Fourteenth Entry
More about the other day. My personal hour before bedtime was occupied, and I could not record it yesterday. But all of it is etched in me, and most of all—perhaps forever—that intolerably cold floor…
In the evening O was to come to me—this was her day. I went down to the number on duty to obtain permission to lower my shades.
“What is wrong with you?” the man on duty asked me. “You seem to be sort of…”
“I… I am not well…”
As a matter of fact, it was true. I am certainly sick. All of this is an illness. And I remembered: yes, of course, the doctor’s note… I felt for it in my pocket—it rustled there. Then everything had really happened, it had been real…
I held out the slip of paper to the man on duty. My cheeks burned. Without looking, I saw him glance up at me, surprised.
And then it was twenty-one and a half. In the room at the left, the shades were down. In the room at the right, I saw my neighbor over a book— his knobby brow and bald head a huge yellow parabola. Tormentedly I paced my room. How could I now, with O, after all that had happened? And from the right I sensed distinctly the man’s eyes upon me, I saw distinctly the wrinkles on his forehead—a row of yellow illegible lines; and for some reason it seemed to me those lines were about me.
At a quarter to twenty-two a joyous rosy hurricane burst into my room, a strong circle of rosy arms closed about my neck. And then I felt the circle weakening, weakening. It broke. The arms dropped.
“You’re not the same, you’re not the old one, not mine!”
“What sort of primitive notion—’mine’? I never was…” and I broke off. It came to me: it’s true; before this I never was… But now? Now I no longer live in our clear, rational world; I live in the ancient nightmare world, the world of square roots of minus one.
The shades fell. Behind the wall on the right my neighbor dropped bis book on the floor, and in the last, momentary narrow slit between the shade and the floor I saw the yellow hand picking up the book, and my one wish was to grasp at that hand with all my strength…
“I thought—I hoped to meet you during the walk today. I have so much—there is so much I must tell you…”
Sweet, poor O! Her rosy mouth—a rosy crescent, its horns down. But how can I tell her what happened? I cannot, if only because that would make her an accomplice to my crimes. I knew she would not have enough strength to go to the Office of the Guardians, and hence…
She lay back. I kissed her slowly. I kissed that plump, naive fold on her wrist. Her blue eyes were closed, and the rosy crescent slowly opened, bloomed, and I kissed all of her.
And then I felt how empty, how drained I was— I had given everything away. I cannot, must not. I must— and it’s impossible. My lips grew cold at once…
The rosy half-moon trembled, wilted, twisted. O drew the blanket over herself, wrapped herself in it, hid her face in the pillow…
I sat on the floor near the bed—what an incredibly cold floor!—I sat silently. The agonizing cold rose from beneath, higher and higher. It must be cold like this in the blue, silent, interplanetary space.
“But you must understand, I did not want to…” I muttered. “I did all I could…”
This was true. I, the real I, had not wanted to. And yet how could I tell her this? How explain that the iron may not want to, but the law is ineluctable, exact…
O raised her face from the pillow and said without opening her eyes, “Go away.” But she was crying, and the words came out as “gooway,” and for some reason this silly trifle cut deeply into me.
Chilled, numb all through, I went out into the corridor. Outside, behind the glass, a light, barely visible mist. By nightfall the fog would probably be dense again. What would happen that night?
O silently slipped past me toward the elevator. The door clicked.
“One moment,” I cried out, suddenly frightened.
But the elevator was already humming, down, down, down.
She had robbed me of R.
She had robbed me of O.
And yet, and yet…
Fifteenth Entry
I had just stepped into the dock where the Integral is being built when the Second Builder hurried to meet me. His face—round, white, as usual—a china plate; and his words, like something exquisitely tasty, served up on the plate: “Well, while it pleased you to be sick the other day, we had, I’d say, quite a bit of excitement here in the chiefs absence.”
“Excitement?”
“Oh, yes! The bell rang at the end of the workday, and everybody began to file out. And imagine— the doorman caught a man without a number. I’ll never understand how he managed to get in. He was taken to the Operational Section. They’ll know how to drag the why and how out of the fellow…” (All this with the tastiest smile.)
The Operational Section is staffed with our best and most experienced physicians, who work under the direct supervision of the Benefactor Himself. They have a variety of instruments, the most effective of them all the famous Gas Bell. Essentially, it is the old school laboratory experiment: a mouse is placed under a glass jar and an air pump gradually rarefies the air inside it And so on. But, of course, the Gas Bell is a much more perfect apparatus, using all sorts of gases. And then, this is no longer torture of a tiny helpless animal. It serves a noble end: it safeguards the security of the One State —in other words, the happiness of millions. About five centuries ago, when the Operational Section was first being developed, there were some fools who compared the Section to the ancient Inquisition, but that is as absurd as equating a surgeon performing a tracheotomy with a highwayman; both may have the same knife in then-hands, both do the same thing—cut a living man’s throat—yet one is a benefactor, the other a criminal; one has a + sign, the other a…
All this is entirely clear—within a single second, at a single turn of the logical machine. Then suddenly the gears catch on the minus, and something altogether different comes to ascendancy—the key ring, still swaying in the door. The door had evidently just been shut, yet I-330 was already gone, vanished. That was something the machine could not digest in any way. A dream? But even now I felt that strange sweet pain in my right shoulder— I-330 pressing herself against the shoulder, next to me in the fog. “Do you like fog?” Yes, I love the fog… I love everything, and everything is firm, new, astonishing, everything is good…
“Everything is good,” I said aloud.
“Good?” The china eyes goggled at me. “What is good about this? If that unnumbered one had managed… it means that they are everywhere, all around us, at all times… they are here, around the Integral, they…”
“Who are they?”
