appearance try to relate to you absolute nonsense. But first, I am
incapable of jesting, for in every joke a lie has its hidden function. And
second, the science of the United State contends that the life of the ancients
was exactly what I am describing, and the science of the United State
cannot make a mistake! Yet how could they have State logic, since they
lived in a condition of freedom like beasts, like apes, like herds? What
could one expect of them, since even in our day one hears from time to
time, coming from the bottom, the primitive depths, the echo of the apes?
Fortunately it happens only from time to time, very seldom. Happily it is
only a case of small parts breaking; these may easily be repaired without
stopping the eternal great march of the whole machine. And in order to
eliminate a broken peg we have the skillful heavy hand of the Well-Doer,
we have the experienced eyes of the Guardians. …
By the way, I just thought of that Number whom I met yesterday, the
double-curved one like the letter S; I think I have seen him several times
coming out of the Bureau of the Guardians. Now I understand why I felt
such an instinctive respect for him and a kind of awkwardness when that
strange I-330 at his side. … I must confess that, that I— … they ring the
bell, time to sleep, it is twenty-two-thirty. Till tomorrow, then.
 RECORD FOUR

The wild man with a barometer—Epilepsy—

If.

Until today everything in life seemed to me clear (that is why, I think, I

always had a sort of partiality toward the word “clear”), but today … I don’t
understand. First, I really was assigned to auditorium 112 as she said,
although the probability was as 500:10,000,000 or 1:20,000. (500 is the
number of auditoriums and there are 10,000,000 Numbers.) And second …
but let me relate things in successive order. The auditorium: an enormous
half-globe of glass with the sun piercing through. The circular rows of
noble, globe-like, closely-shaven heads. With joy in my heart I looked
around. I believe I was looking in the hope of seeing the rose-colored
scythe, the dear lips of O-, somewhere among the blue waves of the unifs.
Then I saw extraordinarily white, sharp teeth like the. … But no! Tonight at
twenty-one o’clock O- was to come to me; therefore my desire to see her
was quite natural. The bell. We stood up, sang the Hymn of the United
State, and our clever phono-lecturer appeared on the platform with a
sparkling golden megaphone.
“Respected Numbers, not so long ago our archaeologists dug up a book
written in the twentieth century. In this book the ironical author tells about a
Wild Man and a barometer. The Wild Man noticed that every time the
barometer’s hand stopped on the word ‘rain,’ it actually rained. And as the
Wild Man craved rain, he let out as much mercury as was necessary to put it
at the level of the word ‘rain’ (on the screen a Wild Man with feathers,
letting out the mercury. Laughter).
“You are laughing at him, but don’t you think the ‘European’ of that age
deserves more to be laughed at? He, like the Wild Man, wanted rain—rain
with a little r, an algebraic rain; but he remained standing before the
barometer like a wet hen. The Wild Man at least had more courage and
energy and logic, although primitive logic. The Wild Man showed the
ability to establish a connection between cause and effect: by letting out the
mercury he made the first step on the path which. …”
Here (I repeat, I am not concealing anything, I am setting down
everything) I suddenly became impermeable to the quickening currents
coming from the megaphone. I suddenly felt I had come here in vain (why
in vain and how could I not have come here, where I was assigned?).
Everything seemed to me empty like a shell. I succeeded with difficulty in
switching my attention in again when the phono-lecturer came to the main
theme of the evening—to our music as a mathematical composition
(mathematics is the cause, music the effect). The phono-lecturer began the
description of the recently invented musicometer.
“… By merely rotating this handle anyone is enabled to produce about
three sonatas per hour. What difficulties our predecessors had in making
music! They were able to compose only by bringing themselves to strokes
of inspiration—an extinct form of epilepsy. Here you have an amusing
illustration of their achievements: the music of Scriabin, twentieth century.
This black box,” (a curtain parted on the platform, and we saw an ancient
instrument) “this box they called the ‘Royal Grand.’ They attached to this
the idea of regality, which also goes to prove how their music. …”
And I don’t remember anything further. Very possibly because … I’ll tell
you frankly, because she, I-330, came to the “Royal” box. Probably I was
simply startled by her unexpected appearance on the platform.
She was dressed in a fantastic dress of the ancient time, a black dress
closely fitting the body, sharply delimiting the white of her shoulders and
breast and that warm shadow waving with her breath between. … And the
dazzling, almost angry teeth. A smile, a bite, directed downward. She took
her seat; she began to play something wild, convulsive, loud like all their
life then—not a shadow of rational mechanism. Of course all those around
me were right; they were laughing. Only a few … but why is it that I too,
I…?
Yes, epilepsy, a mental disease, a pain. A slow, sweet pain, bite, and it
goes deeper and becomes sharper. And then, slowly, sunshine—not our
sunshine, not crystalline, bluish and soft, coming through the glass bricks.
No, a wild sunshine, rushing and burning, tearing everything into small
bits. …
The Number at my left glanced at me and chuckled. I don’t know why
but I remember exactly how a microscopic saliva bubble appeared on his
lips and burst. That bubble brought me back to myself. I was again I.
Like all the other Numbers I heard now only the senseless, disorderly
cracking of the chords. I laughed; I felt so light and simple. The gifted
phono-lecturer represented to us only too well that wild epoch. And that
was all.
With what a joy I listened afterward to our contemporary music. It was
demonstrated to us at the end of the lecture for the sake of contrast.
Crystalline, chromatic scales converging and diverging into endless series;
and synthetic harmony of the formulae of Taylor and McLauren,
wholesome, square and massive like the “trousers of Pythagoras.” Sad
melodies dying away in waving movements. The beautiful texture of the
spectrum of planets, dissected by Frauenhofer lines … what magnificent,
what perfect regularity! How pitiful the wilful music of the ancients, not
limited except by the scope of their wild imaginations!
As usual in good order, four abreast, all of us left the auditorium. The
familiar double-curved figure passed swiftly by. I respectfully bowed.
Dear O- was to come in an hour. I felt agitated—agreeably and usefully.
Home at last! I rushed to the house-office, handed over to the controller on
duty my pink ticket and received a certificate permitting the use of the
curtains. This right exists in our State only for the sexual days. Normally we
live surrounded by transparent walls which seem to be knitted of sparkling
air; we live beneath the eye of everyone, always bathed in light. We have
nothing to conceal from one another; besides, this mode of living makes the
difficult and exalted task of the Guardians much easier. Without it many bad
things might happen. It is possible that the strange opaque dwellings of the
ancients were responsible for their pitiful cellish psychology. “My (sic!)
home is my fortress!” How did they manage to think of such things?
At twenty-two o’clock I lowered the curtain and at the same second O-
came in smiling, slightly out of breath. She extended to me her rosy lips and
her pink ticket. I tore off the stub but I could not tear myself away from the
rosy lips up to the last moment—twenty-two-fifteen.
Then I showed her my diary and I talked; I think I talked very well on the
beauty of a square, a cube, a straight line. At first she listened so
charmingly, she was so rosy, when suddenly a tear appeared in her blue
eyes, then another, and a third fell straight on the open page (page 7). The
ink blurred; well, I shall have to copy it again.
“My dear O-, if only you, if. …”
“What if? If what?”
Again the old lament about a child or perhaps something new regarding,
regarding … the other one? Although it seems as though some … but that
would be too absurd!
 RECORD FIVE

The square—The rulers of the world—An

agreeable and useful function.

Again with you, my unknown reader; I talk to you as though you were, let
us say, my old comrade, R-13, the poet with the lips of a negro—well,
everyone knows him. Yet you are somewhere on the moon, or on Venus, or
on Mars. Who knows you? Where and who are you?
Imagine a square, a living, beautiful square. Imagine that this square is
obliged to tell you about itself, about its life. You realize that this square
would hardly think it necessary to mention the fact that all its four angles
are equal. It knows this too well. This is such an ordinary, obvious thing. I
am in exactly the same square position. Take the pink checks for instance,
and all that goes with them: for me they are as natural as the equality of the
four angles of the square. But for you they are perhaps more mysterious and
hard to understand than the binom of Newton. Let me explain: an ancient
sage once said a clever thing (accidentally, beyond doubt). He said, “Love
and Hunger rule the world.” Consequently, to dominate the world, man had
to win a victory over hunger after paying a very high price. I refer to the
great Two Hundred Years’ War, the war between the city and the land.
Probably on account of religious prejudices, the primitive peasants
stubbornly held on to their “bread.”1 In the 35th year before the foundation
of the United State, our contemporary petroleum food was invented. True,
only about two-tenths of the population of the globe did not die out. But
how beautifully shining the face of the earth became when it was cleared of
its impurities!
Accordingly the 0.2 which survived, have enjoyed the greatest happiness
in the bosom of the United State. But is it not clear that supreme bliss and
envy are only the numerator and the denominator respectively, of the same
fraction, happiness? What sense would the innumerable sacrifices of the
Two Hundred Years’ War have for us if a reason were left in our life for
jealousy? Yet such a reason persisted because there remained button-like
noses and classical noses (cf.: our conversation during the promenade). For
there were some whose love was sought by everyone and others whose love
was sought by no one.
Naturally, having conquered hunger (that is, algebraically speaking,
having achieved the total of bodily welfare), the United State directed its
attack against the second ruler of the world, against love. At last this
element also was conquered, that is, organized and put into a mathematical
formula. It is already three hundred years since our great historic Lex
Sexualis was promulgated: “A Number may obtain a license to use any
other Number as a sexual product.”
The rest is only a matter of technique. You are carefully examined in the
laboratory of the Sexual Department where they find the content of the
sexual hormones in your blood, and they make out for you accordingly a
Table of sexual days. Then you file an application to enjoy the services of
Number so-and-so, or Numbers so-and-so. You get for that purpose a
checkbook (pink). That is all.
It is clear that under such circumstances there is no more reason for envy
or jealousy. The denominator of the fraction of happiness is reduced to zero
and the whole fraction is thus converted into a magnificent infiniteness. The
thing which was for the ancients the source of innumerable stupid tragedies
has been converted in our time into an harmonious, agreeable and useful
function of the organism, a function like sleep, like physical labor, the
taking of food, digestion, etc., etc. Hence you see how the great power of
logic purifies everything it happens to touch. Oh, if only you unknown
readers can conceive this divine power! If you will only learn to follow it to
the end!
It is very strange: while I was writing today of the loftiest summit of
human history, all the while I breathed the purest mountain air of thought,
but within me it was and remains cloudy, cobwebby, and there is a kind of
cross-like, four-pawed X. Or perhaps it is my paws and I feel like that only
because they are always before my eyes, my hairy paws. I don’t like to talk
about them. I dislike them. They are a trace of a primitive epoch. Is it
possible that there is in me … ?
 I wanted to strike out all this because it trespasses on the limits of my
synopsis. But then I decided: no, I shall not! Let this diary give the curve of
the most imperceptible vibrations of my brain, like a precise seismograph,
for at times such vibrations serve as forewarnings. … Certainly this is
absurd! This certainly should be stricken out; we have conquered all the
elements; catastrophes are not possible any more.
Now everything is clear to me. The peculiar feeling inside is a result of
that very same square situation of which I spoke in the beginning. There is
no X in me. There can be none. I am simply afraid lest some X will be left
in you, my unknown readers. I believe you will understand that it is harder
for me to write than it ever was for any author throughout human history.
Some of them wrote for contemporaries, some for the future generations but
none of them ever wrote for their ancestors, or beings like their primitive,
distant ancestors.
 RECORD SIX

An accident—The cursed “It’s clear”—

Twenty-four hours.

I must repeat, I made it my duty to write concealing nothing. Therefore I

must point out now that sad as it may be, the process of hardening and
crystallization of life has evidently not been completed even here in our
State. A few steps remain to be made before we reach the ideal. The ideal
(it’s clear), is to be found where nothing happens, but here. … I will give
you an example: in the State paper I read that in two days the holiday of
Justice will be celebrated on the Plaza of the Cube. This means that again
some Number has impeded the smooth run of the great State machine.
Again something that was not foreseen, or forecalculated happened.
Besides, something happened to me. True, it occurred during the
personal hour, that is during the time specifically assigned to unforeseen
circumstances, yet. …
At about sixteen (to be exact, ten minutes to sixteen), I was at home.
Suddenly the telephone: “D-503?”—a woman’s voice.
“Yes.”
“Are you free?”
“Yes.”
“It is I, I-330. I shall run over to you immediately. We shall go together to
the Ancient House. Agreed?”
I-330! … This I- irritates me, repels me. She almost frightens me; but just
because of that I answered, “Yes.”
In five minutes we were in an aero. Blue sky of May. The light sun in its
golden aero buzzed behind us without catching up and without lagging
behind. Ahead of us a white cataract of a cloud. Yes, a white cataract of a
cloud nonsensically fluffy like the cheeks of an ancient cupid. That cloud
was disturbing. The front window was open; it was windy; lips were dry.
Against one’s will one passed the tongue constantly over them and thought
about lips.
Already we saw in the distance the hazy green spots on the other side of
the Wall. Then a slight involuntary sinking of the heart, down—down—
down, as if from a steep mountain, and we were at the Ancient House.
That strange, delicate, blind establishment is covered all around with a
glass shell, otherwise it would undoubtedly have fallen to pieces long ago.
At the glass door we found an old woman all wrinkles, especially her mouth
which was all made up of folds and pleats. Her lips had disappeared, having
folded inward; her mouth seemed grown together. It seemed incredible that
she should be able to talk and yet she did:
“Well, dear, come again to see my little house?”
Her wrinkles shone, that is, her wrinkles diverged like rays, which
created the impression of shining.
“Yes, grandmother,” answered I-330.
The wrinkles continued to shine.
“And the sun, eh—do you see it, you rogue, you! I know, I know. It’s all
right. Go all by yourselves—I shall remain here in the sunshine.”
Hmm. … Apparently my companion was a frequent guest here.
Something disturbed me; probably that unpleasant optical impression—the
cloud on the smooth blue surface of the sky.
While we were ascending the wide, dark stairs, I-330 said, “I love her,
that old woman.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps for her mouth—or perhaps for nothing, just so.”
I shrugged my shoulders. She continued walking upstairs with a faint
smile or perhaps without a smile at all.
I felt very guilty. It is clear that there must not be “love, just so,” but
“love because of.” For all elements of nature should be. …
“It’s clear …” I began, but I stopped at that word and cast a furtive look at
I-330. Did she notice it or not? She looked somewhere, down; her eyes
were closed like curtains.
It struck me suddenly: evening about twenty-two; you walk on the
avenue and among the brightly lighted, transparent, cubic cells, are dark
spaces, lowered curtains, and there behind the curtains. … What has she
behind her curtains? Why did she phone me today? Why did she bring me
here? and all this. …
She opened a heavy, squeaking, opaque door and we found ourselves in a
sombre disorderly space (they called it an “apartment”). The same strange
“royal” musical instrument and a wild, unorganized, crazy loudness of
colors and forms like their ancient music. A white plane above, dark blue
walls, red, green, orange bindings of ancient books, yellow bronze
candelabras, a statue of Buddha, furniture with lines distorted by epilepsy,
impossible to reduce to any clear equation.
I could hardly bear that chaos. But my companion apparently possessed a
stronger constitution.
“This is my most beloved—” she suddenly caught herself (again a
smile—bite, and white sharp teeth), “to be more exact, the most nonsensical
of all ‘apartments.’”
“Or to be most exact, of all the States. Thousands of microscopic States,
fighting eternal wars, pitiless like—”
“Oh yes, it’s clear,” said I-330 with apparent sincerity.
We passed through a room where we found a few small children’s beds
(children in those days were also private property). Then more rooms,
glimmering mirrors, sombre closets, unbearably loud-colored divans, an
enormous “fireplace,” a large mahogany bed. Our contemporary beautiful,
transparent, eternal glass was represented here only by pitiful, delicate, tiny
squares of windows.
“And to think; here there was love ‘just so’; they burned and tortured
themselves” (again the curtain of the eyes was lowered), “What a stupid,
uneconomical spending of human energy. Am I not right?”
She spoke as though reading my thoughts but in her smile there remained
always that irritating X. There behind the curtains something was going on,
I don’t know what, but something that made me lose my patience. I wanted
to quarrel with her, to scream at her (exactly, to scream), but I had to agree.
It was impossible not to agree.
We stopped in front of a mirror. At that moment I saw only her eyes. An
idea came to me: human beings are built as nonsensically as these stupid
“apartments,” human heads are opaque, and there are only two very small
windows that lead inside—the eyes. She seemed to have guessed my
thoughts; she turned around: “Well, here they are, my eyes—well” (this
suddenly, then silence).
 There were in front of me two gloomy dark windows and behind them
inside, such strange hidden life. I saw there only fire, burning like a peculiar
“fireplace” and unknown figures resembling. …
All this was certainly very natural; I saw in her eyes the reflection of my
own face. But my feelings were unnatural and not like me. Evidently the
depressing influence of the surroundings was beginning to tell on me. I felt
definitely fear. I felt as if I were trapped and caged in a strange cage. I felt
that I was caught in the wild hurricane of ancient life.
“Do you know …” said I-330, “step out for a moment into the next
room.” Her voice came from there—from inside, from behind the dark
window-eyes—where the fireplace was blazing.
I went out, sat down. From a shelf on the wall there looked straight into
my face, somewhat smiling, a snub-nosed, asymmetrical physiognomy of
one of the ancient poets; I think it was Pushkin.
“Why do I sit here enduring this smile with such resignation and what is
this all about? Why am I here? And why all these strange sensations, this
irritating, repellent female, this strange game?”
The door of the closet slammed; there was the rustle of silk. I felt it
difficult to restrain myself from getting up and, and. … I don’t remember
exactly; probably I wanted to tell her a number of disagreeable things. But
she had already appeared.
She was dressed in a short bright-yellowish dress, black hat, black
stockings. The dress was of light silk—I saw clearly very long black
stockings above the knees, an uncovered neck and the shadow between. …
“It’s clear that you want to seem original. But is it possible that you—?”
“It is clear,” interrupted I-330, “that to be original means to stand out
among others; consequently to be original means to violate the law of
equality. What was called in the language of the ancients ‘to be common’ is
with us only the fulfilling of one’s duty. For—”
“Yes, yes, exactly,” I interrupted impatiently, “and there is no use, no
use. …”
She came near the bust of the snub-nosed poet, lowered the curtains on
the wild fire of her eyes and said, this time I think she was really in earnest,
or perhaps she merely wanted to soften my impatience with her, but she
said a very reasonable thing:
“Don’t you think it surprising that once people could stand types like
this? Not only stand them but worship them. What a slavish spirit, don’t
you think so?”
“It’s clear … that is … !” I wanted … (damn that cursed “it’s clear!”).
“Oh, yes, I understand. But in fact these were rulers stronger than the
crowned ones. Why were they not isolated and exterminated? In our
State—”
“Oh, yes, in our State—” I began.
Suddenly she laughed. I saw the laughter in her eyes. I saw the
resounding sharp curve of that laughter, flexible, tense like a whip. I
remember my whole body shivered. I thought of grasping her … and I don’t
know what. … I had to do something, mattered little what; automatically I
looked at my golden badge, glanced at my watch—ten minutes to
seventeen!
“Don’t you think it is time to go?” I said in as polite a tone as possible.
“And if I should ask you to stay here with me?”
“What? Do you realize what you are saying? In ten minutes I must be in
the auditorium.”
“And ‘all the Numbers must take the prescribed courses in art and
science,’” said I-330 with my voice.
Then she lifted the curtain, opened her eyes—through the dark windows
the fire was blazing.
“I have a physician in the Medical Bureau; he is registered to me; if I ask
him, he will give you a certificate declaring that you are ill. All right?”
Understood! At last I understood where this game was leading.
“Ah, so! But you know that every honest Number as a matter of course
must immediately go to the office of the Guardians and—”
“And as a matter not of course?” (Sharp smile-bite) “I am very curious to
know; will you or will you not go to the Guardians?”
“Are you going to remain here?”
I grasped the knob of the door. It was a brass knob, a cold, brass knob
and I heard, cold like brass, her voice:
“Just a minute, may I?”
She went to the telephone, called a Number—I was so upset it escaped
me—and spoke loudly: “I shall be waiting for you in the Ancient House.
Yes, yes, alone.”
I turned the cold brass knob.
“May I take the aero?”
“Oh yes, certainly, please!”
 In the sunshine at the gate the old woman was dozing like a plant. Again
I was surprised to see her grown-together mouth open, and to hear her say:
“And your lady, did she remain alone?”
“Alone.”
The mouth of the old woman grew together again; she shook her head;
apparently even her weakening brain understood the stupidity and the
danger of the behaviour of that woman.
At seventeen o’clock exactly, I was at the lecture. There I suddenly
realized that I did not tell the whole truth to the old woman. I-330 was not
there alone now. Possibly this fact, that I involuntarily told the old woman a
lie, was torturing me now and distracting my attention. Yes, not alone—that
was the point.
After twenty-one-thirty o’clock I had a free hour. I could therefore have
gone to the office of the Guardians to make my report; but after that stupid
adventure I was so tired—besides, the law provides two days. I shall have
time tomorrow; I have another twenty-four hours.
 RECORD SEVEN

An eyelash—Taylor—Henbane and lily of the

valley.

Night. Green, orange, blue. The red royal instrument. The yellow dress.
Then a brass Buddha. Suddenly it lifted the brass eyelids and sap began to
flow from it, from Buddha. Sap also from the yellow dress. Even in the
mirror—drops of sap, and from the large bed and from the children’s bed
and soon from myself. … It is horror, mortally sweet horror! …
I woke up. Soft blue light, the glass of the walls, of the chairs, of the
table was glimmering. This calmed me. My heart stopped palpitating. Sap!
Buddha! How absurd! I am sick, it is clear; I never saw dreams before.
They say that to see dreams was a common normal thing with the ancients.
Yes, after all, their life was a whirling carousel: green, orange, Buddha,
sap—but we, people of today, we know all too well that dreaming is a
serious mental disease. I. … Is it possible that my brain, this precise, clean,
glittering mechanism, like a chronometer without a speck of dust on it,
is … ? Yes it is, now. I really feel there in the brain some foreign body like
an eyelash in the eye. One does not feel one’s whole body but this eye with
a hair in it, one cannot forget it for a second. …
The cheerful, crystalline sound of the bell at my head. Seven o’clock.
Time to get up. To the right and to the left as in mirrors, to the right and to
the left through the glass walls I see others like myself, other rooms like my
own, other clothes like my own, movements like mine, duplicated
thousands of times. This invigorates me; I see myself as a part of an
enormous, vigorous, united body; and what precise beauty! Not a single
superfluous gesture, or bow, or turn. Yes, this Taylor was undoubtedly the
greatest genius of the ancients. True, he did not come to the idea of
applying his method to the whole life, to every step throughout the twenty-
four hours of the day; he was unable to integrate his system from one
o’clock to twenty-four. I cannot understand the ancients. How could they
write whole libraries about some Kant and take notice only slightly of
Taylor, of this prophet who saw ten centuries ahead?
Breakfast was over. The hymn of the United State had been
harmoniously sung; rhythmically, four abreast we walked to the elevators,
the motors buzzed faintly and swiftly we went down—down—down, the
heart sinking slightly. Again that stupid dream or some unknown function
of that dream. Oh, yes! Yesterday in the aero, then down—down! Well, it is
all over, anyhow. Period. It is very fortunate that I was so firm and brusque
with her.
The car of the underground railway carried me swiftly to the place where
the motionless, beautiful body of the Integral, not yet spiritualized by fire,
was glittering in the docks in the sunshine. With closed eyes I dreamed in
formulae. Again I calculated in my mind what was the initial velocity
required to tear away the Integral from the earth. Every second the mass of
the Integral would change because of the expenditure of the explosive fuel.
The equation was very complex with transcendant figures. As in a dream I
felt, right here in the firm calculated world, how someone sat down at my
side, barely touching me and saying, “Pardon.” I opened my eyes. At first,
apparently because of an association with the Integral, I saw something
impetuously flying into the distance: a head; I saw pink wing-ears sticking
out on the sides of it, then the curve of the overhanging back of the head,
the double-curved letter S.
Through the glass walls of my algebraic world, again I felt the eyelash in
my eye. I felt something disagreeable, I felt that today I must. …
“Certainly, please,”—I smiled at my neighbor and bowed.
Number S-4711 I saw glittering on his golden badge (that is why I
associated him with the letter S from the very first moment: an optical
impression which remained unregistered by consciousness). His eyes
sparkled, two sharp little drills; they were revolving swiftly, drilling in
deeper and deeper. It seemed that in a moment they would drill in to the
bottom and would see something that I do not even dare to confess to
myself. …
That bothersome eyelash became wholly clear to me. S- was one of them,
one of the Guardians, and it would be the simplest thing immediately,
without deferring to tell him everything!
“I went yesterday to the Ancient House …” my voice was strange, husky,
flat—I tried to cough.
“That is good. It must have given you material for some instructive
deductions.”
“Yes … but … You see, I was not alone; I was in the company of I-330,
and then. …”
“I-330? You are fortunate. She is a very interesting, gifted woman; she
has a host of admirers.”
But he too—then during the promenade. … Perhaps he is even assigned
as her he-Number! No, it is impossible to tell him, unthinkable. This was
perfectly clear.
“Yes, yes, certainly, very,” I smiled, broader and broader, more stupidly,
and felt as if my smile made me look foolish, naked.
The drills reached the bottom; revolving continually they screwed
themselves back into his eyes. S- smiled double-curvedly, nodded and slid
to the exit.
I covered my face with the newspaper (I felt as if everybody were
looking at me), and soon I forgot about the eyelash, about the little drills,
about everything, I was so upset by what I read in the paper: “According to
authentic information, traces of an organization which still remains out of
reach, have again been discovered. This organization aims at liberation
from the beneficial yoke of the State.”
Liberation! It is remarkable how persistent human criminal instincts are!
I use deliberately the word “criminal,” for freedom and crime are as closely
related as—well, as the movement of an aero and its speed: if the speed of
an aero equals zero, the aero is motionless; if human liberty is equal to zero,
man does not commit any crime. That is clear. The way to rid man of
criminality is to rid him of freedom. No sooner did we rid ourselves of
freedom (in the cosmic sense centuries are only a “no sooner”), than
suddenly some unknown pitiful degenerates. … No, I cannot understand
why I did not go immediately yesterday to the Bureau of the Guardians.
Today, after sixteen o’clock, I shall go there without fail.
At sixteen-ten I was in the street; at once I noticed O-90 at the corner; she
was all rosy with delight at the encounter. She has a simple, round mind. A
timely meeting; she would understand and lend me support. Or, … no, I did
not need any support; my decision was firm.
 The pipes of the Musical Tower thundered out harmoniously the
March—the same daily March. How wonderful the charm of this dailiness,
of this constant repetition and mirror-like smoothness!
“Out for a walk?” Her round blue eyes opened toward me widely, blue
windows leading inside; I penetrate there unhindered; there is nothing in
there, I mean nothing foreign, nothing superfluous.
“No, not for a walk. I must go.” I told her where. And to my
astonishment I saw her rosy round mouth form a crescent with the horns
downward as if she tasted something sour. This angered me.
“You she-Numbers seem to be incurably eaten up by prejudices. You are
absolutely unable to think abstractly. Forgive me the word but this I call
bluntness of mind.”
“You? … to the spies? How ugly! And I went to the Botanical Garden
and brought you a branch of lily-of-the-valley. …”
“Why, ‘and I’? Why this ‘and’? Just like a woman!”
Angrily (this I must confess), I snatched the flowers. “Here they are, your
lilies-of-the-valley. Well, smell them! Good? Yes? Why not use a little bit of
logic? The lilies-of-the-valley smell good; all right! But you cannot say
about an odor, about the conception of an odor, that it is good or bad, can
you? You can’t, can you? There is the smell of lilies-of-the-valley and there
is the disagreeable smell of henbane. Both are odors. The ancient States had
their spies; we have ours … yes, spies! I am not afraid of words. But is it not
clear to you that there the spies were henbane; here they are lilies-of-the-
valley? Yes, lilies-of-the-valley, yes!”
The rosy crescent quivered. Now I understand that it was only my
impression but at that moment I was certain she was going to laugh. I
shouted still louder:
“Yes, lilies-of-the-valley! And there is nothing funny about it, nothing
funny!”
The smooth round globes of heads passing by were turning towards us.
O-90 gently took my hand.
“You are so strange today … are you ill?”
My dream. … Yellow color. … Buddha. … It was at once born clearly
upon me that I must go to the Medical Bureau.
“Yes, you are right, I am sick,” I said with joy (that seems to me an
inexplicable contradiction; there was nothing to be joyful about).
 “You must go at once to the doctor. You understand that; you are obliged
to be healthy; it seems strange to have to prove it to you.”
“My dear O-, of course you are right. Absolutely right.”
I did not go to the Bureau of the Guardians; I could not; I had to go to the
Medical Bureau; they kept me there until seventeen o’clock.
In the evening (incidentally, the Bureau of Guardians is closed
evenings)—in the evening O- came to see me. The curtains were not
lowered. We busied ourselves with the arithmetical problems of an ancient
textbook. This occupation always calms and purifies our thoughts. O- sat
over her note book, her head slightly inclined to the left; she was so
assiduous that she poked out her left cheek with the tongue from within.
She looked so childlike, so charming. … I felt everything in me was
pleasant, precise and simple.
She left. I remained alone. I breathed deeply two times (it is very good
exercise before retiring for the night). Suddenly—an unexpected odor
reminiscent of something very disagreeable! I soon found out what was the
matter: a branch of lily-of-the-valley was hidden in my bed. Immediately
everything was aroused again, came up from the bottom. Decidedly, it was
tactless on her part surreptitiously to put these lilies-of-the-valley there.
Well, true I did not go; I didn’t, but was it my fault that I felt indisposed?
 RECORD EIGHT

An irrational root—R-13—The triangle.

It was long ago during my schooldays, when I first encountered the square-
root of minus one. I remember it all very clearly; a bright globe-like class
hall, about a hundred round heads of children and Plappa—our
mathematician. We nicknamed him Plappa; it was a very much used-up
mathematician, loosely screwed together; as the member of the class who
was on duty that day would be putting the plug into the socket behind we
would hear at first from the megaphone, “Plap-plap-plap-plap—tshshsh. …”
Only then the lesson would follow. One day Plappa told us about irrational
numbers, and I remember I wept and banged the table with my fist and
cried, “I do not want that square-root of minus one; take that square-root of
minus one away!” This irrational root grew into me as something strange,
foreign, terrible; it tortured me; it could not be thought out. It could not be
defeated because it was beyond reason.
Now that square-root of minus one is here again. I read over what I have
written and I clearly see that I was insincere with myself, that I lied to
myself in order to avoid seeing that square-root of minus one. My sickness,
etc., is all nonsense; I could go there. I feel sure that if such a thing had
happened a week ago I should have gone without hesitating. Why then am I
unable to go now? … Why?
Today, for instance, at exactly sixteen-ten I stood before the glittering
Glass Wall. Above was the shining, golden, sun-like sign: “Bureau of
Guardians.” Inside, a long queue of bluish-gray unifs awaiting their turns,
faces shining like the oil lamps in an ancient temple. They came to
accomplish a great thing: they came to put on the altar of the United State
their beloved ones, their friends, their own selves. My whole being craved
to join them, yet … I could not; my feet were as though melted into the
glass plates of the sidewalk. I simply stood there looking foolish.
“Heh, mathematician! Dreaming?”
I shivered. Black eyes varnished with laughter looked at me—thick negro
lips! It was my old friend the poet, R-13, and with him rosy O-. I turned
around angrily (I still believe that if they had not appeared I should have
entered the Bureau and have torn the square-root of minus one out of my
flesh).
“Not dreaming at all; if you will, ‘standing in adoration,’” I retorted quite
brusquely.
“Oh, certainly, certainly! You, my friend, should never have become a
mathematician; you should have become a poet, a great poet! Yes, come
over to our trade, to the poets. Heh? If you will, I can arrange it in a jiffy.
Heh?”
R-13 usually talks very fast: His words run in torrents, his thick lips
sprinkle. Every p is a fountain, every “poets” a fountain.
“So far I have served knowledge, and I shall continue to serve
knowledge.”
I frowned. I do not like, I do not understand jokes, and R-13 has the bad
habit of joking.
“Heh, to the deuce with knowledge. Your much-heralded knowledge is
but a form of cowardice. It is a fact! Yes, you want to encircle the infinite
with a wall and you fear to cast a glance behind the wall. Yes, sir! And if
ever you should glance beyond the wall you would be dazzled and close
your eyes—yes—”
“Walls are the foundation of every human—” I began.
R-13 sprinkled his fountain. O- laughed rosily and roundly. I waved my
hand: “Well, you may laugh, I don’t care.” I was busy with something else.
I had to find a way of eating up, of crushing down, that square-root of
minus one. “Suppose,” I offered, “we go to my place and do some
arithmetical problems.” (The quiet hour of yesterday afternoon came to my
memory; perhaps today also. …)
O- glanced at R-, then serenely and roundly at me; the soft, endearing
color of our pink checks came to her cheeks.
“But today I am. … I have a check to him today.” (A glance at R-.) “And
tonight he is busy, so that—”
 The moist varnished lips whispered good-naturedly: “Half an hour is
plenty for us, is it not, O-? I am not a great lover of your problems; let us
simply go over to my place and chat.”
I was afraid to remain alone with myself, or to be more correct, with that
new strange self, who by some curious coincidence bore my number,
D-503. So I went with R-. True, he is not precise, not rhythmic, his logic is
jocular and turned inside out, yet we are. … Three years ago we both chose
our dear, rosy O-. This tied our friendship more firmly together than our
schooldays did. In R-’s room everything seems like mine; the Tables, the
glass of the chairs, the table, the closet, the bed. But as we entered, R-
moved one chair out of place, then another—the room became confused,
everything lost the established order and seemed to violate every rule of
Euclid’s geometry. R- remained the same as before; in Taylor and in
mathematics he always lagged at the tail of the class.
We recalled Plappa, how we boys used to paste the whole surface of his
glass legs with paper notes expressing our thanks (we all loved Plappa). We
recalled our priest (it goes without saying that we were taught not the “law”
of ancient religion but the law of the United State). Our priest had a very
powerful voice; a real hurricane would come out of the megaphone. And we
children would yell the prescribed texts after him with all our lung-power.
We recalled how our scapegrace, R-13, used to stuff the priest with chewed
paper; every word was thus accompanied by a paper wad shot out.
Naturally, R- was punished, for what he did was undoubtedly wrong, but
now we laughed heartily;—by we I mean our triangle, R-, O-, and I, I must
confess, I too.
“And what if he had been a living one? Like the ancient ones, heh?”
We’d have b … b … , a fountain running from the fat bubbling lips. The sun
was shining through the ceiling, the sun above, the sun from the sides, its
reflection from below. O- on R-13’s lap and minute drops of sunlight in
O-’s blue eyes. Somehow my heart warmed up. The square-root of minus
one became silent and motionless. …
“Well, how is your Integral? Will you soon hop off to enlighten the
inhabitants of the planets? You’d better hurry up, my boy, or we poets will
have produced such a devilish lot that even your Integral will be unable to
lift the cargo. ‘Every day from eight to eleven’…” R- wagged his head and
scratched the back of it. The back of his head is square; it looks like a little
valise (I recalled for some reason an ancient painting In the Cab). I felt
more lively.
“You too are writing for the Integral? Tell me about it. What are you
writing about? What did you write today, for instance?”
“Today I did not write; today I was busy with something else.” “B-b-
busy” sprinkled straight into my face.
“What else?”
R- frowned. “What? What? Well, if you insist I’ll tell you. I was busy
with the Death Sentence. I was putting the Death Sentence into verse. An
idiot—and to be frank, one of our poets. … For two years we all lived side
by side with him and nothing seemed wrong. Suddenly he went crazy. ‘I,’
said he, ‘am a genius! And I am above the law.’ All that sort of nonsense. …
But it is not a thing to talk about.”
The fat lips hung down. The varnish disappeared from the eyes. He
jumped up, turned around and stared through the wall. I looked at his tightly
closed little “valise” and thought, “What is he handling in his little valise
now?”
A moment of awkward asymmetric silence. I could not see clearly what
was the matter but I was certain there was something. …
“Fortunately the antediluvian time of those Shakespeares and
Dostoevskys (or what were their names?) is past,” I said in a voice
deliberately loud.
R- turned his face to me. Words sprinkled and bubbled out of him as
before, but I thought I noticed there was no more joyful varnish to his eyes.
“Yes, dear mathematician, fortunately, fortunately. We are the happy
arithmetical mean. As you would put it, the integration from zero to infinity,
from imbeciles to Shakespeare. Do I put it right?”
I do not know why (it seemed to me absolutely uncalled for) I recalled
suddenly the other one, her tone. A thin invisible thread stretched between
her and R- (what thread?). The square-root of minus one began to bother
me again. I glanced at my badge; sixteen-twenty-five o’clock! They had
only thirty-five minutes for the use of the pink check.
“Well, I must go.” I kissed O-, shook hands with R- and went to the
elevator.
As I crossed the avenue I turned around. Here and there in the huge mass
of glass penetrated by sunshine there were grayish-blue squares, the opaque
squares of lowered curtains—the squares of rhythmic, Taylorized
happiness. On the seventh floor I found R-13’s square. The curtains were
already lowered.
Dear O-. … Dear R-. … He also has (I do not know why I write this
“also,” but I write as it comes from my pen), he too has something which is
not entirely clear in him. Yet I, he and O-, we are a triangle; I confess, not
an isosceles triangle but a triangle nevertheless. We, to speak in the
language of our ancestors (perhaps to you, my planetary readers, this is the
more comprehensible language) we are a family. And one feels so good at
times, when one is able for a short while, at least, to close oneself within a
firm triangle, to close oneself away from anything that. …
 RECORD NINE

Liturgy—Iambus—The cast-iron hand.

A solemn bright day. On such days one forgets one’s weaknesses,

inexactitudes, illnesses, and everything is crystalline and imperturbable like
our new glass. …
The Plaza of the Cube. Sixty-six imposing concentric circles—stands.
Sixty-six rows of quiet serene faces. Eyes reflecting the shining of the
sky—or perhaps it is the shining of the United State. Red like blood, are the
flowers—the lips of the women. Like soft garlands the faces of the children
in the first rows, nearest the place of action. Profound, austere, gothic
silence.
To judge by the descriptions which reach us from the ancients, they felt
somewhat like this during their “Church services,” but they served their
nonsensical unknown god; we serve our rational god, whom we most
thoroughly know. Their god gave them nothing but eternal, torturing
seeking; our god gives us absolute truth, that is, he has rid us of any kind of
doubt. Their god did not invent anything cleverer than sacrificing oneself,
nobody knows what for; we bring to our god, The United State, a quiet,
rational, carefully thought-out sacrifice.
Yes, it was a solemn liturgy for the United State, a reminiscence of the
great days, years, of the Two Hundred Years’ War—a magnificent
celebration of the victory of all over one, of the sum over the individual!
That one stood on the steps of the Cube which was filled with sunlight. A
white, no not even white, but already colorless glass face, lips of glass. And
only the eyes—thirsty, swallowing, black holes leading into that dreadful
world from which he was only a few minutes away. The golden badge with
the number already had been taken off. His hands were tied with a red
ribbon. (A symbol of ancient custom. The explanation of it is that in the old
times when this sort of thing was not done in the name of the United State,
the convicted naturally considered that they had the right to resist, hence
their hands were usually bound with chains.)
On the top of the Cube, next to the Machine, the motionless, metallic
figure of him whom we call the Well-Doer. One could not see his face from
below. All one could see was that it was bounded by austere, magnificent,
square lines. And his hands. … Did you ever notice how sometimes in a
photograph the hands, if they were too near the camera, come out
enormous? They then compel your attention, overshadow everything else.
Those hands of his, heavy hands, quiet for the time being, were stony
hands—it seemed the knees on which they rested must have had pains to
bear their weight.
Suddenly one of those hands rose slowly. A slow cast-iron gesture;
obeying the will of the lifted hand, a Number came out on the platform. It
was one of the State poets, whose fortunate lot it was to crown our
celebration with his verses.
Divine iambic brass verses thundered over the many stands. They dealt
with the man, who, his reason lost and lips like glass, stood on the steps and
waited for the logical consequences of his own insane deeds.
… A blaze. … Buildings were swaying in those iambic lines, and
sprinkling upward their liquified golden substance, they broke and fell. The
green trees were scorched, their sap slowly ran out and they remained
standing like black crosses, like skeletons. Then appeared Prometheus (that
meant us).

“… he harnessed fire
With machines and steel
And fettered chaos with Law. …”

The world was renovated; it became like steel—a sun of steel, trees of
steel, men of steel. Suddenly an insane man, “Unchained the fire and set it
free,” and again the world had perished. … Unfortunately I have a bad
memory for poetry, but one thing I am sure of: one could not choose more
instructive or more beautiful parables.
Another slow, heavy gesture of the cast-iron hand and another poet
appeared on the steps of the Cube. I stood up! Impossible! But … thick
negro lips—it was he. Why did he not tell me that he was to be invested
with such high. … His lips trembled; they were gray. Oh, I certainly
understood; to be face to face with the Well-Doer, face to face with the
hosts of Guardians! Yet one should not allow oneself to be so upset.
Swift sharp verses like an axe. … They told about an unheard-of crime,
about sacrilegious poems in which the Well-Doer was called. … But no, I do
not dare to repeat. …
R-13 was pale when he finished, and looking at no one (I did not expect
such bashfulness of him) he descended and sat down. For an infinitesimal
fraction of a second I saw right beside him somebody’s face—a sharp, black
triangle—and instantly I lost it; my eyes, thousands of eyes, were directed
upward toward the Machine. Then—again the superhuman, cast-iron,
gesture of the hand.
Swayed by an unknown wind the criminal moved; one step … one
more, … then the last step in his life. His face was turned to the sky, his
head thrown backward—he was on his last.— … Heavy, stony like fate, the
Well-Doer went around the machine, put his enormous hand on the lever. …
Not a whisper, not a breath around; all eyes were upon that hand. … What
crushing, scorching power one must feel to be the tool, to be the resultant of
hundreds of thousands of wills! How great his lot!
Another second. The hand moved down, switching in the current. The
lightning-sharp blade of the electric ray. … A faint crack like a shiver, in the
tubes of the Machine. … The prone body, covered with a light
phosphorescent smoke; then suddenly, under the eyes of all, it began to
melt—to melt, to dissolve with terrible speed. And then nothing; just a pool
of chemically pure water which only a moment ago was so red and pulsated
in his heart. …
All this was simple; all of us were familiar with the phenomenon,
dissociation of matter—yes, the splitting of the atoms of the human body!
Yet every time we witnessed it, it seemed a miracle; it was a symbol of the
superhuman power of the Well-Doer.
Above, in front of Him, the burning faces of the female numbers, mouths
half open from emotion, flowers swaying in the wind.2 According to
custom, ten women were covering with flowers the unif of the Well-Doer,
which was still wet with spray. With the magnificent step of a supreme
priest He slowly descended, slowly passed between the rows of stands; and
like tender white branches there rose toward Him the arms of the women;
and, millions like one, our tempestuous cheers! Then cheers in honor of the
Guardians, who all unseen, were present among us. … Who knows, perhaps
the fancy of the ancient man foresaw them centuries ahead, when he created
the gentle and formidable “guardian-angels” assigned to each one from the
day of his birth?
Yes, there was in our celebration something of the ancient religions,
something purifying like a storm. … You whose lot it may be to read this,
are you familiar with such emotions? I am sorry for you if you are not.
 RECORD TEN

A letter—A manhunt—Hairy I.

Yesterday was for me a kind of filter-paper which chemists use for filtering
their solutions (all suspended and superfluous particles remain on the
paper). This morning I went downstairs all purified and distilled,
transparent.
Downstairs in the hall the controller sat at a small table, constantly
looking at her watch and recording the Numbers who were leaving. Her
name is U- … well, I prefer not to give her Number, for I fear I may not
write kindly about her. Although, as a matter of fact, she is a very
respectable, mature woman. The only thing I do not like in her is that her
cheeks fold down a little like gills of a fish (although I do not see anything
wrong in this appearance). She scratched with her pen and I saw on the
page “D-503”—and suddenly, splash! an inkblot. No sooner did I open my
mouth to call her attention to that, than she raised her head and blotted me
with an inky smile. “There is a letter for you. You will receive it, dear. Yes,
yes, you will.”
I knew a letter, after she had read it, must go through the Bureau of the
Guardians (I think it is unnecessary to explain in detail this natural order of
things); I would receive it not later than twelve o’clock. But that tiny smile
confused me; the drop of ink clouded the transparency of the distilled
solution. At the dock of the Integral I could not concentrate; I even made a
mistake in my calculations—that never happened to me before.
At twelve o’clock, again the rosy-brown fish-gills’ smile, and at last the
letter was in my hands. I cannot say why I did not read it right there, but I
put it in my pocket and ran into my room. I opened it and glanced it over
and … and sat down. It was the official notification advising me that
Number I-330 had had me assigned to her and that today at twenty-one
o’clock, I was to go to her. Her address was given.
“No! After all that happened! After I showed her frankly my attitude
toward her! Besides, how could she know that I did not go to the Bureau of
the Guardians? She had no way of knowing that I was ill and could not. …
And despite all this. …”
A dynamo was whirling and buzzing in my head. Buddha … yellow …
lilies-of-the-valley … rosy crescent. … Besides—besides, O- wanted to
come to see me today! I am sure she would not believe (how could one
believe), that I had absolutely nothing to do with the matter, that … I am
sure also that we (O- and I) will have a difficult, foolish and absolutely
illogical conversation. No, anything but that! Let the situation solve itself
mechanically; I shall send her a copy of this official communication.
While I was hastily putting the paper in my pocket, I noticed my terrible
apelike hand. I remembered how that day during our walk, she took my
hand and looked at it. Is it possible that she really … that she. …
A quarter to twenty-one. A white northern night. Everything was glass—
greenish. But it was a different kind of glass, not like ours, not genuine but
very breakable—a thin glass shell and within that shell things were flying,
whirling, buzzing. I should not have been surprised if suddenly the cupola
of the auditorium had risen in slow, rolling clouds of smoke; or if the ripe
moon had sent an inky smile—like that one at the little table this morning;
or if in all the houses suddenly all the curtains had been lowered and behind
the curtains. …
I felt something peculiar; my ribs were like iron bars that interfered,
decidedly interfered, with my heart, giving it too little space. I stood at a
glass door on which were the golden letters I-330; I-330 sat at the table with
her back to me; she was writing something. I stepped in.
“Here. …” I held out the pink check, “… I received the notification this
noon and here I am!”
“How punctual you are! Just a minute please, may I? Sit down. I shall
finish in a minute.”
She lowered her eyes to the letter. What had she there, behind her
lowered curtains? What would she say? What would she do in a second?
How to learn it? How to calculate it, since she comes from beyond, from
the wild ancient land of dreams? I looked at her in silence. My ribs were
iron bars. The space for the heart was too small. … When she speaks her
face is like a swiftly revolving, glittering wheel; you cannot see the separate
bars. But at that moment the wheel was motionless. I saw a strange
combination: dark eyebrows running right to the temples—a sharp,
mocking triangle; and still another dark triangle with its apex upward—two
deep wrinkles from the nose to the angles of the mouth. And these two
triangles somehow contradicted each other. They gave the whole face that
disagreeable, irritating X, or cross; a face obliquely marked by a cross.
The wheel started to turn; its bars blurred.
“So you did not go to the Bureau of Guardians after all?”
“I did … I did not feel well … I could not.”
“Yes? I thought so; something must have prevented you, matters little
what (sharp teeth—a smile). But now you are in my hands. You remember:
‘Any Number who within forty-eight hours fails to report to the Bureau is
considered. …’”
My heart banged so forcibly that the iron bars bent. If I were not
sitting … like a little boy, how stupid! I was caught like a little boy and
stupidly I kept silent. I felt I was in a net; neither my legs nor my arms. …
She stood up and stretched herself lazily. She pressed the button and the
curtains on all four walls fell with a slight rustle. I was cut off from the rest
of the world, alone with her.
She was somewhere behind me, near the closet door. The unif was
rustling, falling. I was listening, all listening. I remembered—no, it
glistened in my mind for one hundredth of a second—I once had to
calculate the curve of a street membrane of a new type. (These membranes
are handsomely decorated and are placed on all the avenues, registering all
street conversations for the Bureau of Guardians.) I remembered a rosy
concave, trembling membrane—a strange being consisting of one organ
only, an ear. I was at that moment such a membrane.
Now the “click” of the snap-button at her collar, at her breast, and …
lower. The glassy silk rustled over her shoulders and knees, over the floor. I
heard—and this was clearer than actual seeing—I heard how one foot
stepped out of the grayish-blue heap of silk, then the other. … Soon I’d hear
the creak of the bed and …
The tensely stretched membrane trembled and registered the silence—no,
the sharp hammer-like blows of the heart against the iron bars and endless
pauses between beats. And I heard, saw, how she, behind me hesitated for a
second, thinking. The door of the closet. … It slammed; again silk … silk. …
 “Well, all right.”
I turned around. She was dressed in a saffron-yellow dress of an ancient
style. This was a thousand times worse than if she had not been dressed at
all. Two sharp points, through the thin tissue glowing with rosiness, two
burning embers piercing through ashes; two tender, round knees. …
She was sitting in a low armchair. In front of her on a small square table,
I noticed a bottle filled with something poisonously green and two small
glasses on thin legs. In the corner of her mouth she had a very thin paper
tube; she was ejecting smoke formed by the burning of that ancient
smoking substance whose name I do not now remember.
The membrane was still vibrating. Within the sledgehammer was
pounding the red-hot iron bars of my chest. I heard distinctly every blow of
the hammer, and … what if she too heard it?
But she continued to produce smoke very calmly; calmly she looked at
me; and nonchalantly she flicked ashes on the pink check!
With as much self-control as possible I asked, “If you still feel that way,
why did you have me assigned to you? And why did you make me come
here?”
As if she had not heard at all, she poured some of the green liquid from
the bottle into a small glass and sipped it.
“Wonderful liqueur! Want some?”
Then I understood; alcohol! Like lightning there came to memory what I
saw yesterday: the stony hand of the Well-Doer, the unbearable blade of the
electric ray; there on the Cube, the head thrown backward, the stretched-out
body! I shivered.
“Please listen,” I said, “You know, do you not, that anyone who poisons
himself with nicotine, more particularly with alcohol, is severely treated by
the United State?”
Dark brows raised high to the temples, the sharp mocking triangle.
“ ‘It is more reasonable to annihilate a few than to allow many to poison
themselves. … And degeneration,’… etc. … This is true to the point of
indecency.”
“Indecency?”
“Yes. To let out into the street such a group of bald-headed naked little
truths. Only imagine please. Imagine, say, that persistent admirer of mine,
S-, well, you know him. Then imagine: if he should discard the deception of
clothes and appear in public in his true form … oh!” She laughed. But I
clearly saw her lower, sorrowful triangle; two deep grooves from the nose
to the mouth. And for some reason these grooves made me think: that
double-curved being, half-hunched, with winglike ears—he embraced her?
her, such … Oh!
Naturally, I try now merely to express my abnormal feelings of that
moment. Now, as I write, I understand perfectly that all this is as it should
be; that he, S-4711, like any other honest Number has a perfect right to the
joys of life and that it would be unjust. … But I think the point is quite clear.
I-330 laughed a long, strange laugh. Then she cast a look at me, into me.
“The most curious thing is that I am not in the least afraid of you. You are
such a dear, I am sure of it! You would never think of going to the Bureau
and reporting that I drink liqueurs and smoke. You will be sick or busy, or I
don’t know what. … Furthermore, I am sure you will drink this charming
poison with me.”
What an impertinent, mocking tone! I felt definitely that in a moment I
should hate her. (Why in a moment? In fact I hated her all the time.)
I-330 turned over the little glass of green poison straight into her mouth.
Then she stood up, and all rosy through the translucent saffron-yellow
tissue, she made a few steps and stopped behind my chair. … Suddenly her
arms were about my neck … her lips grew into mine, no, even somewhere
much deeper, much more terribly. … I swear all this was very unexpected
for me. That is why perhaps … for I could not (at this moment I see clearly)
I could not myself have the desire to. …
Unbearably sweet lips. (I suppose it was the taste of the liqueur.) It was
as though burning poison were being poured into me, and more and
more. …
I tore away from the earth and began revolving as an independent
planet—down—down—following an uncalculable curve. …
What happened next I am able to describe only in an approximate way,
only by way of more or less corresponding analogies.
It never occurred to me before but it is true: we who live on the earth, we
are always walking over a seething red sea of fire which is hidden in the
womb of the earth. We never think of it. But imagine the ground under our
feet suddenly transformed into a thin glass shell; suddenly we should
behold … !
I became glass-like and saw within myself. There were two selves in me.
One, the former D-503, Number D-503; and the other. … Before, that other
used only to show his hairy paws from time to time, but now the whole
other self left his shell. That shell was breaking, and in a moment. …
Grasping with all my strength the last straw (the arms of the chair), I
asked loudly (so as to hear my first self), “Where, where did you get this
poison?”
“Oh, this? A physician, one of my. …”
“ ‘One of my! one of my’ what?” And my other self jumped up suddenly
and yelled: “I won’t allow it! I want no one but me. … I shall kill anyone
who. … Because I. … You.” … I saw my other self grasp her rudely with his
hairy paws, tear the silk, and put his teeth in her flesh! … I remember
exactly, his teeth! …
I do not remember how, but I-330 slipped away and I saw her
straightened, her head raised high, her eyes overlain by that cursed
impenetrable curtain. She stood leaning with her back against the closet
door and listening to me.
I remember I was on the floor; I embraced her limbs, kissed her knees
and cried supplicatingly, “At once, right away, right away.”
Sharp teeth. … The sharp mocking triangle of the brows. … She bent over
and in silence unbuttoned my badge.
“Yes, yes, dear—dear.”
I began hastily to remove my unif. But I-330, silent as before, lifted my
badge to my eyes, showing me the clock upon it. It was twenty-two-twenty-
five.
I became cold. I knew what it meant to be out in the street after twenty-
two-thirty. My insanity disappeared at once. I was again I. I saw clearly one
thing: I hated her, hated her, hated— … Without saying goodbye, without
looking back, I ran out of the room. Hurriedly trying to fasten the badge
back in its place, I ran down the stairs (I was afraid lest someone notice me
in the elevator), and jumped out into a deserted street.
Everything was in its place; life so simple, ordinary, orderly. Glittering
glass houses, pale glass sky, a greenish, motionless night. But under that
cool glass something wild, something red and hairy, was silently seething. I
was gasping for breath but I continued to run, so as not to be late.
Suddenly I felt that my badge which I had hurriedly pinned on, was
detaching itself; it came off and fell to the sidewalk. I bent over to pick it up
and in the momentary silence I heard somebody’s steps. I turned. Someone
small and hunched was disappearing around the corner. At least so it
seemed. I started to run as fast as I could. The wind whistled in my ears. At
the entrance of my house I stopped and looked at the clock; one minute to
twenty-two-thirty! I listened; nobody behind. It was my foolish
imagination, the effect of the poison.
The night was full of torture. My bed seemed to lift itself under me, then
to fall again, then up again! I used autosuggestion: “At night all the
Numbers must sleep; sleeping at night is a duty just like working during the
day. To sleep at night is necessary for the next day’s work. Not to sleep at
night is criminal.” Yet I could not sleep—I could not. I was perishing! I was
unable to fulfill my duties to the United State! I. …
 RECORD ELEVEN

No, I can’t; let it be without headings!

Evening. It is somewhat foggy. The sky is covered with a milky-golden

tissue, and one cannot see what is there, beyond, on the heights. The
ancients “knew” that the greatest, bored skeptic—their God, lived there. We
know that crystalline, blue, naked, indecent Nothing is there. I do not know
any more what is there. I have learned too many things of late. Knowledge,
self-confident knowledge which is sure that it is faultless, is faith. I had firm
faith in myself; I believed that I knew all about myself. But then. … I look
in the mirror. And for the first time in my life, yes, for the first time in my
life, I see clearly, precisely, consciously and with surprise, I see myself as
some “him!” I am “he.” Frowning, black, straight brows; between them like
a scar, there is a vertical wrinkle. (Was there that wrinkle before?) Steel
gray eyes encircled by the shadow of a sleepless night. And behind that
steel … I understand; I never before knew what there was behind that steel.
From there (this “there” is at once so near and so infinitely distant!) I look
at myself—at “him.” And I know surely that “he” with his straight brows is
a stranger, that I meet him here for the first time in my life. The real I is not
he.
No. Period. All this is nonsense. And all these foolish emotions are only
delirium, the result of last night’s poisoning. … Poisoning with what? With
a sip of that green poison or with her? It matters little. I write all this merely
in order to demonstrate how strangely the precise and sharp human reason
may become confused. This reason, strong enough to make infinity which
the ancients feared so much, understandable by means of. … The switch
buzzes, “Number R-13.” Well, I am even glad; alone I should. …
 Twenty minutes later:

On the plane of this paper, in a world of two dimensions, these lines follow
each other, but in another world they. … I am losing the sense for figures. …
Twenty minutes! Perhaps two hundred or two hundred thousand! …
It seems so strange, quietly, deliberately, measuring every word, to write
down my adventure with R-. Imagine yourself sitting down at your own
bed, crossing your legs, watching curiously how you yourself shrivel in the
very same bed. My mental state is similar to that.
When R-13 came in I was perfectly quiet and normal. I began with
sincere admiration to tell him how wonderfully he succeeded in versifying
the death sentence of that insane man, and that his poem more than
anything else had smothered and annihilated the transgressor of the law.
“More than that,” I said, “if I were ordered to prepare a mathematical
draught of the Machine of the Well-Doer, I should undoubtedly—
undoubtedly, put on that draught some of your verses!”—Suddenly I saw
R-’s eyes becoming more and more opaque, his lips acquiring a gray tint.
“What is the matter?”
“What?—Well. … Merely that I am dead sick of it; everybody keeps on:
‘the death-sentence, the death-sentence!’ I want to hear no more of it! You
understand? I do not want. …” He became serious, rubbing his neck—that
little valise filled with luggage which I cannot understand. A silence. There!
He found something in that little valise of his, removed it, unwrapped it,
spread it out; his eyes became covered with the varnish of laughter. He
began:
“I am writing something for your Integral. Yes. … I am!” He was himself
again; bubbling, sprinkling lips; words splashing like a fountain.
“You see, it is the ancient legend of paradise.” (p like a fountain.) “That
legend referred to us of today, did it not? Yes. Only think of it, think of it a
moment! There were two in paradise and the choice was offered to them:
happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. No other choice.
Tertium non datur. They, fools that they were, chose freedom. Naturally,
they longed for centuries afterwards for fetters, for the fetters of yore. This
was the meaning of their world-weariness, Weltschmerz. For centuries! And
only we found a way to regain happiness. … No, listen, follow me! The
ancient god and we, side by side at the same table! Yes, we helped god
definitely and finally to defeat the devil. It was he, the devil, who lead
people to transgression, to taste pernicious freedom, he the cunning
serpent? And we came along, planted a boot on his head and … squash!
Done with him! Paradise again! We returned to the simple-mindedness and
innocence of Adam and Eve. No more meddling with good and evil and all
that; everything is simple again, heavenly, childishly simple! The Well-
Doer, The Machine, The Cube, the giant Gas Bell, The Guardians—all
these are good. All this is magnificent, beautiful, noble, lofty, crystalline,
pure. For all this preserves our non-freedom, that is, our happiness. In our
place those ancients would indulge in discussions, deliberations, etc. They
would break their heads trying to make out what was moral or unmoral. But
we. … Well, in short, these are the highlights of my little paradise poem.
What do you think of it? And above all the style is most solemn, pious.
Understand me? Nice little idea, is it not? Do you understand?”
Of course I understood. I remember my thoughts at that moment: “his
appearance is nonsensical and lacking in symmetry, yet what an orderly-
working mind he has!” This made him dear to me, that is to the real me. (I
still insist that I of before is the real one; my I of late is, certainly, only an
illness.)
Apparently R- read my thought in my face; he put his hand on my
shoulders and laughed: “Oh you! … Adam! By the way, about Eve. …” He
searched for something in his pockets, took out a little book, turned over a
few leaves and said, “For the day-after-tomorrow—oh, no, two days from
now—O-90 has a pink check on you. How about it? … As before? … You
want her to?”
“Of course, of course!”
“All right then, I’ll tell her. You see she herself is very bashful. … What a
funny story! You see, for me she has only a pink-check affection, but for
you! … And you, you did not even come to tell us how a fourth member
sneaked into our triangle! Who is it? Repent, sinner! Come on!”
A curtain rose inside me; rustle of silk, green bottle, lips. … Without any
reason whatever I exclaimed (oh, why didn’t I restrain myself at that
moment?), “Tell me, R-, did you ever have the opportunity to try nicotine or
alcohol?”
R- sucked in his lips, looked at me from under his brows. I distinctly
heard his thoughts: “Friend though he is, yet. …” And he answered:
“What shall I say? Strictly speaking, no. But I know a woman. …”
“I-330?” I cried.
 “What! You? You too?” R- was full of laughter; he chuckled, ready to
splash over.
My mirror was hanging in such a way that in order to see R- clearly I had
to turn and look across the table. From my armchair I could see now only
my own forehead and eyebrows. Then I, the real I, suddenly saw in the
mirror a broken, quivering line of brow; I, the real I, heard suddenly a wild
disgusting cry: “What? What does that ‘also’ mean? What does that ‘also’
mean? I demand. …”
Widely parted negro lips. … Eyes bulging. I (the real I) grasped my other
wild, hairy, heavily breathing self forcibly. I (the real I) said to him, to R-,
“In the name of the Well-Doer, please forgive me. I am very sick; I don’t
sleep; I do not know what is the matter with me.”
A swiftly passing smile appeared on the thick lips.
“Yes, yes, I understand, I understand. I am familiar with all this,
theoretically, of course. Goodbye.”
At the door he turned around like a little black ball, came back to the
table and put a book upon it. “This is my latest book. I came to bring it to
you. Almost forgot. Goodbye.” (b like a splash.) The little ball rolled out.
I am alone. Or, to be more exact, I am tête-à-tête with that other self. I sit
in the armchair and having crossed my legs, I watch curiously from some
indefinite “there,” how I (myself) am shrivelling in my bed!
Why, oh, why is it, that for three years R-, O-, and I were so friendly
together and now suddenly—one word only about that other female, about
I-330, and. … Is it possible that that insanity called love and jealousy does
exist not only in the idiotic books of the ancients? What seems most strange
is that I, I! … Equations, formulae, figures, and suddenly this! I can’t
understand it, I can’t! Tomorrow I shall go to R- and tell him. … No, it isn’t
true; I shall not go; neither tomorrow nor day after tomorrow, nor ever. … I
can’t, I do not want to see him. This is the end. Our triangle is broken up.
I am alone. It is evening. There is a light fog. The sky is covered by a
thin milky-golden tissue. If I only knew what is there—higher. If I only
knew who I am. Which I am I?
 RECORD TWELVE

The delimitation of the infinite—Angel—

Meditations on poetry.

I continue to believe that I shall recover, that I may recover. I slept very
well. No dreams or any other symptoms of disease. Dear O-90 will come
tomorrow. Everything will again be simple, regular and limited like a circle.
I am not afraid of this word “limited.” The work of the highest faculty of
man, judgment, is always directed toward the constant limiting of the
infinite, toward the breaking up of the infinite into comfortably digestible
portions—differentials. This is what gives divine beauty to my element,
mathematics. And it is exactly this beauty that that other female lacks. But
this last thought of mine is only an accidental mental association.
These thoughts swarmed in my mind while I was listening to the regular,
rhythmic sounds of the underground railway. Silently I followed the rhythm
of its wheels and recited to myself R-’s verses (from the book which he
gave me yesterday), and I felt that behind me someone was leaning over my
shoulder and looking at the open pages. I did not turn around but with the
corner of my eye I noticed pink ears, spread like wings, the double-
curved … like the letter. … It was he, but I did not want to disturb him. I
feigned not to have noticed him. How he came in, I do not know. I did not
see him when I got into the car.
This incident, insignificant in itself, had an especially good effect upon
me; it invigorated me, I should say. It is pleasant to feel that somebody’s
penetrating eye is watching you from behind your shoulder, lovingly
guarding you from making the most minute mistake, from the most minute
incorrect step. It may seem to you too sentimental but I see in all this the
materialization of the dream of the ancients about a Guardian-Angel. How
many things about which the ancients had only dreams, are materialized in
our life!
At the moment when I became aware of the presence of the Guardian-
Angel behind me I was enjoying a poem entitled “Happiness.” I think I am
not mistaken when I say that it is a piece of rare beauty and depth of
thought. Here are the first four lines:

“Two times two—eternal lovers;

Inseparable in passion four …
Most flaming lovers in the world,
Eternally welded, two times two.”

And the rest is in the same vein: on the wisdom and the eternal happiness
of the multiplication table. Every poet is inevitably a Columbus. America
existed before Columbus for ages, but only Columbus found it. The
multiplication table existed before R-13 for ages, but only R-13 could find
in the virginal forest of figures a new Eldorado. Is it not true? Is there any
happiness more wise and cloudless in this wonderful world? Steel may rust.
The ancient god created the ancient man, i.e., the man capable of mistakes,
ergo the ancient god himself made a mistake. The multiplication table is
more wise and more absolute than the ancient god, for the multiplication
table never (do you understand—never) makes mistakes! There are no more
fortunate and happy people than those who live according to the correct,
eternal laws of the multiplication table. No hesitation! No errors! There is
but one truth, and there is but one path to it; and that truth is: four, and that
path is: two times two. Would it not seem preposterous for these happily
multiplied twos suddenly to begin thinking of some foolish kind of
freedom? i.e. (is it not clear?) of a mistake? It seems undeniable, axiomatic,
that R-13 knows how to grasp the most fundamental, the most. …
At that moment again I felt (first near the back of my head, then on my
left ear) the warm, tender breath of the Guardian-Angel. He apparently
noticed that the book on my lap had long been closed and that my thoughts
were somewhere very far. … Well, I am ready this minute to spread before
him the pages of my brain. This gives one such a feeling of tranquility and
joy. I remember I even turned around and gazed long and questioningly into
his eyes; but either he did not understand, or he did not want to understand
me. He did not ask me anything. … The only thing left for me is to relate
everything to you, my unknown readers. You are to me now as dear and as
near and as far out of reach as he was at that moment.
This was my way of thinking: from the part to the whole—R-13 is the
part; the whole is our Institution of State Poets and Authors. I thought: how
was it that the ancients did not notice the utter absurdity of their prose and
poetry? The gigantic, magnificent power of the artistic word was spent by
them in vain. It is really droll; anybody wrote whatever happened to come
into his head! It was as foolish as the fact that in the days of the ancients the
ocean blindly splashed at the shore for twenty-four hours without
interruption or use. The millions of kilogram-meters of energy which were
hidden in the waves were used only for the stimulation of sweethearts! We
obtained electricity from the amorous whisper of the waves! We made a
domestic animal out of that sparkling, foaming, rabid one! And in the same
manner we domesticated and harnessed the wild element of poetry. Now
poetry is no longer the unpardonable whistling of nightingales but a State
Service! Poetry is a commodity.
Our famous “Mathematical Norms”! Without them in our schools, how
could we love so sincerely and dearly our four rules of arithmetic? And
“Thorns!” This is a classical image: the Guardians are thorns about a rose;
thorns that guard our tender State-Flower from coarse hands. Whose heart
could resist, could remain indifferent to see and hear the lips of our children
recite like a prayer: “A bad boy caught the rose with his hand but the thorn
of steel pricked him like a needle; the bad boy cried and ran home,” etc.,
etc. And the “Daily Odes to the Well-Doer!” Who, having read them, will
not bow piously before the unselfish service of that Number of all
Numbers? And the dreadful red “Flowers of Court Sentences!” And the
immortal tragedy, “Those Who Come Late to Work!” And the popular
book, “Stanzas on Sex-Hygiene!”
Our whole life in all its complexity and beauty is thus stamped forever in
the gold of words. Our poets do not soar any longer in the unknown; they
have descended to earth and they march with us, keeping step to the
accompaniment of our austere and mechanical March of the musical State
Tower. Their lyre is the morning rubbing-sound of the electric toothbrushes,
and the threatening crack of the electric sparks coming from the Machine of
the Well-Doer, and the magnificent echo of the Hymn of the United State,
and the intimate ringing of the crystalline, shining washbasins, and the
stimulating rustle of the falling curtains, and the joyous voices of the newest
cookbooks, and the almost imperceptible whisper of the street
membranes. …
Our gods are here, below. They are with us in the Bureau, in the kitchen,
in the shops, in the restrooms. The gods have become like us, ergo we have
become like gods. And we shall come to you, my unknown readers on
another planet, we shall come to you to make your life as godlike, as
rational and as correct as ours. …
 RECORD THIRTEEN

Fog—Thou—A decidedly absurd adventure.

I awoke at dawn. The rose-colored firmament looked into my eyes.

Everything was beautiful, round. “O-90 is to come tonight. Surely I am
healthy again.” I smiled and fell asleep. The Morning Bell! I got up;
everything looked different. Through the glass of the ceiling, through the
walls, nothing could be seen but fog—fog everywhere, strange clouds,
becoming heavier and nearer; the boundary between earth and sky
disappeared. Everything seemed to be floating and thawing and falling. …
Not a thing to hold to. No houses to be seen; they all were dissolved in the
fog like crystals of salt in water. On the sidewalks and inside the houses
dark figures like suspended particles in a strange milky solution, were
hanging, below, above—up to the tenth floor. Everything seemed to be
covered with smoke, as though a fire were somewhere raging noiselessly.
At eleven-forty-five exactly (I looked at the clock particularly at that time
to catch the figures, to save at least the figures) at eleven-forty-five, just
before leaving, according to our Table of Hours, to go and occupy myself
with physical labor, I dropped into my room for a moment. Suddenly the
telephone rang. A voice—a long needle slowly penetrating my heart:
“Oh, you are at home? I am very glad! Wait for me at the corner. We
shall go together. … Where? Well, you’ll see.”
“You know perfectly well that I am going to work now.”
“You know perfectly well that you’ll do as I say! Au revoir. In two
minutes! …”
I stood at the corner. I had to wait to try to make clear to her that only the
United State directs me, not she. “You’ll do as I say!” How sure she is! One
hears it in her voice. And what if … ?
 Unifs, dull gray as if woven of damp fog would appear for a second at
my side and then soundlessly redissolve. I was unable to turn my eyes away
from the clock. … I seemed myself to have become that sharp, quivering
hand which marked the seconds. Ten, eight minutes … three … two minutes
to twelve. … Of course! I was late! Oh, how I hated her, yet I had to wait to
prove that I. …
A red line in the milky whiteness of the fog—like blood, like a wound
made by a sharp knife—her lips.
“I made you wait, I think? And now you are late for your work anyway?”
“How … ? Well, yes, it is too late now.”
I glanced at her lips in silence. All women are lips, lips only. Some are
rosy lips, tense and round, a ring, a tender fence separating one from the
world. But these! A second ago they were not here, and suddenly … the
slash of a knife! I seemed to see even the dripping sweet blood. …
She came nearer. She leaned gently against my shoulder; we became one.
Something streamed from her into me. I felt, I knew, it should be so. Every
fibre of my nervous system told me this, every hair on my head, every
painfully sweet heartbeat. And what a joy it was to submit to what should
be. A fragment of iron-ore probably feels the same joy of submission to
precise, inevitable law, when it clings to a loadstone. The same joy is in a
stone which thrown aloft, hesitates a little at the height of its flight and then
rushes down to the ground. It is the same with a man when in his final
convulsion he takes a last deep breath and dies.
I remember I smiled vaguely and said for no reason at all, “Fog … very.”
“Thou lovest fog, dost thou?”
This ancient, long-forgotten thou—the thou of a master to his slave—
penetrated me slowly, sharply. … Yes, I was a slave. … This too was
inevitable, was good.
“Yes, good …” I said aloud to myself, and then to her, “I hate fog. I am
afraid of fog.”
“Then you love it. For if you fear it because it is stronger than you, hate it
because you fear it, you love it. For you cannot subject it to yourself. One
loves only the things one cannot conquer.”
“Yes, that is so. That is why … that is precisely why I. …”
We were walking—as one. Somewhere beyond the fog the sun was
singing in a faint tone, gradually swelling, filling the air with tension and
with pearl and gold and rose and red. … The whole world seemed to be one
unembraceable woman, and we who were in her body were not yet born;
we were ripening in joy. It was clear to me, absolutely clear, that everything
existed only for me: the sun, the fog, the gold—for me. I did not ask where
we were going; what did it matter? It was pleasure to walk, to ripen, to
become stronger and more tense. …
“Here …” I-330 stopped at a door. “It so happens that today there is
someone on duty who … I told you about him in the Ancient House.”
Carefully guarding the forces ripening within me, I read the sign:
“Medical Bureau.” Automatically only I understood.
… A glass room, filled with golden fog; shelves of glass, colored bottles,
jars, electric wires, bluish sparks in tubes; and a male Number—a very
thinly flattened man. He might have been cut out of a sheet of paper.
Wherever he was, whichever way he turned, he showed only a profile, a
sharply pointed, glittering blade of a nose and lips like scissors.
I could not hear what I-330 told him; I merely saw her lips when she was
talking; and I felt that I was smiling, irrepressibly, blissfully. The scissors-
like lips glittered and the doctor said, “Yes, yes, I see. A most dangerous
disease. I know of nothing more dangerous.” And he laughed. With his thin,
flat, papery hand he wrote something on a piece of paper and gave it to
I-330; he wrote on another piece of paper and handed it over to me. He had
given us certificates, testifying that we were ill, that we were unable to go
to work. Thus I stole my work from the United State; I was a thief; I
deserved to be put beneath the Machine of the Well-Doer. Yet I was
indifferent to this thought; it was as distant from me as though it were
written in a novel. I took the certificate without an instant’s hesitation. I, all
my being, my eyes, my lips, my hands … knew it was as it should be.
At the corner, from a half empty garage we took an aero. I-330 took the
wheel as she had done before, pressed the starter and we tore away from the
earth. We soared. Behind us the golden haze; the Sun. The thin, blade-like
profile of the doctor seemed to me suddenly so dear, so beloved. Formerly I
knew everything was revolving around the Sun. Now I knew everything
was revolving around me. Slowly, blissfully, with half-closed eyes. …
At the gate of the Ancient House we found the same old woman. What a
dear mouth, with lips grown together and ray-like wrinkles around it!
Probably those lips have remained grown together all these days; but now
they parted and smiled:
 “Ah! you mischievous girl, you! Work is too much for you? Well, all
right, all right. If anything happens I’ll run up and warn you.”
A heavy, squeaky, opaque door. It closed behind us, and at once my heart
opened painfully, widely, still wider. … My lips … hers. … I drank and
drank from them. I tore myself away; in silence I looked into her widely
open eyes, and then again. …
The room in half dusk. … Blue and saffron-yellow lights, dark green
morocco leather, the golden smile of Buddha, a wide mahogany bed, a
glimmer of mirrors. … And my dream of a few days before became so
comprehensible, so clear to me; everything seemed saturated with the
golden prime-juice of life, and it seemed that I was overflowing with it—
one second more and it would splash out. … Like iron-ore to a loadstone, in
sweet submission to the precise and unchangeable law, inevitably, I clung to
her. … There was no pink check, no counting, no United State; I myself was
no more. Only, drawn together, the tenderly-sharp teeth were there, only her
golden, widely open eyes, and through them I saw deeper, within. … And
silence. … Only somewhere in a corner, thousands of miles away it seemed,
drops of water were dripping from the faucet of the washstand. I was the
Universe!
… And between drops whole epochs, eras, were elapsing. …
I put on my unif and bent over I-330 to draw her into me with my eyes—
for the last time.
“I knew it. … I knew you,” said I-330 in a very low voice. She passed her
hand over her face as though brushing something away; then she arose
brusquely, put on her unif and her usual sharp, bite-like smile.
“Well, my fallen angel … you perished just now, do you know that? No?
You are not afraid? Well, au revoir. You shall go home alone. Well?”
She opened the mirror-door of the cupboard and looking at me over her
shoulder, she waited. I left the room obediently. Yet no sooner had I left the
room than I felt it was urgent that she touch me with her shoulder—only for
one second with her shoulder, nothing more. I ran back into the room,
where (I presumed) she was standing before the mirror, busy buttoning up
her unif; I rushed in and stopped abruptly. I saw (I remember it clearly), I
saw the key in the keyhole of the closet and the ancient ring upon it was
still swinging but I-330 was not there. She could not have left the room as
there was but one exit. … Yet I-330 was not there! I looked around
everywhere. I even opened the cupboard and felt of the different ancient
dresses; nobody. …
I feel somewhat ridiculous, my dear planetary readers, relating to you this
most improbable adventure. But what else can I do since it all happened
exactly as I relate it? Was not the whole day from early morning, full of
improbable adventures? Does it not all resemble the ancient disease of
dream-seeing? If this be so, what does it matter if I relate one absurdity
more, or one less? Moreover, I am convinced that sooner or later I shall be
able to include all these absurdities in some kind of a logical sequence. This
thought comforts me as I hope it will comfort you.
… How overwhelmed I am! If only you knew how overwhelmed!
 RECORD FOURTEEN

“Mine”—Impossible—A cold floor.

I shall continue to relate my adventures of yesterday. I was busy during the

personal hour before retiring to bed, and thus I was unable to record
everything last night. But everything is graven in me; especially, for some
reason, and apparently forever, I shall remember that unbearably cold
floor. …
I was expecting O-90 last evening as it was her regular day. I went
downstairs to the controller on duty to get a permit for the lowering of my
curtains.
“What is the matter with you?” asked the controller. “You seem so
peculiar tonight.”
“I … I am sick.”
Strictly speaking, I told her the truth. I certainly am sick. All this is an
illness. Presently I remembered; of course, my certificate! I touched it in
my pocket. Yes, there it was, rustling. Then all this did happen! It did
actually happen!
I held out the paper to the controller. As I did so, I felt the blood rushing
to my cheeks. Without looking directly at her, I noticed with what an
expression of surprise she gazed at me.
Then at twenty-one-thirty o’clock. … In the room to the left the curtains
were lowered, and in the room to the right my neighbor was sitting over a
book. His head is bald and covered with bulging lumps. His forehead is
enormous—a yellow parabola. I was walking up and down the room—
suffering. How could I meet her, after all that happened! O-90, I mean. I felt
plainly to my right, how the eyes of my neighbor were staring at me. I
clearly saw the wrinkles on his forehead like a row of yellow, illegible
lines; and for some reason I was certain that those lines dealt with me.
A quarter of an hour before twenty-two, the cheerful, rosy whirlwind was
in my room; the firm ring of her rosy arms closed about my neck. Then I
felt how that ring grew weaker and weaker, and then it broke and her arms
dropped. …
“You are not the same, not the same man! You are no longer mine!”
“What curious terminology: ‘mine.’ I never belonged—” I faltered. It
suddenly occurred to me: true, I belonged to no one before, but now—Is it
not clear that now I do not live any more in our rational world but in the
ancient delirious world, in a world of square-root of minus one?
The curtains fell. There to my right my neighbor let his book drop at that
moment from the table to the floor. And through the last narrow space
between the curtain and the floor I saw a yellow hand pick up the book.
Within I felt: “Only to seize that hand with all my power.”
“I thought … I wanted to meet you during the hour for the walk. I
wanted … I must talk to you about so many things, so many. …”
Poor, dear, O-90. Her rosy mouth was a crescent with its horns
downward. But I could not tell her everything, could I, if for no other
reason than that it would make her an accomplice of my crimes? I knew
that she would not have the courage to report me to the Bureau of
Guardians, consequently. …
“My dear O-, I am sick, I am exhausted. I went again today to the
Medical Bureau; but it is nothing, it will pass. But let us not talk about it;—
let us forget it.”
O-90 was lying down. I kissed her gently. I kissed that childish, fluffy
fold at her wrist. Her blue eyes were closed. The pink crescent of her lips
was slowly blooming, more and more like a flower. I kissed her. …
Suddenly I clearly realized how empty I was, how I had given away. …
No, I could not—impossible! I knew I must … but no—impossible! I
ought … but no—impossible! My lips cooled at once. The rosy crescent
trembled, darkened, drew together. O-90 covered herself with the
bedspread, her face hidden in the pillow.
I was sitting near the bed, on the floor. What a desperately cold floor! I
sat there in silence. The terrible cold from the floor rose higher and higher.
There in the blue, silent space among the planets, there probably it is as
cold.
 “Please understand, dear; I did not mean …” I muttered, “With all my
heart, I …”
It was the truth. I, my real self did not mean.— … Yet how could I
express it in words? How could I explain to her that the piece of iron did
not want to. … But that the law is precise, inevitable!
O-90 lifted her face from the pillow and without opening her eyes she
said, “Go away.” But because she was crying she pronounced it “Oo aaa-
ay.” For some reason this absurd detail will not leave my memory.
Penetrated by the cold and torpid, I went out into the hall. I pressed my
forehead against the cold glass. Outside a thin, almost imperceptible film of
haze was spread. “Towards night,” I thought, “it will descend again and
drown the world. How sad a night it will be!”
O-90 passed swiftly by, going toward the elevator. The door slammed.
“Wait a minute!” I screamed. I was frightened.
But the elevator was already groaning, going down—down—down. …
“She robbed me of R-, she robbed me of O-90, yet, yet …
nevertheless. …”
 RECORD FIFTEEN

The bell—The mirror-like sea—I am to burn

eternally.

I was walking upon the dock where the Integral is being built, when the
Second Builder came to meet me. His face as usual was round and white—a
porcelain plate. When he speaks it seems as though he serves you a plate of
something unbearably tasty.
“You chose to be ill, and without the Chief we had an accident, as it
were, yesterday.”
“An accident?”
“Yes, sir. We finished the bell and started to let it down, and imagine! the
men caught a male without a number. How he got in, I cannot make out.
They took him to the Operation Department. Oh, they’ll draw the mystery
out of the fellow there; ‘why’ and ‘how,’ etc. …” He smiled delightedly.
Our best and most experienced physicians work in the Operation
Department under the direct supervision of the Well-Doer himself. They
have all kinds of instruments, but the best of all is the Gas Bell. The
procedure is taken from an ancient experiment of elementary physics: they
used to put a rat under a gas bell and gradually pump out the air; the air
becomes more and more rarified, and … you know the rest.
But our Gas Bell is certainly a more perfect apparatus and it is used in
combination with different gasses. Furthermore, we don’t torture a
defenseless animal as the ancients did; we use it for a higher purpose: to
guard the security of the United State, in other words, the happiness of
millions. About five centuries ago when the work of the Operation
Department was only beginning, there were yet to be found some fools who
compared our Operation Department with the ancient Inquisition. But this is
as absurd as to compare a surgeon performing a tracheotomy with a
highway cutthroat. Both use a knife, perhaps the same kind of a knife, both
do the same thing, viz., cut the throat of a living man, yet one is a well-doer,
the other is a murderer; one is marked plus, the other minus. … All this
becomes perfectly clear in one second, in one turn of our logical wheel, the
teeth of which engage that minus, turn it upward and thus change its aspect.
That other matter is somewhat different; the ring in the door was still
oscillating, apparently the door had just closed, yet she, I-330, had
disappeared; she was not there! The logical wheel could not turn this fact. A
dream? But even now I feel still in my right shoulder that incomprehensible
sweet pain of I-330 near me in the fog, pressing herself against me. “Thou
lovest fog?” Yes, I love the fog too. I love everything and everything
appears to me wonderful, new, tense; everything is so good! …
“So good,” I said aloud.
“Good?” The porcelain eyes bulged out. “What good do you find in that?
If that man without a number contrived to sneak in, it means that there are
others around here, everywhere, all the time, here around the Integral,
they—”
“Whom do you mean by ‘they’?”
“How do I know who? But I sense them, all the time.”
“Have you heard about the new operation which has been invented? I
mean the surgical removal of fancy?” (There really were rumors of late
about something of the sort.)
“No, I haven’t. What has that to do with it?”
“Merely this: if I were you, I should go and ask to have this operation
performed upon me.”
The plate expressed distinctly something lemon-like, sour. Poor fellow!
He took offence if one even hinted that he might possess imagination. Well,
a week ago I too should have taken offence at such a hint. Not so now, for I
know that I have imagination, that is what my illness consists in, and more
than that: I know that it is a wonderful illness—one does not want to be
cured, simply does not want to!
We ascended the glass steps; the world spread itself below us like the
palm of a hand.
You, readers of these records, whoever you be, you have the sun above
you. And if you ever were ill, as I am now, then you know what kind of a
sun there is or may be in the morning; you know that pinkish, lucid, warm
gold; the air itself looks a little pinkish; everything seems permeated by the
tender blood of the sun; everything is alive; the stones seem soft and living;
iron living and warm; people all full of life and smiles. It may be that in a
short while all this will disappear, that in an hour the pinkish blood of the
sun will be drained out, but in the meantime everything is alive. And I see
how something flows and pulsates in the sides of the Integral; I see the
Integral think of its great and lofty future, of the heavy load of inevitable
happiness which it is to carry up there into the heights, to you, unseen ones,
to you who seek eternally and who never find. You shall find! You shall be
happy! You must be happy, and you have now not very long to wait!
The body of the Integral is almost ready; it is an exquisite, oblong
ellipsoid, made of our glass, which is everlasting like gold and flexible like
steel. I watched them within, fixing its transverse ribs and its longitudinal
stringers; in the stern they were erecting the base of the gigantic motor.
Every three seconds the powerful tail of the Integral will eject flame and
gasses into the universal space, and the Integral will soar forward and
higher—like a flaming Tamerlane of happiness! I watched how the workers,
true to the Taylor system, would bend down, then unbend and turn around
swiftly and rhythmically like levers of an enormous engine. In their hands
they held glittering glass pipes which emitted bluish streaks of flame; the
glass walls were being cut into with flame; with flame there were being
welded the angles, the ribs, the bars. I watched the monstrous glass cranes
easily rolling over the glass rails; like the workers themselves they would
obediently turn, bend down and bring their loads inward into the bowels of
the Integral. All seemed one, humanized machine and mechanized humans.
It was the most magnificent, the most stirring beauty, harmony, music!
Quick! Down! To them, and with them! And I descended and mingled
with them, fused with their mass, caught in the rhythm of steel and glass.
Their movements were measured, tense and round. Their cheeks were
colored with health, their mirror-like foreheads not clouded by the insanity
of thinking. I was floating upon a mirror-like sea. I was reposing. …
Suddenly one of them turned toward me his carefree face.
“Well, better today?”
“What better?”
“You were not here yesterday. And we thought something serious. …”
His forehead was shining; a childish and innocent smile.
 My blood rushed to my face. No, I could not lie, facing those eyes. I
remained silent; I was drowning. … Above, the shiny round white porcelain
face appeared in the hatchway.
“Eh! D-503! Come up here! Something is wrong with a frame and
brackets here, and …”
Not waiting until he had finished, I rushed to him, upstairs; I was
shamefully saving myself by flight. I had not the power to raise my eyes. I
was dazed by the sparkling glass steps under my feet, and with every step I
made I felt more and more hopeless. I, a corrupted man, a criminal, was out
of place here. No, I shall probably never again be able to fuse myself into
this mechanical rhythm, nor to float over this mirror-like, untroubled sea. I
am to burn eternally from now on, running from place to place, seeking a
nook where I may hide my eyes, eternally, until I. … A spark cold as ice
pierced me: “I myself, I matter little, but is it necessary that she also … ? I
must see that she …”
I crawled through the hatchway to the deck and stood there; where was I
to go now? I did not know what I had come for! I looked aloft. The midday
sun exhausted by its march, was fuming dimly. Below was the Integral, a
gray mass of glass—dead. The pink blood was drained out! It was clear to
me that all this was my imagination and that everything remained as before,
yet it was also clear to me that …
“What is the matter with you, D-503? Are you deaf? I call you and
call. … What is the matter with you?” It was the Second Builder yelling
directly into my ear; he must have been yelling that way for quite a while.
What was the matter with me? I had lost my rudder, the motor was
groaning as before, the aero was quivering and rushing on but it had no
rudder. I did not even know where I was rushing, down to the earth or up to
the sun, to its flame. …
 RECORD SIXTEEN

Yellow—A two-dimensional shadow—An

incurable soul.

I have not written for several days, for I don’t know how many. All my days
are alike. All are of one color—yellow like dry, overheated sand. Not a
patch of shade, not a drop of water, only an infinity of yellow sand. I cannot
live without her, but she, since she disappeared that day so mysteriously in
the Ancient House. …
Since that time I have seen her only once, during the hour for the Walk,
two, three, four days ago, I do not remember exactly. All my days are alike.
She only passed swiftly by and for a second filled up the yellow, empty
world. With her, arm in arm, reaching not higher than her shoulder, were the
double-curved S- and the thin papery doctor, and a fourth person whose
fingers only I remember well; they streamed out, those fingers, from the
sleeve of the unif like a bundle of rays, uncommonly thin, white, long.
I-330 raised her hand and waved to me, then she bent toward the one with
the ray-like fingers, over the head of S-. I overheard the word Integral. All
four turned around to look at me—and then they disappeared in the bluish-
gray sea and my road was once more dry and yellow.
That same evening she had a pink check on me. I stood before the
switchboard and with hatred and tenderness I implored it to click and soon
to show the number I-330. I would jump out into the hall at every sound of
the elevator. The door of the latter would open heavily. Pale, tall, blonde
and dark they would come out of the elevator, and here and there curtains
were falling. … But she was not there. She did not come. And it is quite
possible that now, at this minute, as I write these lines, at twenty-two
o’clock exactly, with her eyes closed, she is pressing her shoulder against
somebody else in the same way and in the same way she may be asking
someone: “Do you love me?” Whom? Who is he? That one with ray-like
fingers or that thick-lipped, sprinkling R-? Or S-? S-! Why is it that I have
heard his steps splashing behind me as though in a ditch all these days?
Why has he been following me all these days like a shadow? Ahead of me,
to my side, behind me, a grayish-blue, two-dimensional shadow; people
cross it, people step on it but it remains nearby, attached to me by unseen
ties. Perhaps that tie is I-330. I do not know. Or perhaps they, the Guardians
I mean, already know that I …
If someone should tell you your shadow sees you, sees you all the time,
would you understand? All at once peculiar sensations arise in you; your
arms seem to belong to someone else, they are in the way. That is how I
feel; very frequently now I notice how absurdly I wave my hands without
any rhythm. I have an irresistible desire to glance behind me but I am
unable to do so, my neck might as well be forged of iron. I flee, I run faster
and faster, and even with my back I feel that shadow following me as fast as
I can run, and there is no place to hide myself, no place!
At length I reach my room. Alone at last! But here I find another thing,
the telephone. I pick up the receiver. “Yes, I-330 please.” And again I hear a
light noise through the receiver; someone’s step in the hall there, passing
the door of her room, and—silence. … I drop the receiver. I cannot, cannot
bear it any longer, and I run to see her!
This happened yesterday. I ran there and for a whole hour from sixteen to
seventeen I wandered near the house in which she lives. Numbers were
passing by in rows. Thousands of feet were beating the time like a
behemoth with a million legs passing by. I was alone, thrown out by a storm
on an uninhabited island, and my eyes were seeking and seeking among the
grayish-blue waves. “There soon,” I thought, “will appear from somewhere
the sharp mocking angles of the brows lifted to the temples, and the dark
window-eyes, and there behind them a flaming fireplace and someone’s
shadow. … And I will rush straight in behind those windows and say to her,
‘Thou’ (yes, ‘thou’ without fail), ‘Thou knowest I cannot live without thee
any longer, then why— … ?’” But silence reigned.
Suddenly I heard the silence; suddenly I heard the Musical Tower
silenced, and I understood! It was after seventeen already; everyone had
already left. I was alone. It was too late to return home. Around me—a
desert made of glass and bathed with yellow sunshine. I saw, as if in water,
the reflection of the walls in the glass smoothness of the street, sparkling
walls, hanging upside down. Myself also upside down, hanging absurdly in
the glass.
“I must go at once, this very second, to the Medical Bureau or else … or
perhaps this would be best: to remain here, to wait quietly until they see me
and come and take me into the Operation Department and put an end to
everything at once, redeem everything. …” A slight rustle! and the double-
curved S- was before me. Without looking I felt his two gray steel-drill eyes
bore quickly into me. I plucked up all my strength to show a smile and to
say (I had to say something), “I, I must go to the Medical Bureau.”
“Who is detaining you? What are you standing here for?”
I was silent, absurdly hanging upside down.
“Follow me,” said S- austerely.
I followed obediently, waving my unnecessary, foreign arms. I could not
raise my eyes. I walked through a strange world turned upside down, where
people had their feet pasted to the ceilings, and where engines stood with
their bases upward, and where, still lower, the sky merged in the heavy
glass of the pavement. I remember what pained me most was the fact that
looking at the world for the last time in my life, I should see it upside down
rather than in its natural state; but I could not raise my eyes.
We stopped. Steps. One step … and I should see the figures of the doctors
in their white aprons and the enormous dumb Bell.
With force, with some sort of an inner screw, at length I succeeded in
tearing my eyes away from the glass beneath my feet, and I noticed the
golden letters, “Medical Bureau.” Why did he bring me here rather than to
the Operation Department? Why did he spare me?—about this I did not
even think at that moment. I made one jump over all the steps, firmly closed
the door behind me and took a very deep breath, as if I had not breathed
since morning and as if my heart had not beaten for the same length of time,
as if only now I started to breathe and only now there opened a sluice in my
chest. …
Inside there were two of them, one a short specimen with heavy legs, his
eyes like the horns of a bull tossing the patients up, the other extremely thin
with lips like sparkling scissors, a nose like a blade—it was the same man
who … I ran to him as to a dear friend, straight over close to the blade, and
muttered something about insomnia, dreams, shadows, yellow sand. The
scissors-lips sparkled and smiled.
 “Yes, it is too bad. Apparently a soul has formed in you.”
A soul?—that strange ancient word that was forgotten long ago. …
“Is it … v-very dangerous?” I stuttered.
“Incurable,” was the cut of the scissors.
“But more specifically, what is it? Somehow I cannot imagine—”
“You see … how shall I put it? Are you a mathematician?”
“Yes.”
“Then you see … imagine a plane, let us say this mirror. You and I are on
its surface. You see? there we are, squinting our eyes to protect ourselves
from the sunlight, or here is the bluish electric spark in that tube, there the
shadow of that aero that just passed. All this is on the surface, is momentary
only. Now imagine this very same surface softened by a flame so that
nothing can any longer glide over it, so everything instead will penetrate
into that mirror world which excites such curiosity in children. I assure you,
children are not so foolish as we think they are! The surface becomes a
volume, a body, a world; and inside the mirror—within you, there is the
sunshine, and the whirlwind caused by the aero propeller, and your
trembling lips and someone else’s lips also. You see, the cold mirror
reflects, throws out, while this one absorbs; it keeps forever a trace of
everything that touches it. Once you saw an imperceptible wrinkle on
someone’s face, and this wrinkle is forever preserved within you; you may
happen to hear in the silence a drop of water falling—and you will hear it
forever!”
“Yes, yes, that is it!” I grasped his hand. I could hear drops of water
dripping in the silence from the faucet of a washstand and at once I knew it
was forever.
“But tell me please, why suddenly … suddenly a soul? There was none,
yet suddenly. … Why is it that no one has it, yet I. …” I pressed the thin
hand; I was afraid to loosen the safety belt.
“Why? Well, why don’t we grow feathers or wings, but only shoulder
blades, bases for wings? We have aeros; wings would only be in the way.
Wings are needed in order to fly, but we don’t need to fly anywhere. We
have arrived at the terminus. We have found what we wanted. Is that not
so?”
I nodded vaguely. He glanced at me and laughed a scalpel-like metallic
laugh. The other doctor overheard us and stamped out of his room on his
heavy legs. He picked up the thin doctor with his horn-eyes, then picked me
up.
“What is the matter, a soul? You say a soul? Oh, damn it! We may soon
retrogress even to the cholera epidemics. I told you,” he tossed the thin one
on the horns, “I told you the only thing to do is to operate on them all,
wholesale! simply extirpate the centre for fancy. Only surgery can help
here, only surgery.” He put on a pair of enormous X-ray spectacles and
remained thus for a long while, looking into my skull, through the bones
into my brain and making notes.
“Very, very curious! Listen.” He looked firmly into my eyes. “Would you
not consent to have me perform an extirpation on you? It would be
invaluable to the United State; it might help us to prevent an epidemic. If
you have no special reasons, of course. …”
Some time ago I should probably have said without hesitation, “I am
willing,” but now—I was silent. I caught the profile of the thin doctor; I
implored him!
“You see,” he said at last, “Number D-530 is building the Integral and I
am sure the operation would interfere. …”
“Ah-h!” grumbled the other and stamped back into his room.
We remained alone. The paper-like hand was put lightly and caressingly
upon mine, the profile-like face came nearer and he said in a very low
voice: “I shall tell you a secret. You are not the only one. My colleague is
right when he speaks of an epidemic. Try to remember, have you not
noticed yourself, someone with something similar, very similar, identical?”
He looked at me closely. What was he alluding to? To whom? … Is it
possible? …
“Listen,” I jumped up from my seat. But he had already changed the
subject. In a loud metallic tone:
“… As to the insomnia and for the dreams you complain of, I advise you
to walk a great deal. Tomorrow morning you must begin taking long
walks … say as far as the Ancient House.”
Again he pierced me with his eyes and he smiled thinly. It seemed to me
that I saw enveloped in the tender tissue of that smile a word, a letter, a
name, the only name. … Or was it only my imagination? I waited
impatiently while he wrote a certificate of illness for today and tomorrow.
Once more I gently and firmly pressed his hand, then I ran out.
 My heart now feels light and swift like an aero; it carries me higher and
higher. … I know joy will come tomorrow. What joy? …
 RECORD SEVENTEEN

Through glass—I died—The corridor.

I am puzzled. Yesterday, at the very moment when I thought everything was

untangled, and that all the X’s were at last found, new unknowns appeared
in my equation. The origin of the coordinates of the whole story is of course
the Ancient Home. From this centre the axes of all the X’s, Y’s, and Z’s
radiate, and recently they have entered into the formation of my whole life.
I walked along the X-axis (Avenue 59) towards the centre. The whirlwind
of yesterday still raged within me; houses and people upside down; my own
hands torturingly foreign to me; glimmering scissors; the sharp sound of
drops dripping from the faucet;—all this existed, all this existed once! All
these things were revolving wildly, tearing my flesh, rotating wildly
beneath the molten surface, there where the “soul” is located.
In order to follow the instructions of the doctor I chose the road which
followed not the hypotenuse but the two legs of a triangle. Soon I reached
the road running along the Green Wall. From beyond the Wall, from the
infinite ocean of green there rose toward me an immense wave of roots,
branches, flowers, leaves. It rose higher and higher; it seemed as though it
would splash over me and that from a man, from the finest and most precise
mechanism which I am, I would be transformed into. … But fortunately
there was the Green Wall between me and that wild green sea. Oh, how
great and divinely limiting is the wisdom of walls and bars! This Green
Wall is I think the greatest invention ever conceived. Man ceased to be a
wild animal the day he built the first wall; man ceased to be a wild man
only on the day when the Green Wall was completed, when by this wall we
isolated our machine-like, perfect world from the irrational, ugly world of
trees, birds and beasts. …
 The blunt snout of some unknown beast was to be seen dimly through the
glass of the Wall; its yellow eyes kept repeating the same thought which
remained incomprehensible to me. We looked into each other’s eyes for a
long while. Eyes are shafts which lead from the superficial world into a
world which is beneath the surface. A thought awoke in me: “what if that
yellow-eyed one, sitting there on that absurd dirty heap of leaves, is happier
than I, in his life which cannot be calculated in figures!” I waved my hand.
The yellow eyes twinkled, moved back and disappeared in the foliage.
What a pitiful being! How absurd the idea that he might be happier!
Happier than I he may be, but I am an exception, am I not? I am sick.
I noticed that I was approaching the dark red walls of the Ancient House
and I saw the grown-together lips of the old woman. I ran to her with all
speed.
“Is she here?”
The grown-together lips opened slowly:
“Who is ‘she’?”
“Who? I-330, of course. You remember we came together, she and I, in
an aero the other day.”
“Oh, yes, yes, yes—yes.”
Ray-wrinkles around the lips, artful rays radiating from the eyes. They
were making their way deeper and deeper into me.
“Well, she is here, all right. Came in a while ago.”
“Here!” I noticed at the feet of the old woman a bush of silver—bitter
wormwood. (The court of the Ancient House, being a part of the museum is
carefully kept in its prehistoric state.) A branch of the bush touched the old
woman, she caressed that branch; upon her knees lay stripes of sunshine.
For a second I myself, the sun, the old woman, the wormwood, those
yellow eyes, all seemed to be one; we were firmly united by common veins
and one common blood, boisterous, magnificent blood, was running
through those veins.
I am ashamed now to write down all this, but I promised to be frank to
the end of these records: yes, I bent over and kissed that soft, grown-
together mouth of the old woman. She wiped it with her hand and laughed.
Running, I passed through familiar, half-dark, echoing rooms, and for
some reason I ran straight to the bedroom. When I had reached the door, a
thought flashed: “And if she is there … not alone?” I stopped and listened.
But all I heard was the ticktock of my heart, not within me, but somewhere
near, outside me.
I entered. The large bed—untouched. A mirror … another mirror in the
door of the cupboard, and in the keyhole an ancient key upon an ancient
ring. No one was there. I called softly: “I-330, are you here?”—and then in
a still lower voice with closed eyes, holding my breath—in a voice as
though I were kneeling before her, “I-, dear.” Silence. Only the water was
dripping fast into the white basin of the washstand. I cannot now explain
why, but I disliked that sound. I turned the faucet hard and went out. She
was not there, so much was clear. She must be in another “apartment.”
I ran down a wide, sombre stairway, pulled one door, another, a third—
locked. Every room was locked save that of “our” apartment. And she was
not there. I went back again to the same apartment without knowing why. I
walked slowly, with difficulty; my shoe-soles suddenly became as heavy as
cast-iron. I remember distinctly my thought, “It is a mistake that the force
of gravity is a constant; consequently all my formulae. …”
Suddenly—an explosion! A door slammed down below; someone
stamped quickly over the flagstones. I again became lightfooted, extremely
light! I dashed to the railing to bend over, and in one word, one
exclamation, expressed everything: “You!”
I became cold. Below in the square shadow of the window-frame,
flapping its pink wing-ears, the head of S- passed by!
Like lightning I saw only the naked conclusion. Without any premises (I
don’t recall any premises even now) the conclusion: he must not see me
here! And on the tips of my toes, pressing myself against the wall, I
sneaked upstairs into the unlocked apartment.
I stopped for a second at the door. He was stamping upward, here. If only
the door. … I prayed to the door but it was a wooden one—It squeaked, it
squealed. Like a wind something red passed my eyes, something green, and
the yellow Buddha. In front of the mirror-door of the cupboard, my pale
face; my ears still following those steps, my lips. … Now he was already
passing the green and yellow, now he was passing Buddha, now at the
doorsill of the bedroom. …
I grasped the key of the cupboard; the ring oscillated. This oscillation
reminded me of something. Again a conclusion, a naked conclusion without
premises; a conclusion, or to be more exact, a fragment of one: “Now
I-330 is. …” I brusquely opened the cupboard and when inside in the
darkness shut the door firmly. One step! The floor shook under my feet.
Slowly and softly I floated somewhere downward; my eyes were dimmed—
I died!
Later when I sat down to describe all these adventures, I sought in my
memory and consulted some books; and now I understand, of course! I was
in a state of temporary death. This state was known to the ancients, but as
far as I am informed it is unknown to us. I have no conception of how long
I was dead, probably not longer than five or ten seconds, but after awhile I
arose from the dead and opened my eyes. It was dark. But I felt I was
falling down—down—down. I stretched out my hand to attach myself to
something but the rough wall scratched my fingers; it was running away
from me, upward. I felt blood on my fingers. It was clear that all this was
not merely a play of my sick imagination. But what was it? What?
I heard my own frequent, trembling breaths. (I am not ashamed to
confess this, it was all unexpected and incomprehensible.) A minute, two,
three passed; I was still going down. Then a soft bump. The thing that had
been falling away from under my feet was motionless. I found in the
darkness a knob, and turned it; a door opened; there was a dim light. I now
noticed behind me a square platform, travelling upward. I tried to run back
to it but it was too late. “I am cut off here,” I thought. Where “here” might
be, I did not know.
A corridor. A heavy silence. The small lamps on the vaulted ceiling
resembled an endless, twinkling, dotted line. The corridor was similar to the
“tube” of our underground railways but it was much narrower, and made
not of our glass but of some other, very ancient material. For a moment I
thought of the underground caves where they say many tried to save
themselves during the Two Hundred Years’ War. There was nothing to do
but to walk ahead.
I walked, I think, for about twenty minutes. A turn to the right, the
corridor became wider, the small lamps brighter. There was a dim droning
somewhere. … Was it a machine or voices? I did not know. I stood before a
heavy, opaque door, from behind which came the noise. I knocked. Then I
knocked again, louder. Now there was silence behind the door. Something
clanked; the door opened slowly and heavily.
I don’t know which of us was the more dumbfounded; the thin blade-like
doctor stood before me!
“You here!” his scissors opened and remained open.
 And I, as if I did not know a human word, stood silent, merely stared,
without comprehending that he was talking to me. He must have told me to
leave, for with his thin paper stomach he slowly pressed me to the side, to
the more brightly lighted end of the corridor and poked me in the back.
“Beg your pardon … I wanted … I thought that she, I-330 … but behind
me. …”
“Stay where you are,” said the doctor brusquely, and he disappeared.
At last! At last she was nearby, here, and what did it matter where “here”
was? I saw the familiar saffron-yellow silk, the smile-bite, the eyes with
their curtains drawn. … My lips quivered, so did my hands and knees, and I
had a most stupid thought: “Vibrations make sounds. Shivering must make
a sound. Why then don’t I hear it?”
Her eyes opened for me widely. I entered into them.
“I could not … any longer! … Where have you been? … Why? …”
I was unable to tear my eyes away from her for a second, and I talked as
if in a delirium, fast and incoherently, or perhaps I only thought without
speaking out: “A shadow … behind me. I died. And from the cupboard. …
Because that doctor of yours … speaks with his scissors. … I have a soul …
incurable … and I must walk. …”
“An incurable soul? My poor boy!” I-330 laughed. She covered me with
the sparkles of her laughter; my delirium left me. Everywhere around her
little laughs were sparkling! How good it was!
The doctor reappeared from around the turn, the wonderful, magnificent,
thinnest doctor.
“Well?” He was already beside her.
“Oh, nothing, nothing. I shall tell you later. He got here by accident. Tell
them that I shall be back in about a quarter of an hour.”
The doctor slid around the corner. She lingered. The door closed with a
heavy thud. Then slowly, very slowly, piercing my heart with a sharp sweet
needle, I-330 pressed against me with her shoulder and then with her arm,
with her whole body, and we walked away as if fused into one.
I do not remember now where we turned into darkness; in the darkness
we walked up some endless stairway in silence. I did not see but I knew, I
knew that she walked as I did, with closed eyes, blind, her head thrown a
little backward, biting her lips and listening to the music, that is to say, to
my almost audible tremor.
 I returned to consciousness in one of the innumerable nooks in the
courtyard of the Ancient House. There was a fence of earth with naked
stone ribs and yellow teeth of walls half fallen to pieces. She opened her
eyes and said, “Day-after-tomorrow at sixteen.” She was gone.
Did all this really happen? I do not know. I shall learn day-after-
tomorrow. One real sign remains: on my right hand the skin has been
rubbed from the tips of three fingers. But today, on the Integral the Second
Builder assured me that he saw me touch the polishing wheel with those
very same fingers. Perhaps I did. It is quite probable. I don’t know. I don’t
know anything.
 RECORD EIGHTEEN

Logical debris—Wounds and plaster—Never

again.

Last night as soon as I had gone to bed, I fell momentarily to the bottom of
the ocean of sleep like an overloaded ship which has been wrecked. The
heavy thicket of wavy green water enveloped me. Then slowly I floated
from the bottom upward, and somewhere in the middle of that course, I
opened my eyes—my room! The morning was still green and motionless. A
fragment of sunshine coming from the mirror on my closet door shone into
my eyes. This fragment does not permit me to sleep, being thus an obstacle
in the way of exactly fulfilling the rules of the Tables which prescribe so
many hours of sleep. I should have opened the closet but I felt as though I
were in a spider web, and cobweb covered my eyes; I had no power to sit
up.
Yet I got up and opened the closet door; suddenly, there behind that door,
making her way through the mass of garments which hung there, was I-330!
I have become so accustomed of late to most improbable things, that as far
as I remember I was not even surprised; I did not even ask a question. I
jumped into the closet, slammed the mirror-door behind me and
breathlessly, brusquely, blindly, avidly I clung to her. I remember clearly
even now:—through the narrow crack of the door a sharp sun-ray like
lightning broke into the darkness and played on the floor and walls of the
closet, and a little higher the cruel ray-blade fell upon the naked neck of
I-330, and this for some reason seemed to me so terrible that I could not
bear it, and I screamed;—and again I opened my eyes. My room!
The morning was still green and motionless. On the door of my closet
was a fragment of the sunshine. I was in bed. A dream? Yet my heart was
still wildly beating, quivering and twitching; there was a dull pain in the
tips of my fingers and in my knees. This undoubtedly did happen! And now
I am unable any more to distinguish what is dream from what is actuality;
irrational numbers grow through my solid, habitual, tri-dimensional life;
and instead of firm, polished surfaces—there is something shaggy and
rough. …
I waited long for the Bell to ring. I was lying thinking, untangling a very
strange logical chain. In our superficial life, every formula, every equation,
corresponds to a curve or a solid. We have never seen any curve or solid
corresponding to my square-root of minus one. The horrifying part of the
situation is that there exist such curves or solids; unseen by us they do exist,
they must, inevitably; for in mathematics as on a screen, strange sharp
shadows appear before us. One must remember that mathematics like death,
never makes mistakes, never plays tricks. If we are unable to see those
irrational curves or solids, it only means that they inevitably possess a
whole immense world somewhere beneath the surface of our life. …
I jumped up without waiting for the waking Bell and began to pace up
and down the room. My mathematics, the only firm and immovable island
of my shaken life, this too was torn from its anchor and was floating,
whirling. Then it means that that absurd thing, the “soul,” is as real as my
unif, as my boots, although I do not see them since they are behind the door
of the closet. If boots are not a sickness, why should the “soul” be one? I
sought, but I could not find, a way out of the logical confusion. It looked to
me like that strange and sad debris beyond the Green Wall; my logical
debris too, is filled with extraordinary, incomprehensible, wordless but
speaking beings. It occurred to me for a moment that through some strange,
thick glass I saw it; I saw it at once infinitely large and infinitely small,
scorpion-like with hidden but ever perceptible sting; I saw the square-root
of minus one. Perhaps it was nothing else but my “soul,” which like the
legendary scorpion of the ancients, was voluntarily stinging itself with. …
The Bell! The day began. All I saw and felt neither died, nor disappeared,
it merely became covered with daylight, as our visible world does not die or
disappear at the end of the day but merely becomes covered with the
darkness of night. My head was filled by a light, thin haze. Through that
haze I perceived the long glass tables and the globe-like heads busy
chewing, slowly, silently, in unison. At a distance, through the haze, the
metronome was slowly beating its ticktock, and to the accompaniment of
this customary and caressing music I joined with the others in counting
automatically to fifty: fifty is the number of chewing movements required
by the law of the State for every piece of food. And automatically then,
keeping time, I went downstairs and put my name down in the book for the
outgoing Numbers—as everyone did. But I felt I lived separately from
everybody; I lived by myself separated by a soft wall which absorbs noises;
beyond that wall there was my world.
Here a thought occurred to me. If that world is only my own, why should
I tell about it in these records? Why should I recount all these absurd
“dreams” about closets, endless corridors? With great sorrow I notice that
instead of a correct and strictly mathematical poem in honor of the United
State, I am writing a fantastic novel. Oh! if only it were a novel and not my
actual life, full of X’s, square-roots of minus one and down-fallings! Yet all
may be for the best. Probably you, my unknown readers, are children still as
compared with us. We are brought up by the United State; consequently we
have reached the highest summits attainable by man. And you, being
children, may swallow without crying all the bitter things I am to give you
only if they be coated with the syrup of adventures.

The Same Evening

Are you familiar with the following sensation? You are in an aero and you
dash upward along a blue spiral line; the window is open and the wind
rushes past your face, whistling. There is no earth. The earth is forgotten.
The earth is as far from you as Venus, Saturn or Jupiter. That is how I live
now. A hurricane wind beats into my face; I forget the earth, forget rosy,
dear O-90. Yet the earth does exist and sooner or later I must plane down to
that earth; only I close my eyes to avoid seeing the date at which there is the
name O-90 written on my Tables.
This evening the distant earth reminded me of itself. In order to fulfill the
recommendation of the doctor (I desire sincerely, most sincerely I desire to
be cured), I wandered for two hours and eight minutes over the straight
lines of the deserted avenues. Everybody was in the auditoriums, in
accordance with the Table. Only I, cut off from the rest, I was alone. Strictly
speaking, it was a very unnatural situation. Imagine a finger cut off from the
whole, from the hand; a separate human finger, somewhat hunched, running
over the glass sidewalk. I was such a finger. What seemed most strange and
unnatural was that the finger had no desire to be with its hand, with its
fellows. I want either to be alone or with her; to transfuse my whole being
into hers through a contact with her shoulder or through our interwoven
fingers.
I came home as the sun was setting. The pink dust of evening was
covering the glass of the walls, the golden peak of the Accumulating Tower,
the voices and smiles of the Numbers. Is it not strange: the passing rays of
the evening sun fall to the earth at the same angle as the awakening rays of
the morning, yet they make everything seem so different; the pink tinge is
different. At sunset it is so quiet, somewhat melancholy; at sunrise it is
resounding, boisterous.
In the hall downstairs when I entered, I saw U-, the controller. She took a
letter from the heaps of envelopes covered with pink dust and handed it to
me. I repeat: she is a very respectable woman and I am sure she has only the
very best feelings towards me. … Yet, every time I see those cheeks hanging
down, which look like the gills of a fish, I. …
Holding out her dry hand with the letter, U- sighed. But that sigh only
very slightly moved in me the curtains which separate me from the rest of
the world. I was completely projected upon the envelope which trembled in
my hand. I had no doubt but that it was a letter from I-330.
At that moment I heard another sigh, such a deliberate one, underscored
with two lines, that I raised my eyes from the envelope and saw a tender,
cloudy smile coming from between the gills, through the bashful jalousies
of lowered eyes. And then:
“You poor, poor, dear! …” a sigh underscored with three lines, and a
glance at the letter, an imperceptible glance. (What was in the letter she
naturally knew, ex officio.)
“No, really? … Why?”
“No, no, dear, I know better than you. For a long time I have watched
you and I see that you need someone with years of experience of life to
accompany you.”
I felt all pasted around by her smile. It was like a plaster upon the
wounds which were to be inflicted upon me by the letter I held in my hand.
Finally, through the bashful jalousies of her eyes, she said in a very low
voice: “I shall think about it, dear. I shall think it over. And be sure that if I
feel myself strong enough …”
 “Great Well-Doer! Is it possible that my lot is? … Is it possible that she
means to say, that she? …”
My eyes were dimmed and filled with thousands of sinusoids; the letter
was trembling. I went near the light, to the wall. There the light of the sun
was going out; from the sun was falling thicker and thicker the dark, sad,
pink dust, covering the floor, my hands, the letter. I opened the envelope
and found the signature as fast as I could—the first wound! It was not
I-330; it was O-90! And another wound: in the right-hand corner a slovenly
splash—a blot! I cannot bear blots. It matters little whether they are made
by ink or by … well, it matters not by what. Heretofore, such a blot would
have had only a disagreeable effect, disagreeable to the eyes; but now—
why did that small gray blot seem to be like a cloud and seem to spread
about me a leaden, bluish darkness? Or was it again the “soul” at work?
Here is a transcript of the letter:

“You know, or perhaps you don’t … I cannot write well. Little

it matters! Now you know that without you there is for me not
a single day, a single morning, a single spring, for R- is only …
well, that is of no importance to you. At any rate, I am very
grateful to him, for without him, alone all these days, I don’t
know what would. … During these last few days and nights I
have lived through ten years, or perhaps twenty years. My
room seemed to me not square but round; I walk around
without end, round after round, always the same thing, not a
door to escape through. I cannot live without you because I
love you; and I should not, I cannot be with you any more—
because I love you! Because I see and I understand that you
need no one now, no one in the world save that other, and you
must realize that it is precisely because I love you I must …
“I need another two or three days in order to paste together
the fragments of myself and thus restore at least something
similar to the O-90 of old. Then I shall go myself, and myself I
shall state that I take your name from my list, and this will be
better for you; you must feel happy now. I shall never
again. …”

“Goodbye, O-.”
 Never again. Yes, that is better. She is right. But, why then? … Why
then? …
 RECORD NINETEEN

The infinitesimal of the third order—From

under the forehead—Over the railing.

There in the strange corridor lighted by the dotted line of dim little electric
lamps … or no, no, later, when we had already reached one of the nooks in
the courtyard of the Ancient House, she said, “Day-after-tomorrow.” That
“day-after-tomorrow” is today. And everything seems to have wings and to
fly; the day flies; and our Integral too already has wings. We finished
placing the motor and tried it out today, without switching it in. What
magnificent, powerful salvos! Each of them sounded for me like a salute in
honor of her, the only one—in honor of today!
At the time of the first explosion about a dozen loafing Numbers from the
docks stood near the main tube—and nothing was left of them save a few
crumbs and a little soot. With pride I write down now that this occurrence
did not disturb the rhythm of our work even for a second. Not a man shrank.
We and our lathes continued our rectilinear or curved motions with the
same sparkling and polished precision as before, as if nothing had
happened. As a matter of fact, what did happen? A dozen Numbers
represent hardly one hundred millionth part of the United State. For
practical consideration, that is but an infinitesimal of the third order. That
pity, a result of arithmetical ignorance, was known to the ancients; to us it
seems absurd.
It seems droll to me also, that yesterday I was thinking, even relating in
these pages about a gray blot! All that was only the “softening of the
surface” which is normally as hard as diamond, like our walls. (There is an
ancient saying: “Shooting beans at a stone wall—”)
 Sixteen o’clock. I did not go for the supplementary walk; who knows,
she might come now, when the sun is so noisily bright.
I am almost the only one in his room. Through the walls full of sunshine
I see for a distance to the right and to the left and below strings of other
rooms, repeating each other as if in a mirror, hanging in the air and empty.
Only on the bluish stairway, striped by the golden ink of the sun, is seen
rising a thin, gray shadow. Already I hear steps, and I see through the door
and I feel a smile pasted to my face like a plaster. But it passed to another
stairway and down. The click of the switchboard! I threw myself to that
little white slit and … an unfamiliar male Number! (A consonant means a
male Number.)
The elevator groaned and stopped. A big, slovenly, slanting forehead
stood before me, and the eyes … They impressed me strangely; it seemed as
if the man talked with his eyes which were deep under the forehead.
“Here is a letter from her, for you.” (From under the awning of that
forehead.) “She asked that everything … as requested in the letter … without
fail.” This too, from under the forehead, from under the awning, and he
turned, looked about.
“No, there is nobody, nobody. Quickly! the letter!”
He put the letter in my hand and went out without a word.
A pink check fell out of the envelope. It was hers, her check! Her tender
perfume! I felt like running to catch up with that wonderful under-the-
forehead one. A tiny note followed the check from the envelope; three lines:
“The check … Lower the curtains without fail, as if I were actually with
you. It is necessary that they should think that I … I am very, very sorry.”
I tore the note into small bits. A glance at the mirror revealed my
distorted, broken eyebrows. I took the check and was ready to do with it as I
had done with the note. “She asked that everything … as requested in the
letter … without fail.” My arms weakened and the hands loosened. The
check was back on the table. She is stronger than I, stronger than I. It
seemed as though I were going to act as she wished. Besides … however, it
is a long time before evening.
The check remained on the table. In the mirror—my distorted, broken
eyebrows. Oh, why did I not have a doctor’s certificate for today? I should
like to go and walk, walk without end around the Green Wall and then to
fall on my bed … to the bottom of. … Yet I had to go to Auditorium No. 13,
and I should have to grip myself, so as to bear up for two hours! Two hours
without motion, at a time when I wanted to scream and stamp my feet!
The lecture was on. It was very strange to hear from the sparkling tube of
the phono-lecturer not the usual metallic voice but a soft, velvety, mossy
one. It was a woman’s voice and I seemed to have a vision of the woman: a
little hook-like old woman, like the one of the Ancient House.
The Ancient House! Suddenly from within me a powerful fountain of. …
I had to use all my strength to control myself, so as not to fill the auditorium
with screams. The soft mossy words were piercing me, yet only empty
words about children and child-production reached my ear. I was like a
photographic plate: everything was making its imprint with a strange,
senseless precision on me; the golden scythe which was nothing more than
the reflection of light from the megaphone of the lecture apparatus, under
the megaphone a child, a living illustration. It was leaning toward the
megaphone, the angle of its infinitesimal unif in its mouth, its little fist
clenched firmly, its thumb squeezed into the fist, a light fluffy pleat of skin
at the wrist. Like a photographic plate I was taking the impression of all
this. Now I saw how its naked leg hung over the edge of the platform, the
pink fan of its finger waved in the air. … One minute more, one second and
the child would be on the floor!
A female’s scream, a wave of translucent wings, her unif on the platform!
She caught the child, her lips clung to the fluffy pleat of the baby’s wrist;
she moved the child to the middle of the table and left the platform. The
imprints were registering in me: a pink crescent of a mouth, the horns
downward! Eyes like small blue saucers filled with liquid! It was O-90.
And as if reading a consequential formula, I suddenly felt the necessity, the
naturalness of that insignificant occurrence.
She sat down behind me, somewhat to my left. I looked back. She quietly
removed her gaze from the table and the child and looked straight into me.
Within again: She, I, the table on the platform—three points: and through
those three points lines were drawn, a projection of some as yet unforeseen
events!
Then I went home through the green dusky street which seemed many-
eyed because of the electric lights. I heard myself tick-tocking like a clock.
And the hands of that clock seemed to be about to pass a figure: I was going
to do something, something that would cut off every way of retreat. She
wants somebody, whom I do not know, to think she is with me. I want her;
what do I care what she wants? I do not want to be alone behind the
curtains and that is all there is to it!
From behind came sounds of a familiar gait, like splashing in a ditch. I
did not need to look back, I knew it was S-. He would follow me to the very
door, probably. Then he would stay below on the sidewalk, and he would
try to drill upward into my room with his boring eyes, until the curtains
would fall, concealing something criminal.
Was he my Guardian-Angel? No! My decision was made.
When I came into my room and turned on the light, I could not believe
my eyes! O-90 stood at my table, or to be more exact, she was hanging like
a creased empty dress. She seemed to have no tensity, no spring beneath the
dress; her arms and legs were springless, her voice was hanging and
springless.
“About my letter, did you receive it? Yes? I must know your answer, I
must—today.”
I shrugged my shoulders. I enjoyed looking into her blue eyes which
were filled with tears as if she were the guilty one. I lingered over my
answer. With pleasure I pricked her:
“Answer? Well. … You are right. Undoubtedly. In everything.”
“Then …” (She tried to cover the minute tremor with a smile but it did
not escape me.) “Well, all right. I shall … I shall leave you at once.”
Yet she remained drooping over the table. Drooping eyelids, drooping
arms and legs. The pink check of the other was still on the table. I quickly
opened this manuscript, We, and with its pages I covered the check, trying
to hide it from myself, rather than from O-.
“See, here, I am still busy writing. Already 101 pages! Something quite
unexpected comes out in this writing.”
In a voice, in a shadow of a voice, “And do you remember … how the
other day I … on the seventh page … and it dropped. …”
The tiny blue saucers filled to the borders; silently and rapidly the tears
ran down her cheeks. And suddenly, like the dropping of the tears—rushing
forth—words:
“I cannot … I shall leave you in a moment. I shall never again … and I
don’t care. … Only I want, I must have a child! From you! Give me a child
and I will leave. I will!”
I saw she was trembling all over beneath her unif, and I felt … I too,
would soon … would. … I put my hands behind my back and smiled.
 “What? You desire to go under the Machine of the Well-Doer?”
Like a stream her words ran over the dam.
“I don’t care. I shall feel it for a while within me. I want to see, to see
only once the little fold of skin here at the wrist, like that one on the table in
the Auditorium. Only for one day!”
Three points: she, I and a little fist with a fluffy fold of skin there on the
table!
I remember how once when I was a child they took me up on the
Accumulating Tower. At the very top I bent over the glass railing of an
opening in the Tower. Below people seemed like dots; my heart contracted
sweetly. “What if. …” On that occasion I only clenched my hands around
the railing; now I jumped over.
“So you desire … being perfectly aware that …”
Her eyes were closed as if the sun were beating straight into her face. A
wet, shining smile!
“Yes, yes! I want it!”
Quickly I took out the pink check of the other from under the manuscript
and down I went to the controller on duty. O-90 caught my hand, screamed
out something, but what it was I understood only later, when I returned.
She was sitting on the edge of the bed, hands firmly clasped about the
knees.
“Is it, is it her check?”
“What does it matter? Well, it is hers, yes.”
Something cracked. It must have been the springs of the bed, for O-90
made a slight motion only. She remained sitting, her hands upon her knees.
“Well, quick. …” I roughly pressed her hand. A red spot was left on her
wrist (tomorrow it would become purple), where the fluffy, infantile fold. …
It was the last. … I turned the switch, my thoughts went out with the light.
Darkness, a spark! and I had jumped over the railing, down. …
 RECORD TWENTY

Discharge—The material of a idea—The zero

rock.

Discharge is the best word for it. Now I see that it was actually like an
electric discharge. The pulse of my last few days had been becoming dryer
and dryer, more and more frequent, more intense. The opposite poles had
been drawing nearer and nearer and already I could hear the dry crackling;
one millimeter more, and—an explosion! Then silence.
Within me there is quiet now and emptiness like that of a house after
everybody has left, when one lies ill, all alone and hears so clearly the
distinct, metallic, ticktock of thoughts.
Perhaps that “discharge” cured me at last of my torturing “soul.” Again I
am like all of us. At least at this moment as I write, I can see as it were,
without any pain in my mental eye, how O-90 is brought to the steps of the
Cube; or I see her in the Gas Bell. And if there in the Operation Department
she should give my name—I do not care. Piously and gratefully I should
kiss the punishing hand of the Well-Doer at the last moment. I have this
right in regard to the United State: to receive my punishment. And I shall
not give up this right. No Number ought, or dares, to refuse this only
personal, and therefore, most precious, privilege.
… Quickly, metallically, distinctly, do the thoughts rap in the head. An
invisible aero carries me into the blue height of my beloved abstractions.
And I see how there in the height, in the purest rarified air, my judgment
about the only “right” bursts with a crack, like a pneumatic tire. I see
clearly that only an atavism, the absurd superstition of the ancients, gives
me this idea of “right.”
 There are ideas of clay and ideas moulded of gold, or of our precious
glass. In order to know the material of which an idea is made, one needs
only to let fall upon it a drop of strong acid. One of these acids was known
to the ancients under the name of reductio ad absurdum. This was the name
of it, I think. But they were afraid of this poison; they preferred to believe
that they saw heaven, even though it was a toy made of clay, rather than
confess to themselves that it was only a blue nothing. We on the other hand
(Glory to the Well-Doer!), we are adults and we have no need of toys. Now
if we put a drop of acid on the idea of “right.” … Even the ancients (the
most mature of them) knew that the source of right was—might! Right is a
function of might. Here we have our scale: on the one side an ounce, on the
other a ton. On one side “I,” on the other “we,” the United State. Is it not
clear? To assume that I may have any “right” as far as the State is
concerned, is like assuming that an ounce may equilibrate a ton in a scale!
Hence the natural distribution: tons—rights, grams—duties. And the natural
road from nothingness to greatness, is to forget that one is a gram and to
feel that one is one-millionth of a ton!
You ripe-bodied, bright Venerians; you sooty, blacksmith-like Uranians, I
almost hear your protests in this silence. But only think, everything that is
great is simple. Remember, only the four rules of arithmetic are
unshakeable and eternal! And only that mortality will be unshakeable and
eternal which is built upon those four rules. This is the superior wisdom,
this is the summit of that pyramid around which people red with sweat,
fought and battled for centuries trying to crawl up!
Looking from this summit down to the bottom, where something is still
left swarming like worms, from this summit all that is left over in us from
the ancients seems alike. Alike are the unlawful coming motherhood of
O-90, a murder, and the insanity of that Number who dared to throw verses
into the face of the United State; and alike is the judgment for them—
premature death. This is that divine justice of which those stone-housed
ancients dreamed, lit by the naive pink rays of the dawn of history. Their
“God” punished sacrilege as a capital crime.
You Uranians, morose and as black as the ancient Spaniards, who were
wise in knowing so well how to burn at the stake, you are silent; I think you
agree with me. But I hear you, pink Venerians, saying something about
“tortures, executions, return to barbarism.” My dear Venerians, I pity you!
You are incapable of philosophical, mathematical thinking. Human history
moves upward in circles, like an aero. The circles are at times golden,
sometimes they are bloody, but all have 360 degrees. They go from 0° to
10°, 20°, 200°, 360°—and then again 0°. Yes, we have returned to zero. But
for a mathematically working mind it is clear that this zero is different; it is
a perfectly new zero. We started from zero to the right and came to zero on
the left. Hence instead of plus zero, we are at minus zero. Do you
understand?
This zero appears to me now as a silent, immense, narrow rock, sharp as
a blade. In cruel darkness, holding our breath, we set sail from the black
night-side of the zero rock. For centuries we, Columbuses, floated and
floated; we made the circuit of the whole world and at last! Hurrah! Salute!
We climbed up the masts; before us now was a new side of the zero rock,
hitherto unknown, bathed in the Polar light of the United State; a blue mass
covered with rainbow sparkles! Suns!—a hundred suns! A million
rainbows! What does it matter if we are separated from the other, black side
of the zero rock only by the thickness of a blade? A knife is the most solid,
the most immortal, the most inspired invention of man. The knife served on
the guillotine. The knife is the universal tool for cutting knots. The way of
paradoxes follows its sharp edge, the only way becoming to a fearless
mind. …
 RECORD TWENTY-ONE

The duty of an author—The ice-swells—The

most difficult love.

Yesterday was her day and again she did not come. Again there came her
incoherent note, explaining nothing. But I am tranquil, perfectly tranquil. If
I do act as I am told to in the note, if I do go to the controller on duty,
produce the pink check and then, having lowered the curtains if I do sit
alone in my room, I do all this of course not because I have no power to act
contrary to her desire. It seems funny? Decidedly not! It is quite simple:
separated from all curative, plaster-like smiles I am enabled quietly to write
these very lines. This first. And second: I am afraid to lose in her, in I-330,
perhaps the only clue I shall ever have to the understanding of all the
unknowns, like the story of the cupboard, or my temporary death, for
instance. To understand, to discover these unknowns as the author of these
records, I feel it simply my duty. Moreover, the unknown is naturally the
enemy of man. And Homo Sapiens only then becomes Man in the complete
sense of the word, when his punctuation includes no question marks, only
exclamation points, commas and periods.
Thus, guided by what seems to me simply my duty as an author, I took an
aero today at sixteen o’clock and went to the Ancient House. A strong wind
was blowing against me. The aero advanced with difficulty through the
thicket of air, its transparent branches whistling and whipping. The city
below seemed a heap of blue blocks of ice. Suddenly—a cloud, a swift,
oblique shadow. The ice became leaden; it swelled. As in springtime when
you happen to stand at the shore and wait; in one more minute everything
will move and pull and crack! But the minute passes and the ice remains
motionless; you feel as though you yourself are swelling, your heart beats
more restlessly, more frequently. … But why do I write about all this? And
whence all these strange sensations? For is there such an iceberg as could
ever break the most lucid, solid crystal of our life?
At the entrance of the Ancient House I found no one. I went around it
and found the old janitress near the Green Wall. She held her hand above
her eyes, looking upward. Beyond the Wall, sharp black triangles of some
birds; they would rush, cawing, in onslaught on the invisible fence of
electric waves, and as they felt the electricity against their breasts, they
would recoil and soar once more beyond the Wall.
I noticed oblique, swift shadows on the dark, wrinkled face, a quick
glance at me.
“Nobody here, nobody, nobody! No! And no use coming here. …”
In what respect is it “no use” and what a strange idea, to consider me
somebody’s shadow. Perhaps all of you are only my shadows. Did I not
populate these pages which only recently were white quadrangular deserts,
with you? Without me would they whom I shall guide over the narrow
paths of my lines, could they ever see you?
Of course I did not say all this to the old woman. From experience I
know that the most torturing thing is to inoculate someone with a doubt as
to the fact that he or she is a three-dimensional reality and not some other
reality. I remarked only, quite drily, that her business was to open the gate,
and she let me into the courtyard.
It was empty. Quiet. The wind remained beyond the walls, distant as on
that day, when shoulder to shoulder, two like one, we came out from
beneath, from the corridors—if it ever really happened. I walked under
stone arches, my steps resounded against the damp vaults and fell behind
me, sounding as though someone were continually following me. The
yellow walls with patches of red brick were watching me through their
square spectacles, windows—watching me open the squeaky doors of a
barn, look into corners, nooks and hidden places. … A gate in the fence and
a lonely spot. The monument of the Two Hundred Years’ War. From the
ground naked, stone ribs were sticking out. The yellow jaws of the wall. An
ancient oven with a chimney like a ship petrified forever among redbrick
waves.
It seemed to me that I had seen those yellow teeth once before. I saw
them still dimly in my mind, as at the bottom of a barrel, through water.
And I began to search. I fell into caves occasionally; I stumbled over
stones; rusty jaws caught my unif a few times; salt drops of sweat ran from
my forehead into my eyes.
Nowhere! I could find that exit from below, from the corridors, nowhere!
There was none. Well, perhaps it was better that it happened so. Probably
that all was only one of my absurd “dreams.”
Tired out, covered with cobweb and dust, I opened the gate to return to
the main yard, when suddenly … a rustle behind me, splashing steps, and
there before me were the pink winglike ears and the double-curved smile of
S-. Half closing his eyes, he bored his little drills into me and asked:
“Taking a walk?”
I was silent. My arms were heavy.
“Well, do you feel better now?”
“Yes, thank you. I think I am getting normal again.”
He let me go. He lifted his eyes, looked upward, and I noticed his
Adam’s apple for the first time; it resembles a broken spring, sticking out
from beneath the upholstery of a divan.
Above us, not very high (about 50 meters) aeros were buzzing. By their
low, slow flight and by the observation tubes which hung down, I
recognized them. They were the aeros of the Guardians. But there were not
two or three, as usual, there were about ten or twelve (I regret to have to
confine myself to an approximate figure).
“Why are there so many today?” I dared to ask S-.
“Why? Hm. … A real physician begins to treat a patient when he is still
well but on the way to becoming sick tomorrow, day-after-tomorrow or
within a week. Prophylaxis! Yes!”
He nodded and went splashing over the stones of the yard. Then he
turned his head and said over his shoulder, “Be careful!”
Again I was alone. Silence. Emptiness. Far beyond the Green Wall the
birds and the wind. What did he mean? My aero ran very fast with the wind.
Light and heavy shadows from the clouds. Below blue cupolas, cubes of
glass-ice were becoming leaden and swelling. …

The Same Evening

I took up my pen just now in order to write upon these pages a few thoughts
which, it seems to me, will prove useful for you, my readers. These
thoughts are concerned with the great Day of Unanimity which is now not
far away. But as I sat down, I discovered that I cannot write at present;
instead I sit and listen to the wind beating the glass with its dark wings; all
the while I am busy looking about and I am waiting, expecting. … What? I
do not know. So I was very glad when I saw the brownish-pink gills enter
my room, heartily glad I may say. She sat down and innocently smoothed a
fold of her unif that fell between her knees, and very soon she pasted upon
me, all over me, a host of smiles—a bit of a smile on each crack of my face
and this gave me pleasant sensations, as if I were tightly bound like an
infant of the ancients in a swaddling-cloth.
“Imagine! Today, when I entered the classroom” (she works in the Child-
Educational Refinery), “I suddenly noticed a caricature upon the
blackboard. Indeed! I assure you! They had pictured me in the form of a
fish! Perhaps I really—”
“No, no! Why do you say that?” I hastily exclaimed. When one was near
her, it was clear indeed that she had nothing resembling gills. No. When I
referred to gills in these pages I was certainly irreverent.
“Oh, after all it does not matter. But the act as such, think of it! Of course
I called the Guardians at once. I love children very much and I think that
the most difficult and the most exalted love is—cruelty. You understand me,
of course.”
“Certainly!” Her sentence so closely resembled my thoughts! I could not
refrain from reading to her a passage from my Record No. 20, beginning
“Quietly, metallically, distinctly, do the thoughts” … etc. I felt her brownish-
pink cheeks twitching and coming closer and closer to me. Suddenly I felt
in my hands her firm, dry, even slightly prickling fingers.
“Give, give this to me please. I shall have it phonographed and make the
children learn it by heart. Not only your Venerians need all this, but we
ourselves right now, tomorrow, day-after-tomorrow.”
She glanced around and said in a very low voice:
“Have you heard, they say that on the Day of Unanimity—”
I sprang to my feet.
“What? What do they say? What—on the Day of Unanimity?”
The coziness of my room, its very walls, seemed to have vanished. I felt
myself thrown outside, where the tremendous, shaggy wind was tossing
about and where the slanting clouds of dusk were descending lower and
lower. …
 U- boldly and firmly grasped me by the shoulders. I even noticed how
her fingers, responding to my emotion, trembled slightly.
“Sit down, dear, and don’t be upset. They say many things; must we
believe them all? Moreover, if only you need me, I shall be near you on that
day. I shall leave the schoolchildren with someone else and I shall stay with
you, for you, dear, you too are a child and you need. …”
“No, no!” (I raised my hands in protest). “Not for anything! You really
think then that I am a child and that I cannot do without a. … Oh, no! Not
for anything in the world.” (I must confess I had other plans for that day!)
She smiled. The wording of that smile apparently was: “Oh, what a
stubborn, what a stubborn boy!” She sat down, eyelids lowered. Her hands
modestly busied themselves with fixing the fold of the unif which fell again
between her knees, and suddenly, about something entirely different, she
said:
“I think I must decide … for your sake. … But I implore you, do not hurry
me. I must think it over.”
I did not hurry her, although I realized that I ought to have been
delighted, as there is no greater honor than to crown someone’s evening
years.
… All night strange wings were about. I walked and protected my head
with my hands from those wings. And a chair, not like ours, but an ancient
chair, came in with a horse-like gait: first the right fore- and left hind-leg,
then the left fore- and right hind-leg. It rushed to my bed and crawled into
it, and I liked that wooden chair, although it made me uncomfortable and
caused me some pain.
It is very strange; is it really impossible to find any cure for this dream-
sickness, or to make it rational, perhaps even useful?
 RECORD TWENTY-TWO

The benumbed waves—Everything is

improving—I am a microbe.

Please imagine that you stand at the seashore. The waves go rhythmically
up, down, up. … Suddenly when they have risen they remain in that
position, benumbed, torpid! It was just as weird and unnatural when
everything became confused and our regular walk which is prescribed by
the Tables, suddenly came to an end. The last time such a thing happened
was 119 years ago, when according to our historians a meteorite fell hissing
and fuming into the very midst of the marchers. We were walking yesterday
as usual, that is like warriors on the Assyrian monuments, a thousand heads
and two composite, integrated legs and two swinging integrated arms. At
the end of the avenue where the Accumulating Tower was formidably
resounding, a quadrangle appeared: on the sides, in front and behind—
guards; in the centre three Numbers. Their unifs were already stripped of
the golden State badges; everything was painfully clear. The enormous dial
on the top of the Tower looked like a face; it bent down from the clouds and
spitting down its seconds, it waited with indifference. It showed six minutes
past thirteen exactly. There was some confusion in the quadrangle. I was
very close and I saw the most minute details. I clearly remember a thin,
long neck and on the temple a confused net of small blue veins like rivers
on the map of a small unfamiliar world, and that unknown world was
apparently still a very young man. He evidently noticed someone in our
ranks; he stopped, rose upon his tiptoes and stretched his neck. One of the
guards snapped his back with the bluish spark of the electric whip—he
squealed in a thin voice like a puppy. The distinct snaps followed each other
at intervals of approximately two seconds; a snap and a squeal, a snap and a
squeal. … We continued to walk as usual, rhythmically, in our Assyrian
manner. I watched the graceful zigzags of the electric sparks and thought:
“Human society is constantly improving, as it should. How ugly a tool was
the ancient whip and how much beauty there is—”
At that moment, like a nut flying from a wheel revolving at full speed, a
female Number, thin, flexible and tense, tore herself from our rows, and
with a cry, “Enough! Don’t you dare!” she threw herself straight into the
quadrangle. It was like the meteorite of 119 years ago; our march came to a
standstill and our rows appeared like the gray crests of waves frozen by
sudden cold. For a second I looked at that woman’s figure with the eye of a
stranger as all the others did. She was no Number any longer; she was only
a human being and she existed for us only as a substantiation of the insult
which she cast upon the United State. But a motion of hers, her bending
while twisting to the left upon her hips, revealed to me clearly who she was.
I knew, I knew that body, flexible as a whip! My eyes, my lips, my hands
knew it; at that moment I was absolutely certain. … Two of the guards
dashed to catch her. One more moment and that limpid mirror-like point on
the pavement would have become the point of meeting of their trajectories,
and she would have been caught! My heart fell, stopped. Without thinking
whether it was permissible or not, whether it was reasonable or absurd, I
threw myself straight to that point.
I felt thousands of eyes bulging with horror fixed upon me but that only
added a sort of desperately joyful power to that wild being with hairy paws
which arose in me and ran faster and faster. Two more steps—she turned
around—
I saw a quivering face covered with freckles, red eyebrows. … It was not
she! Not I-330!
A rabid, quivering joy took hold of me. I wanted to shout something like:
“Catch her! Get her, that—” But I heard only my whisper. A heavy hand
was already upon my shoulder; I was caught and led away. I tried to explain
to them:
“But listen, you must understand that I thought that. …”
But could I explain even to myself all the sickness which I have
described in these pages? My light went out; I waited obediently. As a leaf
that is torn from its branch by a sudden gust of wind falls humbly, but on its
way down turns and tries to catch every little branch, every fork, every
knot; so I tried to catch every one of the silent, globe-like heads, or the
transparent ice of the walls, or the blue needle of the Accumulating Tower
which seemed to pierce the clouds.
At that moment, when a heavy curtain was about to separate from me this
beautiful world, I noticed not far away a familiar, enormous head gliding
over the mirror surface of the pavement and wagging its winglike ears. I
heard a familiar, flat voice:
“I deem it my duty to testify that Number D-503 is ill and is unable to
regulate his emotions. Moreover, I am sure that he was led by natural
indignation—”
“Yes! Yes!” I exclaimed, “I even shouted ‘catch her!’”
From behind me: “You did not shout anything.”
“No, but I wanted to. I swear by the Well-Doer, I wanted to!”
For a second I was bored through by the gray, cold, drill-eyes. I don’t
know whether he believed that what I said was the truth (almost!), or
whether he had some secret reason for sparing me for a while, but he wrote
a short note, handed it to one of those who had held me and again I was
free. That is, I was again included in the orderly, endless, Assyrian rows of
Numbers.
The quadrangle, the freckled face and the temple with the map of blue
veinlets disappeared forever around the corner. We walked again—a
million-headed body; and in each one of us resided that humble joyfulness
with which in all probability molecules, atoms and phagocytes live.
In the ancient days the Christians understood this feeling; they are our
only (though very imperfect) direct forerunners. The greatness of the
“Church of the United Flock” was known to them. They knew that
resignation is virtue, and pride—a vice; that “We” is from God, “I” from the
devil.
I was walking, keeping step with the others yet separated from them. I
was still trembling from the emotion just felt, like a bridge over which a
thundering ancient steel train has passed a moment before. I felt myself. To
feel one’s self, to be conscious of one’s personality, is the lot of an eye
inflamed by a cinder, or an infected finger, or a bad tooth. A healthy eye, or
finger, or tooth is not felt; it is nonexistent as it were. Is it not clear then,
that consciousness of oneself is a sickness?
Apparently I am no longer a phagocyte which quietly, in a businesslike
way devours microbes (microbes with freckled faces and blue temples);
apparently I am myself a microbe, and she too, I-330, is a microbe, a
wonderful, diabolic microbe! It is quite possible that there are already
thousands of such microbes among us, still pretending to be phagocytes, as
I pretend. What if today’s accident, although in itself not important, is only
a beginning, only the first meteorite of a shower of burning and thundering
stones which the infinite may have poured out upon our glass paradise?
 RECORD TWENTY-THREE

Flowers—The dissolution of a crystal—If

only (?).

They say there are flowers that bloom only once in a hundred years. Why
not suppose the existence of flowers that bloom only once a thousand
years? We may have known nothing about them until now only because
today is the “once in a thousand years”?
Happy and dizzy I walked downstairs to the controller on duty and
quickly under my gaze all around me and silently the thousand-year-old
buds burst, and everything was blooming: armchairs, shoes, golden badges,
electric bulbs, someone’s dark heavy eyes, the polished columns of the
banisters, the handkerchief which someone lost on the stairs, the small,
inkblotted desk of the controller and the tender brown, somewhat freckled
cheeks of U-. Everything seemed not ordinary, new, tender, rosy, moist. U-
took the pink stub from me while the blue, aromatic moon, hanging from an
unseen branch, shone through the glass of the wall and over the head of U-.
With a solemn gesture I pointed my finger and said:
“The moon. You see?”
U- glanced at me, then at the number of the stub and again made that
familiar, charmingly innocent movement with which she fixes the fold of
the unif between her knees.
“You look abnormal and ill, dear. Abnormality and illness are the same
thing. You are killing yourself. And no one would tell you that, no one!”
That “No one” was certainly equivalent to the number on the
stub—I-330. This thought was confirmed by an inkblot which fell close to
the figure 330. Dear, wonderful U-! You are right, of course. I am not
reasonable. I am sick. I have a soul. I am a microbe. But is blooming—not a
sickness? Is it not painful when the buds are bursting? And don’t you think
that spermatozoa are the most terrible of all microbes?
Back upstairs to my room. In the widely open cup of the armchair was
I-330. I, on the floor, embracing her limbs, my head on her lap. We were
silent. Everything was silent. Only the pulse was audible. Like a crystal I
was dissolving in her, in I-330. I felt most distinctly how the polished facets
which limited me in space were slowly thawing, melting away. I was
dissolving in her lap, in her, and I became at once smaller and larger and
larger, unembraceable. For she was not she but the whole universe. For a
second I and that armchair near the bed, transfixed with joy, we were one.
And the wonderfully smiling old woman at the gate of the Ancient House,
and the wild debris beyond the Green Wall, and some strange silver
wreckage on a black background, dozing like the old woman and the slam
of a door in the distance—all this was within me, was listening to my pulse
and soaring through the happiest of seconds.
In absurd, confused, overflowing words I attempted to tell her that I was
a crystal and that there was a door in me, and that I felt how happy the
armchair was. But something nonsensical came out of the attempt and I
stopped. I was ashamed. And suddenly:
“Dear I-! Forgive me! I understand nothing. I talk so foolishly!”
“And why should you think that foolishness is not fine? If we had taken
pains to educate human foolishness through centuries, as we have done with
our intelligence, it might perhaps have been transformed into something
very precious.”
Yes, I think she is right! How could she be wrong at that moment?
“… And for this foolishness of yours and for what you did yesterday
during the walk, I love you the more, much more.”
“Then why did you torture me? Why would you not come? Why did you
send me the pink check and make me—?”
“Perhaps I wanted to test you. Perhaps I must be sure that you will do
anything I wish, that you are completely mine.”
“Yes, completely.”
She took my face, my whole self, between her palms, lifted my head:
“And how about ‘It is the duty of every honest Number’? Eh?”
Sweet, sharp, white teeth—a smile. In the open cup of the armchair she
was like a bee—sting and honey combined.
 Yes, duty. … I turned over in my mind the pages of my records; indeed
there is not a thought about the fact that strictly speaking I should. …
I was silent. Exaltedly (and probably stupidly) I smiled, looking into the
pupils of her eyes. I followed first one eye and then the other and in each of
them I saw myself, a millimetric self imprisoned in those tiny rainbow cells.
Then again the lips and the sweet pain of blooming.
In each Number of the United State there is an unseen metronome which
ticktocks silently; without looking at the clock we know exactly the time of
day within five minutes. But now my metronome had stopped and I did not
know how much time had passed. In fright I grasped my badge with its
clock from under the pillow. Glory be to the Well-Doer! I had twenty
minutes more! But those minutes were such tiny, short ones! They ran! And
I wanted to tell her so many things. I wanted to tell her all about myself;
about the letter from O- and about that terrible evening when I gave her a
child; and for some reason also about my childhood, about our
mathematician Plappa and about the square-root of minus one; and how,
when I attended the glorification on the Day of Unanimity for the first time
in my life, I wept bitterly because there was an ink-stain on my unif—on
such a holy day!
I-330 lifted her head. She leaned on her elbow. In the corners of her lips
two long, sharp lines and the dark angle of lifted eyebrows—a cross.
“Perhaps on that day …” her brow grew darker; she took my hand and
pressed it hard. “Tell me, will you ever forget me? Will you always
remember me?”
“But why such talk? What is it, I-, dear?”
She was silent. And her eyes were already sliding past me, through me,
away into the distance. I suddenly heard the wind beating the glass with its
enormous wings. Of course it had been blowing all the while but I had not
noticed it until then. And for some reason those cawing birds over the
Green Wall came to my mind.
I-330 shook her head with a gesture of throwing something off. Once
more she touched me for a second with her whole body, as an aero before
landing touches the ground for a second with all the tension of a recoiling
spring.
“Well, give me my stockings, quick!”
The stockings were on the desk, on the open manuscript, on page 124.
Being in haste I caught some of the pages and they were scattered over the
floor so that it was hard to put them back in the proper order. Moreover,
even if I put them in that order there will be no real order; there are
obstacles to that anyway, some undiscoverable unknowns.
“I can’t bear it,” I said, “You are here, near me, yet you seem to be
behind an opaque ancient wall; through that wall I hear a rustle and voices;
I cannot make out the words, I don’t know what is there. I cannot bear it.
You seem always to withhold something from me; you have never told me
what kind of a place it was where I found myself that day beneath the
Ancient House. Where did those corridors lead? Why was the doctor
there—or perhaps all that never happened?”
I-330 put her hands on my shoulders and slowly entered deeply into my
eyes.
“You want to know all?”
“Yes, I do.”
“And you would not be afraid to follow me anywhere? Wherever I
should lead you?”
“Anywhere!”
“All right then. I promise you, after the holiday, if only. … Oh yes, there
is your Integral. I always forget to ask; will it soon be completed?”
“No. ‘If only’ what? Again! ‘If only’ what?”
She, already at the door: “You shall see.”
I was again alone. All that she left behind her was a barely perceptible
scent, similar to that of a sweet, dry, yellow dust of flowers from behind the
Green Wall; also, sunk deeply within me, question marks like small hooks
similar to those the ancients used for fishing (vide the Prehistoric Museum).
… Why did she suddenly ask about the Integral?
 RECORD TWENTY-FOUR

The limit of the function—Easter—To cross

out everything.

I am like a motor set in motion at a speed of too many revolutions per

second, the bearings have become too hot and in one more minute the
molten metal will begin to drip and everything will go to the devil. Cold
water! Quick! Some logic! I pour pailfuls of it, but my logic merely sizzles
on the hot metal and disappears in the air in the form of vapor.
Of course it is clear that in order to establish the true meaning of a
function, one must establish its limit. It is also clear that yesterday’s
“dissolution in the universe” taken to its limit is death. For death is exactly
the most complete dissolution of the self in the universe. Hence: L = f (D),
love is the function of death.
Yes, exactly, exactly! That is why I am afraid of I-330; I struggle against
her, I don’t want. … But why is it that within me “I don’t want to” and “I
want to” stand side by side? That is the chief horror of the matter; I
continue to long for that happy death of yesterday. The horror of it is that
even now, when I have integrated the logical function, when it becomes
evident that the latter contains death hidden in it, nevertheless I long for it
with my lips, arms, breast, with every millimeter. …
Tomorrow is the Day of Unanimity. She will certainly be there and I shall
see her, though from a distance. That distance will be painful to me, for I
must be, I am inevitably drawn, close to her, so that her hands, her shoulder,
her hair. … I long for even that pain. … Let it come. … Great Well-Doer!
How absurd to desire pain! Who is ignorant of the simple fact that pains are
negative items which reduce that sum total we call happiness?
Consequently … Well, no “consequently” … Emptiness. … Nakedness!
 The Same Evening.

Through the glass wall of the house I see a disquieting, windy, feverishly
pink, sunset. I move my armchair to avoid that pinkness and turn over these
pages, and I find I am forgetting that I write this not for myself but for you
unknown people whom I love and pity, for you who still lag centuries
behind, below. Let me tell you about the Day of Unanimity, about that Great
Day. I think that day for us is what Easter was for the ancients. I remember
I used to prepare an hour-calendar the eve of that day; solemnly I would
cross out every time the figure of the hour elapsed; nearer by one hour! one
hour less to wait! … If I were certain that nobody would discover it, I assure
you I should now too, make out such a calendar and carry it with me, and I
should watch how many hours remain until tomorrow, when I shall see, at
least from a distance. …
(I was interrupted. They brought me a new unif from the shop. As is
customary, new unifs are given to us for tomorrow’s celebration. Steps in
the hall, exclamations of joy, noises.)
I shall continue; tomorrow I shall see the same spectacle which we see
year after year and which always awakes in us fresh emotions, as though we
saw it for the first time: an impressive throng of piously lifted arms.
Tomorrow is the day of the yearly election of the Well-Doer. Tomorrow we
shall again hand over to our Well-Doer the keys to the impregnable fortress
of our happiness. Certainly this in no way resembles the disorderly,
unorganized election-days of the ancients, on which (it seems so funny!)
they did not even know in advance the result of the election. To build a state
on some non-discountable contingencies, to build blindly—what could be
more nonsensical? Yet centuries were required to pass before this was
understood!
Needless to say, we in this respect as in all others have no place for
contingencies; nothing unexpected can happen. The elections themselves
have rather a symbolic meaning. They remind us that we are a united,
powerful organism of millions of cells, that—, to use the language of the
“gospel” of the ancients, we are a united church. The history of the United
State knows not a single case in which upon this solemn day even a solitary
voice has dared to violate the magnificent unison.
They say that the ancients used to conduct their elections secretly,
stealthily like thieves. Some of our historians assert even that they would
come to the electoral celebrations completely masked. Imagine the weird,
fantastic spectacle! Night. A plaza. Along the walls the stealthily creeping
figures covered with mantles. The red flame of torches dancing in the
wind. … Why was such secrecy necessary? It has never been satisfactorily
explained. Probably it resulted from the fact that elections were associated
with some mystic and superstitious, perhaps even criminal ceremonies. We
have nothing to conceal or to be ashamed of; we celebrate our election
openly, honestly, in daylight. I see them all vote for the Well-Doer and
everybody sees me vote for the Well-Doer. How could it be otherwise, since
“all” and “I” are one “we”? How ennobling, sincere, lofty, is this compared
with the cowardly, thievish “secrecy” of the ancients! Moreover, how much
more expedient! For even admitting for a moment the impossible, that is the
outbreak of some dissonance in our customary unity, in that case our unseen
Guardians are always right there among us, are they not, to register the
Numbers who would fall into error and save them from any further false
steps? The United State is theirs, the Numbers’! And besides. …
Through the wall to my left a she-number before the mirror-door of the
closet; she is hastily unbuttoning her unif. For a second, swiftly—eyes, lips,
two sharp, pink … the curtains fell. Within me instantly awoke all that
happened yesterday and now I no longer know what I meant to say by
“besides. …” I no longer wish to;—I cannot. I want one thing. I want I-330.
I want her every minute, every second, to be with me, with no one else. All
that I wrote about Unanimity is of no value; it is not what I want; I have a
desire to cross it out, to tear it to pieces and throw it away. For I know (be it
a sacrilege, yet it is the truth), that a glorious Day is possible only with her
and only then when we are side by side, shoulder to shoulder. Without her
the Sun of tomorrow will appear to me only as a little circle cut out of a tin
sheet, and the sky a sheet of tin painted blue, and I myself … I snatched the
telephone receiver.
“I-330, are you there?”
“Yes, it is I. Why so late?”
“Perhaps not too late yet. I want to ask you … I want you to be with me
tomorrow—dear!”
“Dear” I said in a very low voice. And for some reason a thing I saw this
morning at the docks flashed through my mind: just for fun someone put a
watch under the hundred-ton sledgehammer. … A swing, a breath of wind in
the face and the silent hundred-ton, knife-like weight on the breakable
watch. …
A silence. I thought I heard someone’s whisper in I-330’s room. Then her
voice:
“No, I cannot. Of course you understand that I myself. … No, I cannot.
‘Why?’ You shall see tomorrow.”
Night.
 RECORD TWENTY-FIVE

The descent from heaven—The greatest

catastrophe in history—The known ——— is
ended.

At the beginning all arose, and the hymn, like a solemn mantle, slowly
waved above our heads. Hundreds of tubes of the Musical Tower and
millions of human voices. For a second I forgot everything; I forgot that
alarming something at which I-330 hinted in connection with today’s
celebration; I think I even forgot about her. At that moment I was the very
same little boy who once wept because of a tiny ink-stain on his unif, which
no one else could see. Even if it be so, if nobody sees that I am covered
with black, ineffaceable stains, I know it, do I not? I know that there should
be no place for a criminal like me among these frank open faces. What if I
should rush forward and shout out all at once everything about myself! The
end might follow. Let it! At least for a second I would feel myself clear and
clean and senseless like that innocent blue sky. …
All eyes were directed upward; in the pure morning blue, still moist with
the tears of night, a small dark spot appeared. Now it was dark, now bathed
in the rays of the sun. It was He, descending to us from the sky, He—the
new Jehovah—in an aero, He, as wise and as lovingly cruel as the Jehovah
of the ancients. Nearer and nearer, and higher toward him were drawn
millions of hearts. Already he saw us. And in my mind with Him I looked
over everything from the heights: concentric circles of stands marked with
dotted blue lines of unifs—like circles of a spiderweb strewn with
microscopic suns (the shining of the badges). And in the centre there soon
the wise white spider would occupy his place—the Well-Doer clad in white,
the Well-Doer who wisely tangled our hands and feet in the salutary net of
happiness.
His magnificent descent from the sky was accomplished. The brassy
Hymn came to silence; all sat down. At once I perceived that everything
was really a very thin spiderweb, the threads of which were stretched tense
and trembling, and it seemed that in a moment those threads might break
and something improbable. …
I half rose and looked around, and I met many lovingly-worried eyes
which passed from one face to another. I saw someone lifting his hand and
almost imperceptibly waving his fingers—he was making signs to another.
The latter replied with a similar finger-sign. And a third. … I understood;
they were the Guardians. I understood; they were alarmed by something—
the spiderweb was stretched and trembling. And within me as if tuned to the
same wavelength of a radio, within me there was a corresponding quiver.
On the platform a poet was reciting his pre-electoral ode. I could not hear
a single word; I only felt the rhythmic swing of the hexametric pendulum,
and with its every motion I felt how nearer and nearer there was
approaching some hour set for. … I continued to turn over face after face
like pages but I could not find the one, the only one, I was seeking, the one
I needed to find at once, as soon as possible, for one more swing of the
pendulum and. …
It was he, certainly it was he! Below, past the main platform, gliding over
the sparkling glass, the ear-wings flapped by, the running body gave a
reflection of a double-curved S-, like a noose which was rolling toward
some of the intricate passages among the stands. S-, I-330—there is some
thread between them. I have always felt some thread between them. I don’t
know yet what that thread is but some day I shall untangle it. I planted my
gaze on him; he was rushing farther away, behind him that invisible
thread. … There he stopped … there. … I was pierced, twisted together into
a knot as if by a lightning-like, many-volted electric discharge; in my row,
not more than 40° from me, S- stopped and bowed. I saw I-330 and beside
her the smiling, repellent, negro-lipped R-13.
My first thought was to rush to her and cry, “Why with him? Why did
you not want … ?” But the salutary invisible spiderweb bound fast my hands
and feet; so, gritting my teeth together I sat stiff as iron, my gaze fixed upon
them. A sharp physical pain at my heart. I remember my thought: “if
nonphysical causes effect physical pain, then it is clear that. …”
 I regret that I did not come to any conclusion. I remember only that
something about “soul” flashed through my mind, a purely nonsensical
ancient expression, “His soul fell into his boots” passed through my head.
My heart sank. The hexameter came to an end. It was about to start. What
“It”?
The five minute pre-election recess established by custom. The custom-
established pre-electional silence. But now it was not that pious, really
prayer-like silence that it usually was. Now it was as in the ancient days
when there were no Accumulating Towers, when the sky, still untamed in
those days, would roar from time to time with its “storms.” It was like the
“lull before the storm” of the ancient days. The air seemed to be made of
transparent, vaporized cast-iron. One wanted to breathe with one’s mouth
wide open. My hearing, intense to painfulness, registered from behind a
mouse-like, gnawing, worried whisper. Without lifting my eyes I saw those
two, I-330 and R-13, side by side, shoulder to shoulder—and on my knees
my trembling, foreign, hateful, hairy hands. …
Everybody was holding a badge with a clock in his hands. One. …
Two. … Three. … Five minutes. From the main platform a cast-iron, slow
voice:
“Those in favor shall lift their hands.”
If only I dared to look straight into his eyes as formerly! Straight and
devotedly, and think: “Here I am, my whole self! Take me!” But now I did
not dare. I had to make an effort to raise my hand, as if my joints were
rusty.
A whisper of millions of hands. Someone’s subdued “Ah!” and I felt
something was coming, falling heavily, but I could not understand what it
was, and I did not have the strength or courage to take a look. …
“Those opposed?” …
This was always the most magnificent moment of our celebration: all
would remain sitting motionless, joyfully bowing their heads under the
salutary yoke of that Number of Numbers. But now, to my horror again I
heard a rustle; light as a sigh, yet it was more distinct even than the brass
tube of the Hymn. Thus the last sigh in a man’s life, around him people with
their faces pale and with drops of cold sweat upon their foreheads. … I
lifted my eyes and. …
It took one hundredth of a second only; I saw thousands of hands arise
“opposed” and fall back. I saw the pale cross-marked face of I-330 and her
lifted hand. Darkness came upon my eyes.
Another hundredth of a second, silence. Quiet. The pulse. Then, as if at
the sign of some mad conductor, from all the stands rattling, shouting, a
whirlwind of unifs lifted by the rush, the perplexed figures of the Guardians
running to and fro. Someone’s heels in the air near my eyes and close to
those heels someone’s wide-open mouth tearing itself by an inaudible
scream. For some reason this picture remains particularly distinct in my
memory: thousands of mouths noiselessly yelling as if on the screen of a
monstrous cinema. Also as if on a screen, somewhere below at a distance,
for a second—O-90, pressed against the wall in a passage, her lips white,
defending her abdomen with her crossed arms. She disappeared as if
washed away by a wave, or else I simply forgot her because. …
This not on the screen any more but within me, within my compressed
heart, within the rapidly pulsating temples; over my head, somewhat to the
left, R-13 suddenly jumped upon a bench, all sprinkling, red, rabid. In his
arms was I-330, pale, her unif torn from shoulder to breast, red blood on
white. She firmly held him round the neck, and he with huge leaps from
bench to bench, repellent and agile, like a gorilla, was carrying her away
upward.
As if it were in a fire of ancient days, everything became red around me.
Only one thing in my head: to jump after them, to catch them. At this
moment I cannot explain to myself the source of that strength within me,
but like a battering-ram I broke through the crowd, over somebody’s
shoulders, over a bench and I was there in a moment and caught R-13 by
the collar:
“Don’t you dare! Don’t you dare, I say! Immediately—”
Fortunately no one could hear my voice, as everyone was shouting and
running.
“Who is it? What is the matter? What—” R-13 turned around; his
sprinkling lips were trembling. He apparently thought it was one of the
Guardians.
“What? I do not want—I won’t allow—Put her down at once!”
But he only sprinkled angrily with his lips, shook his head and ran on.
Then I … I am terribly ashamed to write all this down but I believe I must,
so that you, my unknown readers, may make a complete study of my
disease. … Then I hit him over the head with all my might. You understand?
I hit him. This I remember distinctly. I remember also a feeling of liberation
that followed my action, a feeling of lightness in my whole body.
I-330 slid quickly out of his arms.
“Go away!” she shouted to R-, “Don’t you see that he—? Go!”
R-13 showed his white negro teeth, sprinkled into my face some word,
dived down and disappeared. And I picked up I-330, pressed her firmly to
myself and carried her away.
My heart was beating forcibly. It seemed enormous. And with every beat
it would splash out such a thundering, such a hot, such a joyful wave! A
flash: “Let them, below there, let them toss and rush and yell and fall; what
matter if something has fallen, if something has been shattered to dust?—
Little matter! Only to remain this way and carry her, carry and carry. …”

The Same Evening, Twenty-Two O’Clock.

I hold my pen with great difficulty. Such an extraordinary fatigue after all
the dizzying events of this morning. Is it possible that the strong, salutary,
centuries-old walls of the United State have fallen? Is it possible that we are
again without a roof over our heads, back in the wild state of freedom like
our remote ancestors? Is it possible that we have lost our Well-Doer?
“Opposed!” On the Day of Unanimity—opposed! I am ashamed of them,
painfully, fearfully ashamed. … But who are “they”? And who am I?
“They,” “We” … ? Do I know?
I shall continue.
She was sitting where I had brought her on the uppermost glass bench
which was hot from the sun. Her right shoulder and the beginning of the
wonderful and incalculable curve were uncovered—an exceedingly thin
serpent of blood. She seemed not to be aware of the blood, or that her breast
was uncovered. No, I will say rather: she seemed to see all that and seemed
to feel that it was essential to her, that if her unif were buttoned she would
have torn it, she would have. …
“And tomorrow!” She breathed the words through sparkling white
clenched teeth, “Tomorrow, nobody knows what … do you understand?
Neither I nor anyone else knows; it is unknown! Do you realize what a joy
it is? Do you realize that all that was certain has come to an end? Now …
things will be new, improbable, unforeseen!”
 Below the human waves were still foaming, tossing, roaring, but they
seemed to be very far away, and to be growing more and more distant. For
she was looking at me. She slowly drew me into herself through the narrow,
golden windows of her pupils. We thus remained silent for a long while.
And for some reason I recalled how once I watched some queer yellow
pupils through the Green Wall, while above the Wall birds were soaring (or
was this another time?).
“Listen, if nothing particular happens tomorrow, I shall take you there; do
you understand?”
No, I did not understand but I nodded in silence. I was dissolved, I
became infinitesimal, a geometrical point. …
After all, there is some logic—a peculiar logic of today, in this state of
being a point. A point has more unknowns than any other entity. If a point
should start to move, it might become thousands of curves, or hundreds of
solids.
I was afraid to budge. What might I have become if I had moved? It
seemed to me that everybody like myself was afraid now of even the most
minute of motions.
At this moment, for instance, as I sit and write, everyone is sitting hidden
in his glass cell, expecting something. I do not hear the buzzing of the
elevators, usual at this hour, or laughter or steps, from time to time
Numbers pass in couples through the hall, whispering, on tiptoe. …
What will happen tomorrow? What will become of me tomorrow?
 RECORD TWENTY-SIX

The world does exist—Rash—Forty-one

degrees centigrade.

Morning. Through the ceiling the sky is as usual firm, round, red-cheeked. I
think I should have been less surprised had I found above some
extraordinary quadrangular sun, or people clad in many-colored dresses
made of the skins of animals, or opaque walls of stone. Then the world, our
world, does still exist? Or is it only inertia? Is the generator already
switched out, while the armature is still roaring and revolving;—two more
revolutions, or three, and at the fourth will it die away?
Are you familiar with that strange state in which you wake up in the
middle of the night, open your eyes into the darkness and then suddenly feel
you are lost in the dark; you quickly, quickly begin to feel around, to seek
something familiar and solid, a wall, a lamp, a chair? In exactly the same
way I felt around, seeking in the Journal of the United State; quickly,
quickly—I found this:

“The celebration of the Day of Unanimity, long awaited by all,

took place yesterday. The same Well-Doer who so often proved
his unshakeable wisdom, was unanimously reelected for the
forty-eighth time. The celebration was clouded by a little
confusion, created by the enemies of happiness, who by their
action naturally lost the right to be the bricks for the foundation
of the renovated United State. It is clear to everybody that to
take into consideration their votes would mean to consider as a
part of a magnificent, heroic symphony the accidental cough of
a sick person who happened to be in a concert hall.”
 Oh, great Sage! Is it really true that despite everything we are saved?
What objection indeed can one find to this most crystalline syllogism? And
further on a few more lines:

“Today at twelve o’clock a joint meeting of the Administrative

Bureau, Medical Bureau, and Bureau of Guardians will take
place. An important State decree is to be expected shortly.”

No, the Walls still stand erect. Here they are! I can feel them. And that
strange feeling of being lost somewhere, of not knowing where I am—that
feeling is gone. I am not surprised any longer to see the sky blue and the
sun round and all the Numbers going to work as usual. …
I walked along the avenue with a particularly firm resounding step. It
seemed to me that everyone else walked exactly like me. But at the
crossing, on turning the corner, I noticed people strangely shying away,
going around the corner of a building sidewise, as if a pipe had burst in the
wall, as if cold water were spurting like a fountain on the sidewalk and it
was impossible to cross it.
Another five or ten steps and I too felt a spurt of cold water that struck
me and threw me from the sidewalk; at a height of approximately two
meters a quadrangular piece of paper was pasted to the wall and on that
sheet of paper—unintelligible, poisonously green letters:

MEPHI

And under the paper—an S-like curved back and wing-ears shaking with
anger or emotion. His right arm lifted as high as possible, his left arm
hopelessly stretched out backward like a hurt wing, he was trying to jump
high enough to reach the paper and tear it off but he was unable to do so. He
was a fraction of an inch too short.
Probably every one of the passersby had the same thought: “If I go to
help him, I, only one of the many, will he not think that I am guilty of
something and that I am therefore anxious to. …”
I must confess, I had that thought. But remembering how many times he
had proved my real Guardian-angel and how often he had saved me, I
stepped towards him and with courage and warm assurance I stretched out
my hand and tore off the sheet. S- turned around. The little drills sank
quickly into me to the bottom and found something there. Then he lifted his
left brow, winked toward the wall where “Mephi” had been hanging a
minute ago. The tail of his little smile twinkled even with a certain pleasure
which greatly surprised me. But why should I be surprised? A doctor
always prefers a temperature of 40° C and a rash to the slow, languid rise of
the temperature during the period of incubation of a disease; it enables him
to determine the character of the disease. Mephi broke out today on the
walls like a rash. I understood his smile.
In the passage to the underground railway, under our feet on the clean
glass of the steps again a white sheet: Mephi. And also on the walls of the
tunnel and on the benches and on the mirror of the car. (Apparently pasted
on in haste as some were hanging on a slant.) Everywhere the same white
gruesome rash.
I must confess that the exact meaning of that smile became clear to me
only after many days which were overfilled with the strangest and most
unexpected events.
The roaring of the wheels, distinct in the general silence, seemed to be
the noise of infected streams of blood. Some Number was inadvertently
touched on the shoulder and he started so that a package of papers fell out
of his hands. To my left another Number was reading a paper, his eyes fixed
always on the same line; the paper perceptibly trembled in his hands. I felt
that everywhere, in the wheels, in the hands, in the newspapers, even in the
eyelashes, the pulse was becoming more and more rapid and I thought it
probable that today when I-330 and I should find ourselves there, the
temperature would rise to 39°, 40°, perhaps 41° and. …
At the docks—the same silence filled with the buzzing of an invisible
propeller. The lathes were silent as if brooding. Only the cranes were
moving almost inaudibly as if on tiptoe, gliding, bending over, picking up
with their tentacles the lumps of frozen air and loading the tanks of the
Integral. We are already preparing the Integral for a trial flight.
“Well, shall we have her up in a week?” This was my question addressed
to the Second Builder. His face is like porcelain, painted with sweet blue
and tender pink little flowers (eyes and lips), but today those little flowers
looked faded and washed-out. We were counting aloud when suddenly I
broke off in the midst of a word and stopped, my mouth wide open; above
the cupola, above the blue lump lifted by the crane, there was a scarcely
noticeable small white square. I felt my whole body trembling—perhaps
with laughter. Yes! I myself heard my own laughter. (Did you ever hear
your own laughter?)
“No, listen,” I said. “Imagine you are in an ancient aeroplane. The
altimeter shows 5,000 meters. A wing breaks; you are dashing down like. …
And on the way you calculate: ‘Tomorrow from twelve to two … from two
to six … and dinner at five!’ Would it not be absurd?”
The little blue flowers began to move and bulge out. What if I were made
of glass and he could have seen what was going on within me at that
moment? If he knew that some three or four hours later. …
 RECORD TWENTY-SEVEN

No headings. It is impossible!

I was alone in the endless corridors. In those same corridors. … A mute,

concrete sky. Water was dripping somewhere upon a stone. The familiar
heavy opaque door—and the subdued noise from behind it.
She said she would come out at sixteen sharp. It was already five
minutes, then ten, then fifteen past sixteen. No one appeared. For a second I
was my former self, horrified at the thought that the door might open.
“Five minutes more, and if she does not come out. …”
Water was dripping somewhere upon a stone. No one about. With
melancholy pleasure I felt: “saved,” and slowly I turned and walked back
along the corridor. The trembling dots of the small lamps on the ceiling
became dimmer and dimmer. Suddenly a quick rattle of a door behind me.
Quick steps, softly echoing from the ceiling and the walls. It was she, light
as a bird, panting somewhat from running.
“I knew you would be here, you would come! I knew you—you. …”
The spears of her eyelashes moved apart to let me in and … how can I
describe what effect that ancient, absurd and wonderful rite has upon me
when her lips touch mine? Can I find a formula to express that whirlwind
which sweeps out of my soul everything, everything save her? Yes, yes
from my soul. You may laugh at me if you will.
She made an effort to raise her eyelids and her slow words too came with
an effort:
“No. Now we must go.”
The door opened. Old, worn steps. An unbearably multicolored noise,
whistling and light. …
Twenty-four hours have passed since then and everything seems to have
settled in me, yet it is most difficult for me to find words for even an
approximate description. … It is as though a bomb had exploded in my
head. … Open mouths, wings, shouts, leaves, words, stones, all these one
after another in a heap. …
I remember my first thought was: “Fast—back!” For it was clear to me
that while I was waiting there in the corridors, they somehow had blasted
and destroyed the Green Wall, and from behind it everything rushed in and
splashed over our city which until then had been kept clean of that lower
world. I must have said something of this sort to I-330. She laughed.
“No, we have simply come out beyond the Green Wall.”
Then I opened my eyes, and close to me, actually, I saw those very things
which until then not a single living Number had ever seen otherwise than
depreciated a thousand times, dimmed and hazy through the cloudy glass of
the Wall.
The Sun—it was no longer our light, evenly diffused over the mirror
surface of the pavements; it seemed an accumulation of living fragments, of
incessantly oscillating, dizzy spots which blinded the eyes. And the trees!
Like candles rising into the very sky, or like spiders which squatted upon
the earth, supported by their clumsy paws, or like mute green fountains.
And all this was moving, jumping, rustling. Under my feet some strange
little ball was crawling. … I stood as though rooted to the ground. I was
unable to take a step because under my foot there was not an even plane,
but (imagine!), something disgustingly soft, yielding, living, springy,
green! …
I was dazed; I was strangled—yes, strangled; it is the best word to
express my state. I stood holding fast with both hands to a swinging branch.
“It is nothing. It is all right. It is natural—for the first time. It will pass.
Courage!”
At I-330’s side bouncing dizzily on a green net—someone’s thinnest
profile, cut out of paper. No, not “someone’s.” I recognized him. I
remembered. It was the doctor. I understood everything very clearly. I
realized that they both caught me beneath the arms and laughingly dragged
me forward. My legs twisted and glided. … Terrible noise, cawing, stumps,
yelling, branches, tree-trunks, wings, leaves, whistling. …
 The trees ran apart. A bright clearing. In the clearing, people, or perhaps
to be more exact, beings. Now comes the most difficult part to describe for
this was beyond any bounds of probability. It is clear to me now why I-330
was stubbornly silent about it before; I should not have believed it, should
not have believed even her. It is even possible that tomorrow I shall not
believe myself, shall not believe my own description in these pages.
In the clearing, around a naked, skull-like rock—a noisy crowd of three
or four hundred … people. Well, let’s call them people. I find it difficult to
coin new words. Just as on the stands you recognize in the general
accumulation of faces only those which are familiar to you, so at first I
recognized only our grayish-blue unifs. But one second later and I saw
distinctly and clearly among the unifs dark, red, golden, black, brown and
white humans—apparently they were humans. None of them had any
clothes on, and their bodies were covered with short, glistening hair, like
that which may be seen on the stuffed horse in the Prehistoric Museum. But
their females had faces exactly, yes exactly, like the faces of our women:
tender, rosy and not overgrown with hair. Also their breasts were free of
hair, firm breasts of wonderful geometrical form. As to the males, only a
part of their faces were free from hair, like our ancestors’, and the organs of
reproduction, similar to ours.
All this was so unbelievable, so unexpected, that I stood there quietly (I
assert positively that I stood quietly), and looked around. Like a scale:
overload one side sufficiently and then you may gently put on the other as
much as you will; the arrow will not move.
Suddenly I felt alone. I-330 was no longer with me. I don’t know how
nor where she disappeared. Around me were only those, with their hair
glistening like silk in the sunlight. I caught someone’s warm, strong, dark
shoulder.
“Listen, please, in the name of the Well-Doer, could you tell me where
she went? A while, a minute ago she. …”
Long-haired, austere eyebrows turned to me.
“Sh … sh … silence!” He made a sign with his head towards the centre
where there stood the yellow, skull-like stone.
There above the heads of all I saw her. The sun beat straight into my
eyes, and because of that she seemed coal-black, standing out on the blue
cloth of the sky—a coal-black silhouette on a blue background. A little
higher the clouds were floating. And it seemed that not the clouds but the
rock itself, and she herself upon that rock, and the crowd and the clearing—
all were silently floating like a ship, and the earth was light and glided away
from under the feet. …
“Brothers!” (It was she.) “Brothers, you all know that there inside the
Wall, in the City, they are building the Integral. And you know also that the
day has come for us to destroy that Wall and all other walls, so that the
green wind may blow all over the earth, from end to end. But the Integral is
going to take these walls up into the heights to the thousands of other
worlds which every evening whisper to us with their lights through the
black leaves of night. …”
Waves and foam and wind were beating the rock:
“Down with the Integral! Down!”
“No, brothers, not ‘down.’ The Integral must be ours. And it shall be
ours. On the day when it first sets sail into the sky, we shall be on board.
For the Builder of the Integral is with us. He left the walls, he came with
me here in order to be with us. Long live the Builder!”
A second—and I was somewhere above everything. Under me: heads,
heads, heads, wide open yelling mouths, arms rising and falling. … There
was something strange and intoxicating in it all. I felt myself above
everybody; I was—I—a separate world; I ceased to be the usual item; I
became unity. …
Again I was below, near the rock, my body happy, shaken and rumpled,
as after an embrace of love. Sunlight, voices, and from above—the smile of
I-330. A golden-haired woman, her whole body silky-golden and diffusing
an odor of different herbs, was near by. She held a cup, apparently made of
wood. She drank a little from it with her red lips and then offered the cup to
me. I closed my eyes and with avidity I drank the sweet cold prickly sparks,
pouring them down on the fire which burned within me.
Soon afterward my blood and the whole world began to circulate a
thousand times faster; the earth seemed to be flying, light as down. And
within me everything was simple, light and clear. Only then I noticed on the
rock the familiar, enormous letters: M E P H I, and for some reason the
inscription seemed to me necessary. It seemed to be a simple thread binding
everything together. A rather rough picture hewn in the rock; this too,
seemed comprehensible; it represented a youth with wings and with a
transparent body, and in the place ordinarily occupied by the heart—a
blinding, red, blazing coal. Again, I understood that coal, or no, I felt it as I
felt without hearing every word of I-330 (she continued to speak from
above, from the rock), and I felt that all of them breathed one breath and
that they were all ready to fly somewhere like the birds over the Wall.
From behind, from the confusion of breathing bodies—a loud voice:
“But this is folly!”
It seems to me it was I, yes, I am certain it was I, who then jumped on the
rock; from there I saw the sun, heads, a green sea on a blue background,
and I cried:
“Yes, yes, precisely. All must become insane; we must become insane as
soon as possible! We must; I know it.”
I-330 was at my side. Her smile—two dark lines from the angles of her
mouth directed upward. … And within me a blazing coal. It was
momentary, light, a little painful, beautiful. … And later—only stray
fragments that remained sticking in me. …
… Very low and slowly a bird was moving. I saw it was living, like me.
It was turning its head now to the right and then to the left like a human
being, and its round black eyes screwed themselves into me. …
… Then: a human back glistening with fur the color of ancient ivory;—a
mosquito crawling on that back, a mosquito with tiny transparent wings.
The back twitched to chase the mosquito away; it twitched again. …
… And yet another thing: a shadow from the leaves, a woven, net-like
shadow. Some lay in that shadow, chewing something, something similar to
the legendary food of the ancients, a long yellow fruit and a piece of
something dark. They put some of it in my hand, and it seemed droll to me
for I did not know whether I might eat it or not. …
… And again: a crowd, heads, legs, arms, mouths, faces appearing for a
second and disappearing like bursting bubbles. For a second appeared (or
perhaps it was only an hallucination?) the transparent, flying wing-ears. …
With all my might I pressed the hand of I-330. She turned to me.
“What is the matter?”
“He is here! I thought, I—”
“Who?”
“S-, a second ago, in the crowd.”
The ends of the thin coal-black, brows moved to the temples—a smile
like a sharp triangle. I could not see clearly why she smiled. How could she
smile?
 “But you understand, I-330, don’t you, you understand what it means if
he, or one of them is here?”
“You are funny! How could it ever enter the heads of those within the
Wall that we are here? Remember; take yourself. Did you ever think it was
possible? They are busy hunting us there—let them! You are delirious!”
Her smile was light and cheerful and I too, was smiling; the earth was
drunken, cheerful, light, floating. …
 RECORD TWENTY-EIGHT

Both of them—Entropy and energy—The

opaque part of the body.

If your world is similar to the world of the ancients, then you may easily
imagine that one day you suddenly come upon a sixth or a seventh
continent, upon some Atlantis, and you find there unheard of cities,
labyrinths, people flying through the air without the aid of wings or aeros,
stones lifted into the air by the power of a gaze—in brief, imagine that you
see things that cannot come to your mind even if you suffer from dream-
sickness. That is how I feel now. For you must understand that no one has
ever gone beyond the Green Wall since the Two Hundred Years’ War, as I
already have told you.
I know that it is my duty to you, my unknown friends, to give more
details about that unsuspected strange world which opened to me yesterday.
But for the time being I am unable to return to that subject. Everything is so
novel, so novel it is like a rainstorm, and I am not big enough to collect it
all. I spread out the folds of my unif, my palms—and yet pailfuls splash
past me and only drops can reach these pages. …
At first I heard behind me, behind the door, a loud voice. I recognized her
voice, the voice of I-330, tense, metallic—and another one, almost
inflexible, like a wooden ruler, the voice of U-. Then the door came open
with a crack and both of them shot into the room. Shot is the right word.
I-330 put her hand on the back of my armchair and smiled over her
shoulder but only with her teeth, at U-. I should not care to stand before
such a smile.
“Listen,” she said to me, “this woman seems to have made it her business
to guard you from me like a little child. Is it with your permission?”
 “But he is a child. Yes! That is why he does not notice that you … that it
is only in order. … That all this is only a foul game! Yes! And it is my
duty. …”
For a second (in the mirror) the broken, trembling line of brows. I leaped,
controlling with difficulty the other self within me, the one with the hairy
fists; with difficulty, pushing every word through my teeth, I cried straight
into her face, into her very gills:
“Get out of here at once! Out! At once!”
The gills swelled at first into brick-red lumps, then fell and became gray.
She opened her mouth to say something but without a word she slammed it
shut and went out.
I threw myself towards I-330.
“Never, never will I forgive myself! She dared! You … but you don’t
think, do you, that you, that she. … This is all because she wants to register
on me but I. …”
“Fortunately she will not have time for that now. Besides, even a
thousand like her. … I don’t care. … I know you will not believe that
thousand but only me. For after all that happened yesterday, I am all yours,
all, to the very end, as you wanted it. I am in your hands; you can now at
any moment. …”
“What, ‘at any moment?’” (But at once I understood what. My blood
rushed to my ears and cheeks.) “Don’t speak about that, you must never
speak about that! The other I, my former self … but now. …”
“How do I know? Man is like a novel: up to the last page one does not
know what the end will be. It would not be worth reading otherwise.”
She was stroking my head. I could not see her face but I could tell by her
voice that she was looking somewhere very far into the distance; she
hooked herself to that cloud which was floating silently, slowly, no one
knows where to.
Suddenly she pushed me away with her hand, firmly but tenderly.
“Listen. I came to tell you that perhaps we are now … our last days. …
You know, don’t you, that all Auditoriums are to be closed after tonight?”
“Closed?”
“Yes. I passed by and saw that in all Auditoriums preparations are going
on: tables; medics all in white. …”
“But what does it all mean?”
 “I don’t know. Nobody knows as yet. That is the worst of it. I only feel
the current is on, the spark is jumping, and if not today, then tomorrow. …
Yet perhaps they will not have time. …”
For a long while I have ceased to understand who are they and who we. I
do not understand what I want; do I want them to have or not to have
enough time? One thing is clear to me: I-330 is now on the very edge, on
the very edge, and in one second more. …
“But it is folly,” I said. “You, versus the United State! It is the same as if
you should cover the muzzle of a gun with your hands and expect that way
to prevent the shot. … It is absolute folly!”
A smile.
“ ‘We must all go insane—as soon as possible go insane.’ It was
yesterday, do you remember?”
Yes, she was right; I had even written it down. Consequently it really
took place. In silence I looked into her face. At that moment the dark cross
was especially distinct.
“I-, dear, before it is too late. … If you want … I’ll leave everything, I’ll
forget everything, and we’ll go there beyond the Wall, to them. … I do not
even know who they are. …”
She shook her head. Through the dark windows of her eyes I saw within
her a flaming oven, sparks, tongues of flame and above them a heap of dry,
tarry wood. It was clear to me that it was too late, my words could be of no
avail.
She stood up. She would soon leave. Perhaps these were the last days, or
the last minutes. … I grasped her hand.
“No, stay a little while longer … for the sake … for the sake. …”
She slowly lifted my hand towards the light, my hairy paw which I
detest. I wanted to withdraw it but she held it tightly.
“Your hand. … You undoubtedly don’t know and very few do know, that
women from here occasionally used to fall in love with them. Probably
there are in you a few drops of that blood of the sun and the woods. Perhaps
that is why I. …”
Silence. It was so strange that because of that silence, because of an
emptiness, of nothing, my heart should beat so wildly. I cried.
“Ah, you shall not go yet! You shall not go until you tell me about
them … for you love … them, and I do not know even who they are, nor
where they come from.”
 “Who are they? The half we have lost. H2 and O, two halves; but in order
to get water, H2O, creeks, seas, waterfalls, storms, it is necessary that those
two halves be united.”
I distinctly remember every movement of hers. I remember she picked up
a glass triangle from my table and while talking she pressed its sharp edge
against her cheek; a white scar would appear; then it would fill again and
become pink and disappear. And it is strange that I cannot remember her
words, especially the beginning of the story. I remember only different
images and colors. At first, I remember, she told me about the Two Hundred
Years’ War. Red color. … On the green of the grass, on the dark clay, on the
pale blue of the snow—everywhere red ditches that would not become dry.
Then yellow; yellow grass burned by the sun, yellow naked wild-men and
wild dogs side by side near swollen cadavers of dogs or perhaps of men. All
this, certainly beyond the Walls, for the City was already the victor and it
possessed already our present-day petroleum food. And at night … down
from the sky … heavy black folds. The folds would swing over the woods,
the villages—blackish-red slow columns of smoke. A dull moaning; endless
strings of people driven into the City to be saved by force and to be
whipped into happiness.
“… You knew almost all this.”
“Yes, almost.”
“But you did not know and only a few did, that a small part of them
remained together and stayed to live beyond the Wall. Being naked, they
went into the woods. They learned there from the trees, beasts, birds,
flowers and sun. Hair soon grew over their bodies, but under that hair they
preserved their warm red blood. With you it was worse; numbers covered
your bodies; numbers crawled over you like lice. One ought to strip you of
everything, and naked you ought to be driven into the woods. You ought to
learn how to tremble with fear, with joy, with wild anger, with cold; you
should pray to fire! And we Mephi, we want. …”
“Oh, wait a minute! ‘Mephi,’ what does it mean!”
“Mephi? It is from Mephisto. You remember, there on the rock, the figure
of the youth? Or, no. I shall explain it to you in your own language and you
will understand better: there are two forces in the world, entropy and
energy. One leads into blessed quietude, to happy equilibrium, the other to
the destruction of equilibrium, to torturingly perpetual motion. Our, or
rather your ancestors, the Christians, worshipped entropy like a God. But
we are not Christians, we. …”
At that moment a slight whisper was suddenly heard, a knock at the door,
and in rushed that flattened man with the forehead low over his eyes, who
several times had brought me notes from I-330. He ran straight to us,
stopped, panting like an air-pump, and could say not a word, as he must
have been running at top speed.
“But tell me! What has happened?” I-330 grasped him by the hand.
“They are coming here—” panted the air-pump, “with guards. … And
with them that what’s-his-name, the hunchback. …”
“S-?”
“Yes. They are in the house by this time. They’ll soon be here. Quick,
quick!”
“Nonsense, we have time!” I-330 was laughing, cheerful sparks in her
eyes. It was either absurd, senseless courage, or else there was something I
did not yet understand.
“I-, dear, for the sake of the Well-Doer! You must understand that
this. …”
“For the sake of the Well-Doer!” The sharp, triangle-smile.
“Well … well, for my sake, I implore you!”
“Oh, yes, I wanted to talk to you about some other matters. … Well, never
mind. … We’ll talk about them tomorrow.”
And cheerfully (yes cheerfully) she nodded to me; the other came out for
a second from under his forehead’s awning and nodded also. I was alone.
Quick! To my desk! I opened this manuscript, took the pen so that they
should find me at this work which is for the benefit of the United State.
Suddenly I felt every hair on my head living, separated, moving: “What if
they should read, even one page of these most recently written?”
Motionless I sat at the table but everything around me seemed to be
moving, as if the less than microscopic movements of the atoms suddenly
were magnified millions of times, and I saw the walls trembling, my pen
trembling and the letters swinging and fusing together. “To hide them! But
where?” Glass all around. “To burn them?” But they would notice the fire
through the corridor and in the neighboring room. Besides I felt unable, I
felt too weak, to destroy this torturing and perhaps dearest piece of my own
self. …
 Voices from a distance (from the corridor) and steps. I had only time to
snatch a handful of pages and put them under me, and then as if soldered to
the armchair, every atom of which was quivering, I remained sitting, while
the floor under my feet rolled like the deck of a ship, up and down. …
All shrunk together and hidden under the awning of my own forehead
like that messenger, I watched them stealthily; they were going from room
to room, beginning at the right end of the corridor. Nearer … nearer. … I
saw that some sat in their rooms, torpid like me; others would jump up and
open their doors wide—lucky ones! If only I too, could. …
“The Well-Doer is the most perfect fumigation humanity needs,
consequently no peristalsis in the organism of the United State could. …” I
was writing this nonsense, pressing my trembling pen hard, and lower and
lower my head bent over the table, and within me some sort of crazy
forge. … With my back I was listening … and I heard the click of the
doorknob. … A current of fresh air. … My armchair was dancing a mad
dance. … Only then, and even then with difficulty, I tore myself away from
the page, turned my head in the direction of the newcomers (how difficult it
is to play a foul game!). In front of all was S-, morose, silent, swiftly
drilling with his eyes deep shafts within me, within my armchair and within
the pages which were twitching in my hands. Then for a second—familiar,
everyday faces at the door; one of them separated itself from the rest with
its bulging, pinkish-brown gills. …
At once I recalled everything that happened in the same room half an
hour ago and it was clear to me that they would presently. …
All my being was shriveling and pulsating in that fortunately opaque part
of my body with which I was covering the manuscript. U- came up to S-,
gently plucked his sleeve and said in a low voice:
“This is D-503, the builder of the Integral. You have probably heard of
him. He is always like that, at his desk; does not spare himself at all!”
… And I thought! … What a dear, wonderful woman! …
S- slid up to me, bent over my shoulder toward the table. I covered the
lines I had written with my elbow but he shouted severely:
“Show us at once what you have there, please!”
Dying with shame, I held out the sheet of paper. He read it over, and I
noticed a tiny smile jump out of his eyes, jump down his face and slightly
wagging its tail, perch upon the right angle of his mouth. …
 “Somewhat ambiguous, yet. … Well, you may continue; we shall not
disturb you any more.”
He went splashing towards the door as if in a ditch of water. And with
every step of his I felt coming back to me my legs, my arms, my fingers—
my soul again distributed itself evenly over my whole body; I breathed. …
The last thing: U- lingered in my room to come back to me and say in my
very ear in a whisper: “It is lucky for you that I. …”
I did not understand. What did she mean by that? The same evening I
learned that they led away three Numbers, although nobody speaks out loud
about that, or about anything that happened. This ostensible silence is due
to the educational influence of the Guardians who are ever present among
us. Conversations deal chiefly with the quick fall of the barometer and the
forthcoming change in the weather.
 RECORD TWENTY-NINE

Threads on the face—Sprouts—An unnatural

compression.

It is strange: the barometer continues to fall yet there is no wind. There is

quiet. Above, the storm which we do not yet hear has begun. The clouds are
rushing with a terrific speed. There are few of them as yet; separate
fragments; it is as if there above us an unknown city were being destroyed
and pieces of walls and towers were rushing down, coming nearer and
nearer with terrific speed, but it will take some days of rushing through the
blue infinite before they reach the bottom, that is us, below. And below
there is silence.
There are thin, incomprehensible, almost invisible threads in the air;
every autumn they are brought here from beyond the Wall. They float
slowly, and suddenly you feel something foreign and invisible on your face;
you want to brush it off, but no, you cannot rid yourself of it. You feel it
especially near the Green Wall, where I was this morning. I-330 made an
appointment with me to meet her in the Ancient House in that “Apartment”
of ours.
I was not far from the rust-red, opaque mass of the Ancient House, when
I heard behind me short hasty steps and rapid breathing. I turned around and
saw O-90 trying to catch up to me. She seemed strangely and perfectly
rounded. Her arms and breast, her whole body, so familiar to me, was
rounded out, stretching her unif. It seemed as though it would soon tear the
thin cloth and come out into the sun, into the light. I think that there in the
green debris, in springtime, the unseen sprouts try thus to tear their way
through the ground in order to emit their branches and leaves and to bloom.
For a few seconds she shone into my face with her blue eyes in silence.
 “I saw you on the Day of Unanimity.”
“I saw you, too.” I at once remembered; below, in a narrow passage she
had stood, pressing herself to the wall, protecting her abdomen with her
arms, and automatically I glanced now at her abdomen which rounded the
unif. She must have noticed, for she became pink, and with a rosy smile:
“I am so happy … so happy! I am so full of … you understand, I am … I
walk and I hear nothing around me. … And all the while I listen within,
within me. …”
I was silent. Something foreign was shadowing my face and I was unable
to rid myself of it. Suddenly, all shining, light blue, she caught my hand; I
felt her lips upon it. … It was for the first time in my life. … It was some
ancient caress as yet unknown to me. … And I was so ashamed and it
pained me so much that I swiftly, I think even roughly, pulled my hand
away.
“Listen, you are crazy, it seems. … And anyway you … what are you
happy about? Is it possible that you forget what is ahead of you? If not now,
then within a month or two. …”
Her light went out, her roundness sagged and shrank. And in my heart an
unpleasant, even a painful compression, mixed with pity. Our heart is
nothing else than an ideal pump: a compression, i.e., a shrinking at the
moment of pumping, is a technical absurdity. Hence it is clear how
essentially absurd, unnatural and pathological are all these “loves” and
“pities,” etc., etc., which create that compression. …
Silence. To the left the cloudy green glass of the Wall. And just ahead the
dark red mass. Those two colors combined, gave me as a resultant what I
thought was a splendid idea.
“Wait! I know how to save you! I shall save you from. … To see one’s
own child for a few moments only and then be sent to death! No! You shall
be able to bring it up! You shall watch it and see it grow in your arms, and
ripen like a fruit. …”
Her body quivered and she seemed to have chained herself to me.
“Do you remember that woman, I-330? That … of … of long ago? …
Who during that walk? … Well, she is now right here, in the Ancient House.
Let us go to her and I assure you that I shall arrange matters at once.”
I already pictured us, I-330 and I, leading O-90 through the corridors …
then how she would be brought amidst flowers, grass, and leaves. … But
O-90 stepped back, the little horns of her rosy crescent trembling and
bending downward.
“Is she that same one?” she asked.
“That is. …” I was confused for some reason. “Yes, of course … that very
same. …”
“And you want me to go to her, to ask her … to. … Don’t you ever dare
to say another word about it!”
Leaning over, she walked away. … Then as if she remembered
something, she turned around and cried:
“I shall die; be it so! And it is none of your business … what do you
care?”
Silence. From above pieces of blue towers and walls were falling
downward with terrific speed … they will have perhaps hours or days to fly
through the infinite. … Unseen threads were slowly floating through the air,
planting themselves upon my face, and it was impossible to brush them off,
impossible to rid myself of them.
I walked slowly toward the Ancient House and in my heart I felt that
absurd, tormenting compression. …
 RECORD THIRTY

The last number—Galileo’s mistake—Would

it not be better?

Here is my conversation with I-330, which took place in the Ancient House
yesterday in the midst of loud noise, among colors which stifled the logical
course of my thoughts, red, green, bronze, saffron-yellow, orange colors. …
And all the while under the motionless marble smile of that snub-nosed
ancient poet.
I shall reproduce the conversation word by word, for it seems to me that
it may have an enormous and decisive importance for the fate of the United
State—more than that, for the fate of the universe. Besides, reading it, you
my unknown readers, may find some justification for me. I-330, without
preliminaries, at once threw everything upon my head:
“I know that the day after tomorrow the first trial trip of the Integral is to
take place. On that day we shall take possession of it.”
“What! Day after tomorrow?”
“Yes. Sit down and don’t be upset. We cannot afford to lose a minute.
Among the hundreds who were arrested yesterday there are twenty Mephis.
To let pass two or three days means that they will perish.”
I was silent.
“As observers on the trial trip they will send electricians, mechanicians,
physicians, meteorologists, etc. … At twelve sharp, you must remember
this, when the bell rings for dinner we shall remain in the passage, lock
them all up in the dining hall, and the Integral will be ours. You realize that
it is most necessary, happen what may! The Integral in our hands will be a
tool that will help to put an end to everything at once without pain. … Their
aeros? … Bah! They would be insignificant mosquitos against a buzzard.
And then, if it proves inevitable, we may direct the tubes of the motors
downward and by their work alone. …”
I jumped up.
“It is inconceivable! It is absurd! Is it not clear to you that what you are
contriving is a revolution?”
“Yes, a revolution. Why is it absurd?”
“Absurd? because a revolution is impossible! Because our (I speak for
myself and for you), our revolution was the last one. No other revolutions
may occur. Everybody knows that.”
A mocking, sharp triangle of brows.
“My dear, you are a mathematician, are you not? More than that, a
philosopher-mathematician? Well then, name the last number!”
“What is … I … I cannot understand, which last?”
“The last one, the highest, the largest.”
“But I-330, it is absurd! Since the number of numbers is infinite, how can
there be a last one?”
“And why then do you think there is a last revolution? There is no last
revolution, their number is infinite. … The ‘last one’ is a children’s story.
Children are afraid of the infinite, and it is necessary that children should
not be frightened, so that they may sleep through the night.”
“But what is the use, what is the use of it all? For the sake of the Well-
Doer! What is the use since all are happy already?”
“All right! Even suppose that is so. What further?”
“How funny! A purely childish question. You tell something to children,
come to the very end, yet they will invariably ask you, ‘what further?’ and
‘what for?’”
“Children are the only courageous philosophers. And courageous
philosophers are invariably children. One ought always to ask like children,
‘what further’?”
“Nothing further! Period. In the whole world evenly, everywhere, there is
distributed. …”
“Ah, ‘evenly!’ ‘Everywhere!’ That is the point, entropy! Psychological
entropy. Don’t you as a mathematician know that only differences (only
differences!), in temperature, only thermic contrasts make for life? And if
all over the world there are evenly warm or evenly cold bodies, they must
be pushed off! … in order to get flame, explosions! And we shall push! …”
 “But I-330, please realize that our ancestors during the Two Hundred
Years’ War did exactly that!”
“Oh, they were right! A thousand times right! They did one wrong thing,
however; later they began to believe that they were the last number, a
number that does not exist in nature. Their mistake was the mistake of
Galileo; he was right in that the earth revolves about the sun but he did not
know that our whole solar system revolves about some other centre, he did
not know that the real (not relative) orbit of the earth is not a naive circle.”
“And you, the Mephi?”
“We? For the time being we know that there is no last number. We may
forget that some day. Of course, we shall certainly forget it when we grow
old, as everything inevitably grows old. Then we shall inevitably fall like
autumn leaves from the trees, like you the day-after-tomorrow. … No, no
dear, not you personally. You are with us, are you not? You are with us?”
Flaming, stormy, sparkling! I never before had seen her in such a state.
She embraced me with her whole self; I disappeared.
Her last word, looking steadily, deeply into my eyes:
“Then, do not forget: at twelve o’clock sharp.”
And I answered:
“Yes, I remember.”
She left. I was alone amidst a rebellious, multi-voiced commotion of
blue, red, green, saffron-yellow and orange. …
Yes, at twelve! … Suddenly a feeling of something foreign on my face, of
something implanted, that could not be brushed off. Suddenly, yesterday
morning, and U- and all she shouted into the face of I-330! Why, how
absurd!
I hastened to get out of the house and home, home! Somewhere behind
me I heard the chattering of birds beyond the Wall. And ahead of me in the
setting sun the balls of cupolas made of red, crystallized fire, enormous
flaming cubes—houses, and the sharp point of the Accumulating Tower
high in the sky like a paralyzed streak of lightning. And all this, all this
impeccable, most geometric beauty, shall I, I myself, with my hands … ? Is
there no way out? No path? No trail?
I passed by an auditorium (I do not recall its number). Inside, the benches
were stacked along the walls. In the middle, tables covered with snow-white
glass sheets, with pink stains of sunny blood on the white. … There was
foreshadowed in all that some unknown and therefore alarming tomorrow.
It is unnatural for a thinking and seeing human being to live among
irregularities, unknowns, X’s. If suddenly your eyes were covered with a
bandage and you were let go to feel around, to stumble, ever aware that
somewhere very close to you there is the borderline, one step only and
nothing but a compressed, smothered piece of flesh will be left of you. … I
now feel somewhat like that.
… And what if without waiting for anything I should … just head
down. … Would it not be the only right thing to do? To disentangle
everything at once?
 RECORD THIRTY-ONE

The great operation—I forgave everything—

The collision of trains.

Saved! At the very last moment, when it seemed that there was nothing to
hold to, that it was the end! …
It was as if you already ascended the steps towards the threatening
machine of the Well-Doer, or as if the great glass Bell with a heavy thud
already covered you, and for the last time in life you looked at the blue sky
to swallow it with your eyes … when suddenly, it was only a dream! The
sun is pink and cheerful and the wall … what happiness to be able to touch
the cold wall! And the pillow! To delight endlessly in the little cavity
formed by your own head in the white pillow! … This is approximately
what I felt, when I read the State Journal this morning. It has been all a
terrible dream and this dream is over. And I was so feeble, so unfaithful,
that I thought of selfish, voluntary death! I am ashamed now to reread the
last lines of yesterday. But let them remain as a memory of that incredible
might-have-happened, which will not happen! On the front page of the
State Journal the following gleamed:

“REJOICE!
“For from now on we are perfect!
“Before today your own creation, engines, were more perfect
than you.
“WHY?
 “For every spark from a dynamo—is a spark of pure reason;
each motion of a piston—a pure syllogism. Is it not true that
the same faultless reason is within you?
“The philosophy of the cranes, presses, and pumps is
finished and clear like a circle. But is your philosophy less
circular? The beauty of a mechanism lies in its immutable,
precise rhythm, like that of a pendulum. But have you not
become as precise as a pendulum, you who are brought up on
the system of Taylor?
“Yes, but there is one difference:
“MECHANISMS HAVE NO FANCY
“Did you ever notice a pump cylinder during its work show
upon its face a wide, distant, sensuously-dreaming smile? Did
you ever hear cranes restlessly toss about and sigh at night,
during the hours designed for rest?
“NO!
“Yet on your faces (you may well blush with shame!), the
Guardians have seen more and more frequently those smiles
and they have heard your sighs. And (you should hide your
eyes for shame!) the historians of the United State all tendered
their resignations so as to be relieved from having to record
such shameful occurrences.
“It is not your fault; you are ill. And the name of your illness
is
“FANCY
“It is a worm that gnaws black wrinkles on one’s forehead. It
is a fever that drives one to run farther and farther, albeit
‘farther’ may begin where happiness ends. It is the last
barricade on our road to happiness.
“Rejoice! This Barricade Has Been Blasted at Last! The
Road is Open!
“The latest discovery of our State science is that there is a
centre for fancy—a miserable little nervous knot in the lower
 region of the frontal lobe of the brain. A triple treatment of this
knot with X-rays will cure you of fancy—
“Forever!
“You are perfect; you are mechanized; the road to hundred
percent happiness is open! Hasten then all of you, young and
old, hasten to undergo the great Operation! Hasten to the
auditoriums where the great Operation is being performed!
Long live the Great Operation! Long live the United State!
Long live the Well-Doer.”

You, had you read all this not in my records which look like an ancient
strange novel, had you like me held in your trembling hands the newspaper,
smelling of typographic ink … if you knew as I do, that all this is most
certain reality, if not the reality of today, then that of tomorrow—would you
not feel the very things I feel? Would not your head whirl as mine does?
Would there not run over your back and arms those strange, sweet, icy
needles? Would you not feel that you were a giant, an Atlas?—that if only
you stood up and straightened out you would reach the ceiling with your
head?
I snatched the telephone receiver.
“I-330. Yes. … Yes. Yes … 330!” And then, swallowing my own words I
shouted, “Are you at home? Yes? Have you read? You are reading now? Is
it not, is it not stupendous?”
“Yes. …” A long, dark silence. The wires buzzed almost imperceptibly.
She was thinking.
“I must see you today without fail. Yes, in my room, after sixteen,
without fail!”
Dear … she is such a dear! … “Without fail!” I was smiling and I could
not stop, I felt I should carry that smile with me into the street like a light
above my head.
Outside the wind ran over me, whirling, whistling, whipping, but I felt
even more cheerful. “All right, go on, go on moaning and groaning! The
Walls cannot be torn down.” Flying leaden clouds broke over my head …
well let them! They could not eclipse the sun! We chained it to the zenith
like so many Joshuas, sons of Nuns!
 At the corner a group of Joshuas, sons of Nuns, were standing with their
foreheads pasted to the glass of the wall. Inside, on a dazzling white table
already a Number lay. One could see two naked soles diverging from under
the sheet in a yellow angle. … White medics bent over his head—a white
hand, a stretched-out hand holding a syringe filled with something. …
“And you, what are you waiting for?” I asked nobody in particular, or
rather all of them.
“And you?” Someone’s round head turned to me.
“I? Oh, afterward! I must first. …” Somewhat confused, I left the place. I
really had to see I-330 first. But why first? I could not explain to myself. …
The docks. The Integral, bluish like ice, was glistening and sparkling.
The engine was caressingly grumbling, repeating some one word, as if it
were my word, a familiar one. I bent down and stroked the long, cold tube
of the motor. “Dear! What a dear tube! Tomorrow it will come to life,
tomorrow for the first time it will tremble with burning, flaming streams in
its bowels.”
With what eyes would I have looked at the glass monster had everything
remained as it was yesterday? If I knew that tomorrow at twelve I should
betray it, yes, betray. … Someone behind cautiously touched my elbow. I
turned around. The plate-like, flat face of the Second Builder.
“Do you know already?” he asked.
“What? About the Operation? Yes. How everything, everything …
suddenly. …”
“No, not that. The trial flight is put off until day-after-tomorrow—on
account of that Operation. They rushed us for nothing; we hurried. …”
“On account of that Operation!” Funny, limited man. He could see no
farther than his own platter! If only he knew that but for the Operation
tomorrow at twelve he would be locked-up in a glass cage, would be
tossing about, trying to climb the walls!
At twelve-thirty when I came into my room I saw U-. She was sitting at
my table, firm, straight, bone-like, resting her right cheek on her hand. She
must have waited for a long while because when she brusquely rose to meet
me there remained on her cheek five white imprints of her fingers.
For a second that terrible morning came back to me; she beside I-330,
indignant. But for a second only. All was at once washed off by the sun of
today, as it happens sometimes when you enter your room on a bright day
and absentmindedly turn on the light, the bulb shines but it is out of place,
droll, unnecessary.
Without hesitation I held out my hand to her; I forgave her everything.
She firmly grasped both my hands and pressed them till they hurt. Her
cheeks quivering and hanging down like ancient precious ornaments, she
said with emotion:
“I was waiting. … I want only one moment. … I only wanted to say …
how happy, how joyous I am for you! You realize of course, that tomorrow
or day-after-tomorrow you will be healthy again, as if born anew.”
I noticed my papers on the table; the last two pages of my record of
yesterday; they were in the place where I left them the night before. If only
she knew what I wrote there! Although I did not care after all. Now it was
only history; it was the ridiculously far off distance like an image through a
reversed opera-glass.
“Yes,” I said, “a while ago, while passing through the avenue, I saw a
man walking ahead of me. His shadow stretched along the pavement and
think of it! his shadow was luminous! I think, more than that, I am
absolutely certain that tomorrow all shadows will disappear. Not a shadow
from any person or anything! The sun will be shining through everything.”
She, gently and earnestly:
“You are a dreamer! I should not allow my children in school to talk that
way.”
She told me something about the children; that they were all led in one
herd to the Operation; that it was necessary to bind them afterward with
ropes; and that one must love pitilessly, “yes, pitilessly,” and that she
thought she might finally decide to. …
She smoothed out the grayish-blue fold of the unif that fell between her
knees, swiftly pasted her smiles all over me and went out.
Fortunately the sun did not stop today. The sun was running. It was
already sixteen o’clock. … I was knocking at the door, my heart was
knocking. …
“Come in!”
I threw myself upon the floor near her chair, to embrace her limbs, to lift
my head upward and look into her eyes, first into one then into the other,
and in each of them to see the reflection of myself in wonderful captivity. …
There beyond the wall it looked stormy, there the clouds were leaden—
let them be! My head was overcrowded with impetuous words, and I was
speaking aloud, and flying with the sun I knew not where. … No, now we
know where we are flying; planets were following me, planets sparkling
with flame and populated with fiery, singing flowers and mute planets, blue
ones where rational stones were unified into one organized society, and
planets which like our own earth had reached already the apex of one
hundred percent happiness.
Suddenly from above:
“And don’t you think that at the apex are, precisely, stones unified into an
organized society?” The triangle grew sharper and sharper, darker and
darker.
“Happiness … well? … Desires are tortures, are they not? It is clear
therefore, that happiness is where there are no longer any desires, not a
single desire any more. What an error, what an absurd prejudice it was, that
formerly we would mark happiness with the sign ‘plus’! No, absolute
happiness must be marked ‘minus,’—divine minus!”
I remember I stammered unintelligibly:
“Absolute zero!—minus 273° C.”
“Minus 273°—exactly! A somewhat cool temperature. But does it not
prove that we are at the summit?”
As before she seemed somehow to speak for me and through me,
developing to the end my own thoughts. But there was something so morbid
in her tone that I could not refrain … with an effort I drew out a “No.”
“No,” I said, “You, you are mocking. …”
She burst out laughing loudly, too loudly. Swiftly, in a second, she
laughed herself to some unseen edge, stumbled and fell over. … Silence.
She stood up, put her hands upon my shoulders and looked into me for a
long while. Then she pulled me toward her and everything seemed to have
disappeared save her sharp, hot lips. …
“Goodbye.”
The words came from afar, from above, and reached me not at once, only
after a minute, perhaps two minutes later.
“Why … why ‘goodbye’?”
“You have been ill, have you not? Because of me you have committed
crimes. Has not all this tormented you? And now you have the Operation to
look forward to. You will be cured of me. And that means—goodbye.”
“No!” I cried.
A pitilessly sharp black triangle on a white background.
 “What? Do you mean that you don’t want happiness?”
My head was breaking into pieces; two logical trains collided and
crawled upon each other, rattling and smothering. …
“Well, I am waiting. You must choose; the Operation and hundred
percent happiness, or. …”
“I cannot … without you. … I must not … without you. …” I said, or
perhaps I only thought, I am not sure which, but I-330 heard.
“Yes, I know,” she said. Then, her hands still on my shoulders and her
eyes not letting my eyes go, “Then … until tomorrow. Tomorrow at twelve.
You remember?”
“No, it was postponed for a day. Day-after-tomorrow!”
“So much the better for us. At twelve, day-after-tomorrow!”
I walked alone in the dusky street. The wind was whirling, carrying,
driving me like a piece of paper; fragments of the leaden sky were soaring,
soaring—they had to soar through the infinite for another day or two. …
Unifs of Numbers were brushing my sides—yet I was walking alone. It
was clear to me that all were saved but that there was no salvation for me.
For I do not want salvation. …
 RECORD THIRTY-TWO

I do not believe—Tractors—A little human

splinter.

Do you believe that you will die? Oh, yes, “Man is mortal. I am a man,
consequently. …” No, not that; I know that; you know it. But I ask: has it
ever happened that you actually believed it? Believed definitely, believed
not with your reason but with your body, that you actually felt that some
day those fingers which now hold this page, will become yellow, icy? …
No, of course you cannot believe this. That is why you have not jumped
from the tenth floor to the pavement before now, that is why you eat, turn
over these pages, shave, smile, write.
This very thing, yes, exactly this is alive in me today. I know that that
small black hand on the clock will slide down here towards midnight, then
again it will start to ascend, and it will cross some last border and the
improbable tomorrow will have arrived. I know it, but somehow I do not
believe it, or perhaps I think that twenty-four hours are twenty-four years.
Therefore I am still able to act, to hurry, to answer questions, to climb the
rope-ladder to the Integral. I am still able to feel how the latter is shaking
the surface of the water, and I still understand that I must grasp the railing,
and I am still able to feel the cold glass in my hand. I see the transparent,
living cranes, bending their long necks, carefully feeding the Integral with
the terrible explosive food which the motors need. I still see below on the
river the blue veins and knots of water swollen by the wind. … Yet all this
seems very distant from me, foreign, flat—like a draught on a sheet of
paper. And it seems to me strange, when the flat, draught-like face of the
Second Builder, suddenly asks:
 “Well, then. How much fuel for the motors shall we load on? If we count
on three, or say three and a half hours. …”
I see before me, over a draught, my hand with the counter and the
logarithmic dial at the figure 15.
“Fifteen tons. But you’d better take … yes, better take a thousand.”
I said that because I know that tomorrow. … I noticed that my hands and
the dial began to tremble.
“A thousand! What do you need such a lot for? That would last a week!
No, more than a week!”
“Well, nobody knows. …”
I do know. …
The wind whistled, the air seemed to be stuffed to the limit with
something invisible. I had difficulty in breathing, difficulty in walking, and
with difficulty, slowly but without stopping for a second the hand of the
Accumulating Tower was crawling, at the end of the avenue. The peak of
the Tower reached into the very clouds;—dull, blue, groaning in a subdued
way, sucking electricity from the clouds. The tubes of the Musical Tower
resounded.
As always—four abreast. But the rows did not seem as firm as usual;
they were swinging, bending more and more, perhaps because of the wind.
There! They seemed to have stumbled upon something at the corner, and
they drew back and stopped, congealed, a close mass, a clot, breathing
rapidly; at once all had stretched their necks like geese.
“Look! No look, look—there, quick!”
“They? Are those they?”
“Ah, never! Never! I’d rather put my head straight into the Machine. …”
“Silence! Are you crazy?”
On the corner the doors of the auditorium were ajar, a heavy column of
about fifty people—. The word “people” is not the right one. These were
heavy-wheeled automatons bound in iron and moved by an invisible
mechanism. Not people but a sort of human-like tractor. Over their heads,
floating in the air—a white banner with a golden sun embroidered on it, and
the rays of the sun: “We are the first! We have already been operated upon!
Follow us, all of you!”
They slowly, unhesitatingly mowed through the crowd, and it was clear
that if they had had in their way a wall, a tree, a house, they would have
moved on with no more hesitation through wall, tree or house. In the middle
of the avenue they fused and stretched out into a chain, arm in arm, their
faces turned towards us. And we, a human clot, tense, the hair pricking our
heads, we waited. Our necks were stretched out goose-fashion. Clouds. The
wind whistled. Suddenly the wings of the chain from right and left bent
quickly around us, and faster, faster, like a heavy engine descending a hill,
they closed the ring and pulled us toward the yawning doors and inside. …
Somebody’s piercing cry: “They are driving us in! Run!”
All ran. Close to the wall there still was an open living gate of human
beings. Everybody dashed through it, heads forward. Their heads became
sharp wedges, so with their ribs, shoulders, hips. … Like a stream of water
compressed in a firehose they spurted out in the form of a fan—and all
around me stamping feet, raised arms, unifs. … The double-curved S- with
his transparent wing-ears appeared for a moment close before my eyes; he
disappeared as suddenly; I was alone among arms and legs appearing for a
second and disappearing. I was running. …
I dashed to the entrance of a house to stop for a breath, my back close to
the door—and immediately, like a splinter borne by the wind, a human
being was thrown towards me.
“All the while I … I have been following you. I do not want … do you
see? I do not want … I am ready to. …”
Small round hands on my sleeves, round dark blue eyes—it was O-90.
She just slipped along my body like a unif which, its hanger broken, slips
along the wall to fall upon the floor. Like a little bundle she crumpled below
me on the cold doorstep, and I stood over her, stroking her head, her face—
my hands were wet. I felt as if I were very big and she very small, a small
part of myself. I felt something quite different from what I feel towards
I-330. I think that the ancients must have had similar feelings towards their
private children.
Below, passing through her hands with which she was covering her face,
a voice came to me:
“Every night I … I cannot! If they cure me. … Every night I sit in the
darkness alone and think of him, and of what he will look like when I. … If
cured I should have nothing to live with—do you understand me? You
must … you must. …”
An absurd feeling yet it was there; I really must! Absurd, because this
“duty” of mine was nothing but another crime. Absurd, because white and
black cannot be one, duty and crime cannot coincide. Or perhaps there is no
black and white in life, but everything depends upon the first logical
premise? If the premise is that I unlawfully gave her a child. …
“It is all right, but don’t, only don’t …” I said. “Of course I understand. …
I must take you to I-330, as I once offered to, so that she. …”
“Yes.” (This in a low voice, without uncovering her face.)
I helped her rise. Silently we went along the darkening street, each busy
with his own thoughts, or perhaps with the same thought. … We walked
between silent leaden houses, through the tense, whipping branches of the
wind. …
Through the whistling of the wind all at once I heard, as if splashing
through ditches, the familiar footsteps coming from some unseen point. At
the corner I turned around, and among the clouds, flying upside-down
reflected in the dim glass of the pavement I saw S-. Instantly my arms
became foreign, swinging out of time, and I began to tell O-90 in a low
voice that tomorrow, yes tomorrow, was the day of the first flight of the
Integral, and that it was to be something that never happened before in all
history, great, miraculous.
“Think of it! For the first time in life to find myself outside the limits of
our city and see—who knows what is beyond the Green Wall?”
O-90 looked at me extremely surprised, her blue eyes trying to penetrate
mine; she looked at my senselessly swinging arms. But I did not let her say
a word—I kept talking, talking. … And within me, apart from what I was
saying and audible only to myself a thought was feverishly buzzing and
knocking. “Impossible! You must somehow … you must not lead him to
I-330!”
Instead of turning to the right I turned to the left. The bridge
submissively bent its back in a slavish way to all three of us, to me, to O-,
to him behind. Lights were falling from the houses across the water, falling
and breaking into thousands of sparks which danced feverishly, sprayed
with the mad white foam of the water. The wind was moaning like a tensely
stretched string of a double-basso somewhere not far away. Through this
basso, behind, all the while. …
The house where I live. At the entrance O- stopped and began:
“No! You promised, did you not, that. …”
I did not let her finish. Hastily I pushed her through the entrance and we
found ourselves in the lobby. At the controller’s desk—the familiar,
hanging, excitedly quivering cheeks, a group of Numbers around. They
were quarreling about something, heads bending over the banisters on the
second floor; they were running downstairs one by one. But about that later.
I at once drew O-90 into the opposite, unoccupied corner and sat down with
my back to the wall. I saw a dark large-headed shadow gliding back and
forth over the sidewalk. I took out my notebook. O-90 in her chair was
slowly sinking as if she were evaporating from under her unif, as if her
body were thawing, as if only her empty unif were left, and empty eyes
taking one into the blue emptiness. In a tired voice:
“Why did you bring me here? You lied to me?”
“No, not so loud! Look here! Do you see? Through the wall?”
“Yes, I see a shadow.”
“He is always following me. … I cannot. … Do you understand? I cannot
therefore … I am going to write a few words to I-330. You take the note and
go alone. I know he will remain here.”
Her body began again to take form and to move beneath the unif; on her
face a faint sunrise, dawn. I put the note between her cold fingers, pressed
her hand firmly and for the last time looked into her blue eyes.
“Goodbye. Perhaps some day. …” She freed her hand. Slightly bending
over she slowly moved away, made two steps, turned around quickly and
again we were side by side. Her lips were moving; with her lips and with
her eyes she repeated some inaudible word. What an unbearable smile!
What suffering!
Then the bent-over human splinter went to the door; a bent-over little
shadow beyond the wall; without turning around she went on faster, still
faster. …
I went to U-’s desk. With emotion filling up her indignant gills she said
to me:
“They have all gone crazy! He, for instance, is trying to assure me that he
himself saw a naked man covered with hair near the Ancient House. …”
A voice from the group of empty raised heads;
“Yes. I repeat it, yes.”
“Well, what do you think of that? Oh, what a delirium!” The word
“delirium” came out of her mouth so full of conviction, so unbending, that I
asked myself: “Perhaps it really was nothing but delirium, all that has been
going on around me of late?” I glanced at my hairy hand and I remembered:
“There are, undoubtedly, some drops of that blood of the sun and woods in
you. That is why perhaps you. …” No, fortunately it was not delirium; or
no, unfortunately it was not delirium.
 RECORD THIRTY-THREE

This without a synopsis, hastily, the last.

The day.
Quick, to the newspaper! perhaps there. … I read the paper with my eyes
(exactly; my eyes now are like a pen, or like a counting machine which you
hold and feel in your hands like a tool, something foreign, an instrument).
In the newspaper on the first page, in large print:

“THE ENEMIES OF HAPPINESS ARE AWAKE! HOLD TO YOUR HAPPINESS

WITH BOTH HANDS. TOMORROW ALL WORK WILL STOP AND ALL THE
NUMBERS ARE TO COME TO BE OPERATED UPON. THOSE WHO FAIL TO
COME WILL BE SUBMITTED TO THE MACHINE OF THE WELL-DOER.”

Tomorrow! How can there be, how can there be any tomorrow?
Following my daily habit, I stretched out my arm (instrument!) to the
bookshelf to put today’s paper with the rest in a cover ornamented with
gold. While doing this: “What for? What does it matter? Never again shall
I. … In this cover, never. …” And out of my hands, down to the floor it fell.
I stood looking all around, over all my room; hastily I was taking away,
feverishly putting into some unseen valise everything I regretted leaving
here: my desk, my books, my chair. Upon that chair sat I-330 that day; I
was below on the floor. … My bed. … Then for a minute or two I stood and
waited for some miracle to happen; perhaps the telephone would ring,
perhaps she would say that. … But no, no miracle. …
I am leaving, going into the unknown. These are my last lines. Farewell
you, my unknown beloved ones, with whom I have lived through so many
pages, before whom I have bared my diseased soul, my whole self to the
last broken little screw, to the last cracked spring. … I am going. …
 RECORD THIRTY-FOUR

The forgiven ones—A sunny night—A radio-

walkyrie.

Oh, if only I actually had broken myself to pieces! If only I actually had
found myself with her in some place beyond the Wall, among beasts
showing their yellow tusks; if only I actually had never returned here! It
would be a thousand, a million times easier! But now—what? Now to go
and choke that—! But would it help? No, no, no! Take yourself in hand,
D-503! Set into yourself the firm logical hub; at least for a short while
weigh heavily with all your might on the lever, and like the ancient slave,
turn the millstones of syllogisms until you have written down and
understood everything that happened. …
When I boarded the Integral, everybody was already there and everybody
occupied his place; all the cells of the gigantic hive were filled. Through the
glass of the decks—tiny, ant-like people below, at the telegraph, dynamo,
transformers, altimeters, ventilators, indicators, motor, pumps, tubes. … In
the saloon people sitting over tables and instruments, probably those
commissioned by the Scientific Bureau. Near them the Second Builder and
his two aides. All three had their heads down between their shoulders like
turtles, their faces gray, autumnal, rayless.
“Well?” I asked.
“Well, somewhat uncanny,” replied one of them smiling a gray rayless
smile, “Perhaps we shall have to land in some unknown place. And,
generally speaking, nobody knows. …”
I hardly could bear to look at them, when in an hour or so I was to throw
them out with my own hands, to cast them out from the cozy figures of our
Tables of Hours, forever to tear them away from the mother’s breast of the
United State. They reminded me of the tragic figures of “The Three
Forgiven Ones”—a story known to all of our schoolchildren. It tells about
three Numbers, who by way of experiment were exempted for a whole
month from any work.3 “Go wherever you will, do what you will,” they
were told. The unhappy three wandered the whole time about the place of
their usual work and gazed within with hungry eyes. They would stop on
the plazas and for hours busy themselves repeating the motions which they
were used to making during certain hours of the day; it became a bodily
necessity for them to do so. They would saw and plane the air; with unseen
sledgehammers they would bang upon unseen stakes. Finally, on the tenth
day they could bear it no longer; they took one another by the hand, entered
the river, and to the accompaniment of the March they waded deeper and
deeper until the water forever ended their sufferings.
I repeat, it was hard for me to look at them, and I was anxious to leave
them.
“I just want to take a glance into the engine-room, and then off!” I said.
They were asking me questions: What voltage should be used for the
initial spark, how much ballast water was needed in the tank aft. As if a
phonograph were somewhere within me, I was giving quick and precise
answers but I, my inner self, was busy with its own thoughts.
In the narrow passage gray unifs were passing, gray faces and for a
second, one face with its hair low over the forehead, eyes gazing from deep
beneath it—it was that same man. I understood: they had come and there
was no escape from it for me; only minutes remained, a few dozens of
minutes. … An infinitesimal, molecular quiver of my whole body. This did
not cease to the very end—it was as if an enormous motor were placed
under the very foundation of my body which was so light that the walls,
partitions, cables, beams, lights—everything was quivering. …
I did not yet know whether she was there. But I had no time. … They
were calling me: quick! To the commander’s bridge; time to go … where?
Gray, rayless faces. Below in the water—tense blue veins. Heavy, cast-
iron patches of sky. It was so difficult to lift my cast-iron hand and take up
the receiver of the commander’s telephone! … “Up! Forty-five degrees!”
A heavy explosion—a jerk—a rabid greenish-white mountain of water
aft—the deck beneath my feet began to move, soft as rubber; and
everything below, the whole life, forever. … For a second, falling deeper
and deeper into a sort of funnel, becoming more and more compressed—the
icy-blue relief-map of the City, the round bubbles of cupolas, the lonely
leaden finger of the Accumulating Tower. … Then instantaneously a cotton
curtain of cloud. … We pierced it, and there was the sun and the blue sky!
Seconds, minutes, miles—the blue was hardening, fast filling with
darkness; like drops of cold silver sweat appeared the stars. …
A sad, unbearably bright, black, starry, sunny night. … As if one had
become deaf, one still saw that the pipes were roaring, but one only saw,
dead silence all about. The sun was mute. It was natural, of course. One
might have expected it; we were beyond the terrestrial atmosphere. The
transition was so quick, so sudden that everyone became timid and silent.
Yet I … I thought I felt even easier under that fantastic, mute sun. I had
bounded over the inevitable border, having left my body somewhere there
below, and I was soaring bodiless to a new world, where everything was to
be different, upside down.
“Keep the same course!” I shouted into the engine-room, or perhaps it
was not I but a phonograph in me, and the same machine with a
mechanical, hinge-like movement handed the commander’s trumpet to the
Second Builder. All permeated by that most delicate, molecular quiver
known only to me, I ran down the companionway, to seek. …
The door of the saloon. … An hour later it was to latch and lock itself. …
At the door stood an unfamiliar Number. He was small, with a face like a
hundred or a thousand others which are usually lost in a crowd, but his arms
were exceptionally long—they reached down to the knees as though by
mistake they had been taken from another set of human organs and fastened
to his shoulders.
The long arm stretched out and barred the way.
“Where do you want to go?”
It was clear that he was not aware I knew everything. All right! Perhaps it
was necessary that it should be so. From above him, in a deliberately
significant tone I said:
“I am the Builder of the Integral and I am directing the test flight. Do
you understand?”
The arm drew away.
The saloon. Heads covered with bristles, gray iron bristles, and yellow
heads, and bald, ripe heads were bent over the instruments and maps.
Swiftly, with a glance, I gathered them in with my eyes, off I ran, back
along the long passage, then through the hatch into the engine-room. There
it was hot from the red tubes, overheated by the explosions; a constant
roar—the levers were dancing their desperate drunken dance, quivering
ceaselessly with a barely noticeable quiver; the arrows on the dials. …
There! At last! Near the tachometer, a notebook in his hand, was that man
with the low forehead.
“Listen,” I shouted straight into his ear (because of the roar), “Is she
here? Where is she?”
“She? There at the radio.”
I dashed over there. There were three of them, all with receiving helmets
on. And she seemed a head taller than usual, wingy, sparkling, flying like an
ancient walkyrie, and those bluish sparks from the radio seemed to emanate
from her—from her also that ethereal, lightning-like odor of ozone.
“Someone—well, you for instance,” I said to her, panting from having
run, “I must send a message down to earth, to the docks. Come, I shall
dictate it to you.”
Close to the apparatus there was a small boxlike cabin. We sat at the table
side by side. I found her hand and pressed it hard.
“Well, what is going to happen?”
“I don’t know. Do you realize how wonderful it is? To fly without
knowing where … no matter where? It will soon be twelve o’clock and
nobody knows what. … And when night. … Where shall you and I be
tonight? Perhaps somewhere on the grass, on dry leaves. …”
Blue sparks emanated from her and the odor of lightning, and the
vibration became more and more frequent within me.
“Write down,” I said loudly, panting (from having run), “Time: eleven-
twenty; speed 5800. …”
“Last night she came to me with your note. I know … I know everything;
don’t talk. … But the child is yours. I sent her over; she is already beyond
the Wall. She will live. …”
I was back on the commander’s bridge, back in the delirious night with
its black, starry sky and its dazzling sun. The hands of the clock on the table
were slowly moving from minute to minute. Everything was permeated by
a thin, hardly perceptible quivering (only I noticed it). For some reason a
thought passed through my head: it would be better if all this took place not
here but somewhere below, nearer to earth.
“Stop!” I commanded.
 We kept moving by inertia, but more and more slowly. Now the Integral
was caught for a second by an imperceptible little hair—for a second it
hung motionless, then the little hair broke and the Integral like a stone
dashed downward with increasing speed. That way in silence, minutes, tens
of minutes passed. My pulse was audible; the hand of the clock before my
eyes came closer and closer to twelve. It was clear to me I was a stone;
I-330 the earth; and the stone was under irresistible compulsion to fall
downward, to strike the earth and break into small particles. What if … ?
Already the hard blue smoke of the clouds appeared below. … What if … ?
But the phonograph within me with a hinge-like motion and precision took
the telephone and commanded: “Low speed!” The stone ceased falling.
Only the four lower tubes were growling, two ahead and two aft, only
enough to hold the Integral motionless, and the Integral, only slightly
trembling, stopped in the air as if anchored, about one kilometer from the
earth.
Everybody came out on deck, (it was shortly before twelve, before the
sounding of the dinner-gong) and leaned over the glass railing; hastily, in
huge gulps, they swallowed the unknown world which lay below, beyond
the Green Wall. Amber, blue, green, the autumnal woods, prairies, a lake.
At the edge of a little blue saucer, some lone yellow debris, a threatening,
dried-out yellow finger—it must have been the tower of an ancient
“church” saved by a miracle. …
“Look, there! Look! There to the right!”
There (over the green desert) a brown blot was rapidly moving. I held a
telescope in my hands and automatically I brought it to my eyes: the grass
reaching their chests, a herd of brown horses was galloping, and on their
back—they, black, white, and dark. …
Behind me:
“I assure you, I saw a face!”
“Go away! Tell it to someone else!”
“Well, look for yourself! Here is the telescope.”
They had already disappeared. Endless green desert, and in that desert,
dominating it completely and dominating me, and everybody—the piercing
vibrations of the gong; dinner time, one minute to twelve.
For a second the little world around me became incoherent, dispersed.
Someone’s brass badge fell to the floor. It mattered little. Soon it was under
my heel. A voice: “And I tell you, it was a face!” A black square, the open
door of the main saloon. White teeth pressed together, smiling. … And at
that moment, when the clock began slowly, holding its breath between
beats, to strike, and when the front rows began to move towards the dining
saloon, the rectangle of the door was suddenly crossed by the two familiar,
unnaturally long arms:
“STOP!”
Someone’s fingers sank piercing into my palm. It was I-330. She was
beside me.
“Who is it, do you know him?”
“Is he not … is he not? …”
He was already lifted upon somebody’s shoulders. Above a hundred
other faces, his face like hundreds, like thousands of other faces yet unique
among the rest. …
“In the name of the Guardians! You, to whom I talk, they hear me, every
one of them hears me—I talk to you: we know! We don’t know your
numbers yet but we know everything else. The Integral shall not be yours!
The test flight will be carried out to the end and you yourselves, you will
not dare to make another move! You with your own hands will help to go
on with the test and afterward … well, I have finished!”
Silence. The glass plates under my feet seemed soft, cotton-like. My feet
too—soft, cotton-like. Beside me—she with a dead-white smile, angry blue
sparks. Through her teeth to me:
“Ah! It is your work! You did your ‘duty’! Well. …” She tore her hand
from mine; the walkyrie helmet with indignant wings was soon to be seen
some distance in front of me. I was alone, torpid, silent. Like everyone else
I followed into the dining saloon.
But it was not I, not I! I told nobody, save these white, mute pages. … I
cried this to her within me, inaudibly, desperately, loudly. She was across
the table, directly opposite me and not once did she even touch me with her
gaze. Beside her, someone’s ripe, yellow, bald head. I heard (it was I-330’s
voice):
“ ‘Nobility’ of character! But my dear professor, even a superficial
etymological analysis of the word shows that it is a superstition, a remnant
of the ancient feudal epoch. We. …”
I felt I was growing pale—and that they would soon notice it. But the
phonograph within me performed the prescribed fifty chewing movements
for every bite. I locked myself into myself as though into an opaque house;
I threw up a heap of rocks before my door and lowered the window-
blinds. …
Afterward, again the telephone of the commander was in my hands and
again we made the flight with icy, supreme anxiety through the clouds into
the icy, starry, sunny night. Minutes, hours passed. … Apparently all that
time the logical motor within me was working feverishly at full speed. For
suddenly somewhere at a distant point of the dark blue space I saw my
desk, and the gill-like cheeks of U- over it and the forgotten pages of my
records! It became clear to me; nobody but she … everything was clear to
me!
If only I could reach the radio-room soon … winglike helmets, the odor
of blue lightnings … I remember telling her something in a low voice and I
remember how she looked through me and how her voice seemed to come
from a distance:
“I am busy. I am receiving a message from below. You may dictate yours
to her.”
The small, boxlike little cabin. … I thought for a second and then dictated
in a firm voice:
“Time 14:40. Going down. Motors stopped. The end of all.”
The commander’s bridge. The machine-heart of the Integral stopped; we
were falling; my heart could not catch up and would remain behind and rise
higher and higher into my throat. … Clouds. … And then a distant green
spot—everything green, more and more distinct, running like a storm
towards us. “Soon the end.”
The porcelain-like white distorted face of the Second Builder! It was he
who struck me with all his strength; I hurt my head on something; and
through the approaching darkness while falling I heard:
“Full speed—aft!”
A brusque jolt upward. …
 RECORD THIRTY-FIVE

In a ring—A carrot—A murder.

I did not sleep all night. The whole night but one thought. … As a result of
yesterday’s mishap my head is tightly bandaged—it seems to me not a
bandage but a ring, a pitiless ring of glass-iron, riveted about my head. And
I am busy with the same thought, always the same thought in my riveted
circle: to kill U-. To kill U- and then go to her and say: “Now do you
believe?” What is most disquieting is that to kill is dirty, primitive. To break
her head with something—the thought of it gives me a peculiar sensation of
something disgustingly sweet in my mouth, and I am unable to swallow my
saliva; I am always spitting into my handkerchief, yet my mouth feels dry.
I had in my closet a heavy piston-rod which cracked during the casting
and which I brought home in order to find out the cause of the cracking
with a microscope. I made my manuscript into a tube (let her read me to the
last letter!), pushed the broken piston into that tube and went downstairs.
The stairway seemed endless, the steps disgustingly slippery, liquid. I had
to wipe off moisture from my mouth very frequently. Downstairs … my
heart dropped. I took out the piston and went to the controller’s table, but
she was not there; instead an empty, icy desk with inkblots. I remembered
that today all work was stopped; everybody was to go to be operated upon.
Hence there was no need for her to stay here. There was nobody to be
registered. …
The street. It was windy. The sky seemed to be composed of soaring
panels of cast-iron. And exactly as it seemed for one moment yesterday, the
whole world was broken up into separate, sharp, independent fragments,
and each of these fragments was falling at full speed; each would stop for a
second, hang before me in the air and disappear without trace. It was as if
the black, precise letters on this page should suddenly move apart and begin
to jump hither and thither in fright, so that there was not a word on the
page, only nonsensical “ap,” “jum,” “wor.” The crowd seemed just as
nonsensical, dispersed (not in rows), going forward, backward, diagonally,
transversely. …
Then nobody. For a second while I was dashing at full speed, suddenly
stopping, I saw on the second floor in the glass cage hanging in the air—a
man and a woman—a kiss; she standing with her whole body bent
backward brokenly: “This is for the last time, forever. …”
At a corner a thorny, moving bush of heads. Above the heads, separate,
floating in the air, a banner: “Down with the machines! Down with the
Operation!” And (distinct from my own self) I thought: “Is it possible that
each one of us bears such a pain, that it can be removed only with his
heart. … That something must be done to each one, before he. …” For a
second everything disappeared for me from the world, except my beast-like
hand with the heavy cast-iron package it held. …
A boy appeared. He was running, a shadow under his lower lip. The
lower lip turned out like the cuff of a rolled-up sleeve. His face was
distorted; he wept loudly; he was running away from somebody. Stamping
of feet was heard behind him. …
The boy reminded me: “U- must be in school. I must hurry!” I ran to the
nearest opening of the Underground Railway. At the entrance someone
passed me and said, “Not running. No trains today … there!” I descended. A
sort of general delirium was reigning. The glitter of cut-crystal suns; the
platform packed closely with heads. An empty, torpid train.
In the silence—a voice. I could not see her but I knew, I knew that
intense, living, flexible, whip-like, flogging voice! I felt there that sharp
triangle of brows drawn to the temples. …
“Let me! Let me reach her! I must! …”
Someone’s tentacles caught my arm, my shoulders. I was nailed. In the
silence I heard:
“No. Go up to them. There they will cure you; there they will overfeed
you with that leavened happiness. Satiated, you will slumber peacefully,
organized, keeping time and snoring sweetly. Is it possible that you do not
yet hear that great symphony of snoring? Foolish people! Don’t you realize
that they want to liberate you from these gnawing, worm-like, torturing
question marks? And you remain standing here and listening to me? Quick!
Up! To the Great Operation! What is your concern, if I remain here alone?
What does it matter to you if I want to struggle, hopelessly struggle? So
much the better! What does it matter to you that I do not want others to
desire for me? I want to desire for myself. If I desire the impossible. …”
Another voice, slow, heavy:
“Ah, the impossible! Which means to run after your stupid fancies; those
fancies would whirl from under your very noses like a tail. No, we shall
catch that tail, and then. …”
“And then—swallow it and fall snoring; a new tail will become
necessary. They say the ancients had a certain animal which they called
‘Ass.’ In order to make it go forward they would attach a carrot to a bow
held in front of its nose, so that it could not reach it. … If it had caught and
swallowed it. …”
The tentacles suddenly let me go; I threw myself towards the place she
was speaking from; but at that very moment everything was brought to
confusion. Shouts from behind: “They are coming here! Coming here!” The
lights twinkled and went out—someone cut the cable—and everything was
like a lava of cries, groaning, heads, fingers. …
I do not know how long we were rolled about that way in the
underground tube. I only remember that steps were felt, dusk appeared,
becoming brighter and brighter, and again we were in the street, dispersing
fan-wise in different directions.
Again I was alone. Wind. Gray, low twilight crawling over my head. In
the damp glass of the sidewalk, somewhere very deep, there were light
topsy-turvy walls and figures moving along, feet upward. And that terribly
heavy package in my hands pulled me down into that depth to the bottom.
At the desk again. U- was not yet there; her room was dark and empty. I
went up to my room and turned on the light. My temples tightly bound by
the iron ring were pulsating. I paced and paced, always in the same circle:
my table, the white package on the table, the bed, my table, the white
package on the table. … In the room to my left the curtains were lowered.
To my right: the knotty bald head over a book, the enormous parabolic
forehead. Wrinkles on the forehead like a series of yellow, illegible lines. At
times our eyes met and then I felt that those lines were about me.
… It happened at twenty-one o’clock exactly. U- came in on her own
initiative. I remember that my breathing was so loud that I could hear it and
that I wanted to breathe less noisily but was unable to.
 She sat down and arranged the fold of her unif on her knees. The pinkish-
brown gills were waving.
“Oh, dear, is it true that you are wounded? I just learned about it, and at
once I ran. …”
The piston was before me on the table. I jumped up, breathing even
louder. She heard, and stopped halfway through a word and rose. Already I
had located the place on her head; something disgustingly sweet was in my
mouth. … My handkerchief! I could not find it. I spat on the floor.
The fellow with the yellow fixed wrinkles which think of me! It was
necessary that he should not see. It would be even more disgusting if he
could. … I pressed the button. (I had no right to do that, but who cared
about rights then?) The curtains fell.
Evidently she felt and understood what was coming for she rushed to the
door. But I was quicker than she and I locked the door with the key,
breathing loudly and not taking my eyes for a second away from that place
on her head. …
“You … you are mad! How dare you. …” She moved backward towards
the bed, put her trembling hands between her knees. … Like a tense spring,
holding her firmly with my gaze, I slowly stretched out my arm towards the
table (only one arm could move), and I snatched the piston.
“I implore you! One day—only one day! Tomorrow I shall go and attend
to the formalities. …”
What was she talking about? I swung my arm. … And I consider I killed
her. Yes, you my unknown readers, you have the right to call me murderer. I
know that I should have dealt the blow on her head had she not screamed:
“For … for the sake … I agree. … I … one moment. …” With trembling
hands she tore off her unif;—a large, yellow, drooping body, she fell upon
the bed. …
Then I understood; she thought that I pulled the curtains … in order to …
that I wanted. …
This was so unexpected and so stupid that I burst out laughing.
Immediately the tense spring within me broke and my hand weakened and
the piston fell to the floor.
Here I learned from personal experience that laughter is the most terrible
of weapons; you can kill anything with laughter, even murder. I sat at my
table and laughed desperately; I saw no way out of that absurd situation. I
don’t know what would have been the end if things had run their natural
course, for suddenly a new factor in the arithmetical chain: the telephone
rang.
I hurried, grasped the receiver. Perhaps she … I heard an unfamiliar
voice:
“Wait a minute.”
Annoying, infinite buzzing. Heavy steps from afar, nearer and louder like
cast-iron, and. …
“D-503? The Well-Doer speaking. Come at once to me.”
Ding! He hung up the receiver. Ding! like a key in a keyhole.
U- was still in bed, eyes closed, gills apart in the form of a smile. I picked
up her clothes, threw them on her and said through clenched teeth:
“Well. Quick! Quick!”
She raised her body on her elbow, her breasts hanging down to one side,
eyes round. She became a figure of wax.
“What?”
“Get dressed, that is what!”
Face distorted, she firmly snatched her clothes and said in a flat voice,
“Turn away. …”
I turned away, pressed my forehead against the glass. Light, figures,
sparks, were trembling in the black, wet mirror. … No, all this was I,
myself—within me. … What did he call me for? Is it possible that he knows
already about her, about me, about everything?
U-, already dressed, was at the door. I made a step toward her and
pressed her hand as hard as though I hoped to squeeze out of it drop by drop
what I needed.
“Listen. … Her name, you know whom I am talking of—did you report
her name? No? Tell the truth, I must. … I care not what happens, but tell the
truth!”
“No.”
“No? But why not, since you. …”
Her lower lip turned out like the lip of that boy and her face … tears were
running down her cheeks.
“Because I … I was afraid that if I did you might … you would stop lov—
Oh, I cannot, I could not!”
I understood. It was the truth. Absurd, ridiculous, human truth. I opened
the door.
 RECORD THIRTY-SIX

Empty pages—The Christian god—About my

mother.

It is very strange that a kind of empty white page should be left in my head.
How I walked there, how I waited (I remember I had to wait), I know
nothing about it; I remember not a sound, not a face, not a gesture, as if all
communicating wires between me and the world were cut.
When I came to, I found myself standing before Him; I feared to raise my
eyes—I saw only His enormous cast-iron hands upon His knees. Those
hands weighed upon Him, bending His knees with their weight. He was
slowly moving His fingers. His face was somewhere above as if in fog.
And, only because His voice came to my ear from such a height, it did not
roar like thunder, it did not deafen me but appeared to be an ordinary human
voice.
“Then you too, you the Builder of the Integral! You, whose lot it was to
become the greatest of all conquistadores! You whose name was to have
been at the head of a glorious, new chapter of the history of the United
State! You. …”
Blood ran to my head, to my cheeks—and here again a white page; only
the pulsation in my temples and the heavy voice from above; but I
remember not a word. Only when He became silent I came to and noticed
how His hand moved heavily like a thousand pounds, and crawled slowly—
a finger threatened me.
“Well! Why are you silent? Is it true, or not? Executioner? So!”
“So,” I repeated submissively. And then I clearly heard every word of
His.
 “Well then? Do you think I am afraid of the word! Did you ever try to
take off its shell and look into its inner meaning? I shall tell you. …
Remember a blue hill, a crowd, a cross? Some up on the hill, sprinkled with
blood, are busy nailing a body to the cross; others below, sprinkled with
tears, are gazing upward. Does it not seem to you that the part which those
above must play is the more difficult, the most important part? If it were not
for them, how could that magnificent tragedy ever have been staged? True,
they were hissed by the dark crowd but for that the author of the tragedy,
God, should have remunerated them the more liberally, should he not? And
the Christian, most clement God himself, who burnt on a slow fire all the
infidels, is he not an executioner? Was the number of those burned by the
Christians less than the number of burned Christians? Yet (you must
understand this!), yet this God was for centuries glorified as the God of
love! Absurd? Oh, no. Just the contrary. It is rather a patent for the
imperishable wisdom of man, written in blood. Even at the time when he
still was wild and hairy man knew that real, algebraic love for humanity
must inevitably be inhuman, and that the inevitable mark of truth is cruelty,
just as the inevitable mark of fire is its property of causing the sensation of
burning. Could you show me a fire that would not hurt? Well, prove now
your point! Proceed! Argue!”
How could I argue? How could I argue when those thoughts were once
mine, though I was never able to dress them in such a splendid, tempered
armor. I remained silent.
“If your silence is intended to mean that you agree with me, then let us
talk as adults do after the children have gone to bed; let us talk to the logical
end. I ask: what was it that man from his diaper age dreamed of, tormented
himself for, prayed for? He longed for that day when someone would tell
him what happiness is and then would chain him to it. What else are we
doing now? The ancient dream about a paradise. … Remember: there in
paradise they know no desires any more, no pity, no love; there they are
all—blessed. An operation has been performed upon their centre of fancy;
that is why they are blessed, angels, servants of God. … And now, at the
very moment when we have caught up with that dream, when we hold it
like this”: (He clenched his hand so, that if he had held a stone in it sap
would have run out!) “At the moment when all that was left for us was to
adorn our prize and distribute it amongst all in equal pieces, at that very
moment you, you. …”
 The cast-iron roar was suddenly broken off. I was as red as a piece of
iron on an anvil, under the moulding sledgehammer. This seemed to have
stopped for a second, hanging in air, and I waited, waited … until suddenly:
“How old are you?”
“Thirty-two.”
“Just double the age, and as simple as at sixteen! Listen. Is it possible
that it really never occurred to you that they (we do not yet know their
names but I am certain you will disclose them to us), that they were
interested in you only as the Builder of the Integral? only in order to be able
through the use of you—”
“Don’t! Don’t!” I cried. But it was like protecting yourself with your
hands and crying to a bullet: you may still be hearing your own “don’t” but
the bullet meanwhile has burned you through, and writhing with pain, you
are prostrated on the ground.
Yes, yes; the Builder of the Integral. … Yes, yes. … At once there came
back to me the angry face of U- with twitching, brick-red gills, on that
morning when both of them. …
I remember now, clearly, how I raised my eyes and laughed. A Socrates-
like, bald-headed man was sitting before me; and small drops of sweat
dotted the bald surface of his cranium.
How simple, how magnificently trivial everything was! How simple!
Almost to the point of being ridiculous. Laughter was choking me and
bursting forth in puffs; I covered my mouth with my hand and rushed
wildly out. …
Steps. Wind. Damp, leaping fragments of lights and faces. … And while
running: “No! Only to see her! To see her once more!”
Here again, an empty white page. All I remember is feet; not people, just
feet; hundreds of feet, confusedly stamping feet, falling from somewhere on
the pavement; a heavy rain of feet. … And some cheerful, daring voice, and
a shout that was probably for me: “Hey, hey! Come here! Come along with
us!”
Afterward—a deserted square heavily overloaded with tense wind. In the
middle of the square a dim, heavy threatening mass—the Machine of the
Well-Doer; and a seemingly unexpected image arose within me in response
to the sight of the Machine: a snow-white pillow and on the pillow a head
thrown back, and half-closed eyes and a sharp, sweet line of teeth. … All
this seemed so absurdly, so terribly connected with the Machine. I know
how this connection has come about but I do not yet want to see it nor to
say it aloud—I don’t want to! I do not!
I closed my eyes, sat down on the steps which lead upwards to the
Machine. I must have been running for my face was wet. From somewhere
very far away cries were coming. But nobody heard them; nobody heard me
crying: “Save me from it—save me!”
If only I had a mother as the ancients had—my mother, mine, for whom I
should be not the Builder of the Integral and not D-530, not a molecule of
the United State but merely a living human piece, a piece of herself, a
trampled, smothered, a cast-off piece. … And though I were driving the
nails into the cross or being nailed to it (perhaps it is the same), she would
hear what no one else could hear; her old grown-together wrinkled lips. …
 RECORD THIRTY-SEVEN

Infusorian—Doomsday—Her room.

This morning while we were in the refectory, my neighbor to my left

whispered to me in a frightened tone:
“But why don’t you eat? Don’t you see, they are looking at you!”
I had to pluck up all my strength to show a smile. I felt it—like a crack in
my face; I smiled and the borders of the crack drew apart wider and wider;
it was quite painful.
What followed was this: no sooner had I lifted the small cube of paste
upon my fork, than my fork jerked from my hand and tinkled against the
plate, and at once the tables, the walls, the plates, the air even, trembled and
rang; and outside too, an enormous, iron, round roar reaching the sky—
floating over heads and houses it died away in the distance in small, hardly
perceptible circles like those upon water.
I saw faces instantaneously grow faded and bleached; I saw mouths filled
with food suddenly motionless and forks hanging in air. Then everything
became confused, jumped off the centuries-old tracks, everybody jumped
up from his place (without singing the Hymn!) and confusedly, in disorder,
hastily finishing chewing, choking, grasping one another. … They were
asking: “What? What happened? What? …” And the disorderly fragments
of the Machine which was once perfect and great, fell down in all
directions—down the elevators, down the stairs. … Stamping of feet. …
Pieces of words like pieces of torn letters carried by the wind. …
The same outpour from the neighboring houses. A minute later the
avenue seemed like a drop of water under a microscope: the infusoria
locked up in the transparent, glass-like drop of water were tossing around,
to the sides, up and down.
 “Ah!” Someone’s triumphant voice. I saw the back of a neck and a finger
pointing to the sky. I remember very distinctly a yellow-pinkish nail and
under the nail a crescent crawling out as if from under the horizon. The
finger was like a compass; all eyes were raised to the sky.
There, running away from an invisible pursuit, masses of cloud were
rushing upon each other; and colored by the clouds the aeros of the
Guardians, with their tubes like antennae, were floating. And farther to the
west—something like. … At first nobody could understand what it was,
even I, who knew (unfortunately) more than the others. It was like a great
hive of black aeros swarming somewhere at an extraordinary height—they
looked like hardly noticeable, swiftly moving points. … Nearer and
nearer. … Hoarse, guttural sounds began to reach the earth and finally we
saw birds just over our heads! They filled the sky with their sharp, black,
descending triangles. The stormy wind drove them down and they began to
land on the cupolas, on the roofs, poles and balconies.
“Ah—ah!” and the triumphant back of the neck turned, and I saw that
man with the protruding forehead but it seemed that the title, so to speak,
was all that was left of him: he seemed to have crawled out from under his
forehead and on his face, around the eyes and lips, bunches of rays were
growing. Through the noise of the wind and wings and cawing, he cried to
me:
“Do you realize? Do you realize! They have blown up the Wall! The Wall
has been blown up! Do you understand?”
Somewhere in the background, figures with their heads drawn in were
hastily rushing by, and into the houses. In the middle of the pavement a
mass of those who had been already operated upon; they moved towards the
west. …
… Hairy bunches of rays around the lips and eyes. … I grasped his hands:
“Tell me. Where is she? Where is I-330? There? Beyond the Wall or … ? I
must. … Do you hear me? At once. … I cannot. …”
“Here!” he shouted in a happy, drunken voice, showing strong yellow
teeth, “here in town, and she is acting! Oh, we are doing great work!”
Who are those “we”? Who am I?
There were about fifty around him. Like him, they seemed to have
crawled out from under their foreheads. They were loud, cheerful, strong-
toothed, swallowing the stormy wind. With their simple, not at all terrible-
looking electrocutors (where did they get them?) they started to the west,
towards the operated ones, encircling them, keeping parallel to forty-eighth
avenue. …
Stumbling against the tightly-drawn ropes woven by the wind, I was
running to her. What for? I did not know. I was stumbling. … Empty
streets. … The city seemed foreign, wild, filled with the ceaseless,
triumphant, hubbub of birds. It seemed like the end of the world,
Doomsday.
Through the glass of the walls in quite a few houses (this cut into my
mind) I saw male and female Numbers in shameless embraces—without
curtains lowered, without pink checks, in the middle of the day! …
The house—her house; the door ajar. The lobby, the control desk, all was
empty. The elevator had stopped in the middle of its shaft. I ran panting up
the endless stairs. The corridor. Like the spokes of a wheel figures on the
doors dashed past my eyes; 320, 326, 330—I-330! Through the glass wall
everything in her room was seen to be upside down, confused, creased. The
table overturned, its legs in the air like a beast. The bed was absurdly placed
away from the wall, obliquely. Strewn over the floor—fallen, trodden petals
of the pink checks.
I bent over and picked up one, two, three of them; all bore the name
D-503. I was on all of them, drops of myself, of my molten, poured-out self.
And that was all—that was left. …
Somehow I felt they should not lie there on the floor and be trodden
upon. I gathered a handful of them, put them on the table and carefully
smoothed them out, glanced at them and … laughed aloud! I never knew it
before but now I know, and you too, know, that laughter may be of different
colors. It is but a distant echo of an explosion within us; it may be the echo
of a holiday, red, blue and golden fireworks, or at times it may represent
pieces of human flesh exploded into the air. …
I noticed an unfamiliar name on some of the pink checks. I do not
remember the figures but I do remember the letter—F. I brushed the stubs
from the table to the floor, stepped on them, on myself, stamped on them
with my heels—and went out. …
I sat in the corridor on the windowsill in front of her door and waited
long and stupidly. An old man appeared. His face was like a pierced, empty
bladder with folds; from beneath the puncture something transparent was
still slowly dripping. Slowly, vaguely I realized—tears. And only when the
old man was quite far off I came to and exclaimed:
 “Please … listen. … Do you know … Number I-330?”
The old man turned around, waved his hand in despair and stumbled
farther away. …
I returned home at dusk. On the west side the sky was twitching every
second in a pale blue electric convulsion:—a subdued, heavy roar was
proceeding from that direction. The roofs were covered with black charred
sticks—birds.
I lay down; and instantly like a heavy beast sleep came and stifled me. …
 RECORD THIRTY-EIGHT

I don’t know what title—Perhaps the whole

synopsis may be called a cast-off cigarette-
butt.

I awoke. A bright glare painful to look at. I half closed my eyes. My head
seemed filled with some caustic blue smoke. Everything was enveloped in
fog and through the fog:
“But I did not turn on the light … then how is it. …”
I jumped up. At the table, leaning her chin on her hand and smiling, was
I-330, looking at me.
She was at the very table at which I am now writing. Those ten or fifteen
minutes are already behind me, cruelly twisted into a very firm spring. Yet
it seems to me that the door closed after her only a second ago and that I
could still overtake her and grasp her hand—and that she might laugh out
and say. …
I-330 was at the table. I rushed towards her.
“You? You! I have been. … I saw your room. … I thought you. …” But
midway I hurt myself upon the sharp, motionless spears of her eyelashes
and I stopped. I remembered: she looked at me in the same way before—in
the Integral. It was urgent to tell her everything in one second and in such a
way that she should believe—or she would never. …
“Listen, I-330, I must. … I must … everything! No, no, one moment—let
me have a glass of water first.”
My mouth was as dry as though it were lined with blotting paper. I
poured a glass of water but I could not. … I put the glass back upon the
table, and with both hands firmly grasped the carafe.
 Now I noticed that the blue smoke was from a cigarette. She brought the
cigarette to her lips and with avidity she drew in and swallowed the smoke
as I did water; then she said:
“Don’t. Be silent. Don’t you see it matters little? I came anyway. They
are waiting for me below. … Do you want these minutes which are our
last … ?”
Abruptly she threw the cigarette on the floor and bent backwards over the
side of the chair to reach the button in the wall (it was quite difficult to do
so), and I remember how the chair swayed slightly, how two of its legs were
lifted. Then the curtains fell.
She came close to me and embraced me. Her knees, through her dress,
were like a slow, gentle, warm, enveloping and permeating poison. …
Suddenly (it happens at times) you plunge into sweet, warm sleep—when
all at once, as if something pricks you, you tremble and your eyes are again
widely open. So it was now; there on the floor in her room were the pink
checks stamped with traces of footsteps, one of them bore the letter F and
some figures. … Plus and minus fused within my mind into one lump. … I
could not say even now what sort of a feeling it was but I crushed her so
that she cried out with pain. …
One more minute out of these ten or fifteen; her head thrown back, lying
on the bright white pillow, her eyes half closed, a sharp, sweet line of
teeth. … And all this reminded me in an irresistible, absurd, torturing way
about something forbidden, something not permissible at that moment.
More tenderly, more cruelly, I pressed her to myself, more bright grew the
blue traces of my fingers. …
She said, without opening her eyes (I noticed this), “They say you went
to see the Well-Doer yesterday, is it true?”
“Yes.”
Then her eyes opened widely and with delight I looked at her and saw
that her face grew quickly paler and paler, that it effaced itself,
disappearing—only the eyes remained.
I told her everything. Only for some reason, what I don’t know—(no, it is
not true, I know the reason) I was silent about one thing: His assertion at the
end that they needed me only in order. …
Like the image on a photographic plate in a developing fluid, her face
gradually reappeared; the cheeks, the white line of teeth, the lips. She stood
up and went to the mirror-door of the closet. My mouth was dry again. I
poured water but it was revolting to drink it; I put the glass back on the
table and asked:
“Did you come to see me because you wanted to inquire … ?”
A sharp, mocking triangle of brows drawn to the temples looked at me
from the mirror. She turned around to say something but said nothing.
It was not necessary; I knew.
To bid her goodbye, I moved my foreign limbs, struck the chair with
them. It fell upside down, dead, like the table in her room. Her lips were
cold … just as cold was once the floor, here, near my bed. …
When she left I sat down on the floor, bent over the cigarette-butt. …
I cannot write any more—I no longer want to!
 RECORD THIRTY-NINE

The end.

All this was like the last crystal of salt thrown into a saturated solution;
quickly, needle-like crystals began to appear, to grow more substantial and
solid. It was clear to me; the decision was made and tomorrow morning I
shall do it! It amounts to suicide but perhaps then I shall be reborn. For only
what is killed can be reborn.
Every second the sky twitched in convulsion there in the west. My head
was burning and pulsating inside; I was up all night and I fell asleep only at
about seven o’clock in the morning when the darkness of the night was
already dispelled and becoming gray and when the roofs crowded with
birds became visible. …
I woke up; ten o’clock. Evidently the bell did not ring today. On the
table—left from yesterday—there stood the glass of water. I gulped the
water down with avidity and I ran; I had to do it quickly, as quickly as
possible.
The sky was deserted, blue, all eaten up by the storm. Sharp corners of
shadows. … Everything seemed to be cut out of blue autumnal air—thin,
dangerous to touch; it seemed so brittle, ready to disperse into glass dust.
Within me something similar; I ought not to think; it was dangerous to
think, for. …
And I did not think, perhaps I did not even see properly; I only registered
impressions. There on the pavement, thrown from somewhere, branches
were strewn; their leaves were green, amber and cherry-red. Above,
crossing each other, birds and aeros were tossing about. Here below heads,
open mouths, hands waving branches. … All this must have been shouting,
buzzing, chirping. …
 Then—streets empty as if swept by a plague. I remember I stumbled over
something disgustingly soft, yielding yet motionless. I bent down—a
corpse. It was lying flat, the legs apart. The face. … I recognized the thick
negro lips which even now seemed to sprinkle with laughter. His eyes,
firmly screwed in, laughed into my face. One second. … I stepped over him
and ran. I could no longer. … I had to have everything done as soon as
possible, or else I felt I would break, I would break in two like an
overloaded sail. …
Luckily it was not more than twenty steps away; I already saw the sign
with the golden letters: “The Bureau of Guardians.” At the door I stopped
for a moment to gulp down as much air as I could and stepped in.
Inside, in the corridor stood an endless chain of numbers, holding small
sheets of paper and heavy notebooks. They moved slowly, advancing a step
or two and stopping again. I began to be tossed about along the chain, my
head was breaking to pieces; I pulled them by the sleeves, I implored them
as a sick man implores to be given something that would even at the price
of sharpest pain end everything, forever.
A woman with a belt tightly clasped around her waist over the unif and
with two distinctly protruding squatty hemispheres tossing about as if she
had eyes on them, chuckled at me:
“He has a bellyache! Show him to the room second door to the right!”
Everybody laughed, and because of that laughter something rose in my
throat; I felt I should either scream or … or. …
Suddenly from behind someone touched my elbow. I turned around.
Transparent wing-ears! But they were not pink as usual; they were purplish
red; his Adam’s apple was tossing about as though ready to tear the
covering. …
Quickly boring into me: “What are you here for?”
I seized him.
“Quickly! Please! Quickly! … into your office. … I must tell
everything … right away. … I am glad that you. … It may be terrible that it
should be you to whom. … But it is well, it is well. …”
He too, knew her; this made it even more tormenting for me. But perhaps
he too, would tremble when he should hear. … And we would both be
killing. … And I would not be alone at that, my supreme second. …
The door closed with a slam. I remember a piece of paper was caught
beneath the door and it rustled on the floor when the door closed. And then
a strange airless silence covered us as if a glass bell were put over us. If
only he had uttered a single, most insignificant word, no matter what, I
should have told him everything at once. But he was silent. So keyed up
that I heard a noise in my ears, I said without looking at him:
“I think I always hated her from the very beginning. … I struggled. … Or,
no, no, don’t believe me; I could have but I did not want to save myself; I
wanted to perish; this was dearer to me than anything else … and even now,
even this minute, when I know already everything. … Do you know that I
was summoned to the Well-Doer?”
“Yes, I do.”
“But what he told me! Please realize that it was equivalent to … it was as
if someone should remove the floor from under you this minute, and you
and all here on the desk, the papers, the ink … the ink would splash out and
cover everything with blots. …”
“What else? What further? Hurry up, others are waiting!”
Then stumbling, muttering, I told him everything that is recorded in these
pages. … About my real self, and about my hairy self, and about my
hands … yes … exactly that was the beginning. And how I would not do my
duty then, and how I lied to myself, and how she obtained false certificates
for me, and how I grew worse and worse, every day, and about the long
corridors underground, and there beyond the Wall. …
All this I threw out in formless pieces and lumps. I would stutter and fail
to find words. The lips double-curved in a smile would prompt me with the
word I needed and I would nod gratefully: “Yes, yes!”. … Suddenly, what
was it? He was talking for me and I only listened and nodded: “Yes, yes,”
and then, “Yes, exactly so, … yes, yes. …”
I felt cold around my mouth as though it were wet with ether, and I asked
with difficulty:
“But how is it. … You could not learn anywhere. …”
He smiled a smile growing more and more curved; then:
“But I see that you do want to conceal from me something. For example,
you enumerated everything you saw beyond the Wall but you failed to
mention one thing. You deny it? But don’t you remember that once, just in
passing, just for a second you saw me there? Yes, yes me!”
Silence.
Suddenly, like a flash of lightning, it became shamelessly clear to me:
he—he too—. And all myself, my torment, all that I brought here, crushed
by the burden, plucking up my last strength as if performing a great feat, all
appeared to me only funny—like the ancient anecdote about Abraham and
Isaac; Abraham all in a cold sweat, with the knife already raised over his
son, over himself—and suddenly a voice from above: “Never mind. … I
was only joking.”
Without taking my eyes from the smile which grew more and more
curved, I put my hands on the edge of the desk and slowly, very slowly
pushed myself with my chair away from him. Then instantly gathering
myself into my own hands, I dashed madly out, past loud voices, past steps
and mouths. …
I do not remember how I got into one of the public restrooms at a station
of the Underground Railway. Above, everything was perishing; the greatest
civilization, the most rational in human history was crumbling—but here,
by some irony everything remained as before, beautiful. The walls shone;
water murmured cosily and like the water—the unseen, transparent
music. … Only think of it! All this is doomed; all this will be covered with
grass, some day; only myths will remain. …
I moaned aloud. At the same instant I felt someone gently patting my
knee. It was from the left; it was my neighbor who occupied a seat on my
left—an enormous forehead, a bald parabola, yellow unintelligible lines of
wrinkles on his forehead, those lines about me.
“I understand you. I understand completely,” he said. “Yet you must calm
yourself. You must. It will return. It will inevitably return. It is only
important that everybody should learn of my discovery. You are the first to
whom I talk about it. I have calculated that there is no infinity! No!”
I looked at him wildly.
“Yes, yes, I tell you so. There is no infinity. If the universe is infinite,
then the average density of matter must equal zero, but as it is not zero, we
know, consequently the universe is finite; it is spherical in form and the
square of its radius—R2—is equal to the average density multiplied by. …
The only thing left is to calculate the numerical coefficient and then. … Do
you realize what it means? It means that everything is final, everything is
simple. … But you, my honored sir, you disturb me, you prevent my
finishing my calculations by your yelling!”
I do not know which shattered me more, his discovery, or his
positiveness at that apocalyptic hour. I only then noticed that he had a
notebook in his hands and a logarithmic dial. I understood then that even if
everything was perishing it was my duty (before you, my unknown and
beloved) to leave these records in a finished form.
I asked him to give me some paper, and here in the restroom to the
accompaniment of the quiet music, transparent like water, I wrote down
these last lines.
I was about to put down a period as the ancients would put a cross over
the caves into which they used to throw their dead, when all of a sudden my
pencil trembled and fell from between my fingers. …
“Listen!” (I pulled my neighbor). “Yes, listen, I say. There where your
finite universe ends, what is there? What?”
He had no time to answer. From above, down the steps, stamping. …
 RECORD FORTY

Facts—The bell—I am certain.

Daylight. It is clear. The barometer—760 mm. It is possible that I, D-503,

really wrote these—pages? Is it possible that I ever felt, or imagined I felt
all this?
The handwriting is mine. And what follows is all in my handwriting.
Fortunately only the handwriting. No more delirium, no absurd metaphors,
no feelings—only facts. For I am healthy, perfectly, absolutely healthy. … I
am smiling; I cannot help smiling; a splinter has been taken out of my head
and I feel so light, so empty! To be more exact, not empty, but there is
nothing foreign, nothing that prevents me from smiling. (Smiling is the
normal state for a normal human being).
The facts are as follows: That evening my neighbor who discovered the
finiteness of the universe, and I, and all others who did not have a
certificate showing that we had been operated on, all of us were taken to the
nearest auditorium. (For some reason the number of the auditorium, 112,
seemed familiar to me). There they tied us to the tables and performed the
great operation. Next day, I, D-503, appeared before the Well-Doer and told
him everything known to me about the enemies of happiness. Why before it
seemed hard for me to go, I cannot understand. The only explanation seems
to be my illness—my soul.
The same evening, sitting at the same table with Him, with the Well-
Doer, I saw for the first time in my life the famous Gas Chamber. They
brought in that woman. She was to testify in my presence. That woman
remained stubbornly silent and smiling. I noticed that she had sharp and
very white teeth which were very pretty.
 Then she was brought under the Bell. Her face became very white and as
her eyes were large and dark—all was very pretty. When they began
pumping the air from under the Bell she threw her head back and half
closed her eyes; her lips were pressed together. This reminded me of
something. She looked at me, holding the arms of the chair firmly. She
continued to look until her eyes closed. Then she was taken out and brought
to by means of electrodes and again put under the Bell. The procedure was
repeated three times, yet she did not utter a word.
The others who were brought in with that woman, proved to be more
honest; many of them began to speak after the first trial. Tomorrow they
will all ascend the steps to the Machine of the Well-Doer. No postponement
is possible for there still is chaos, groaning, cadavers, beasts in the western
section, and to our regret there are still quantities of Numbers who betrayed
Reason.
But on the transverse avenue Forty, we succeeded in establishing a
temporary Wall of high voltage waves. And I hope we win. More than that;
I am certain we shall win. For Reason must win.