“How would I know who? But I feel them, you understand? All the time.”
“And have you heard about the newly invented operation—excision of the imagination?” (I had myself heard something of the kind a few days earlier.)
“I know about it. But what has that to do with… ?”
“Just this: in your place, I would go and ask to be operated on.”
Something distinctly lemon-sour appeared on the plate. The good fellow was offended by the hint that he might possibly possess imagination… Oh, well, only a week ago I would have been offended myself. Not today. Today I know that I have it, that I am ill. I also know that I don’t want to be cured. I don’t, and that’s all there is to it We ascended the glass stairs. Everything below was as clearly visible as if it were spread out on the palm of my hand.
You, who read these notes, whoever you may be—you have a sun over your heads. And if you have ever been as ill as I am now, you know what the sun is like—what it can be like—in the morning. You know that pink, transparent, warm gold, when the very air is faintly rosy and everything is suffused with the delicate blood of the sun, everything is alive: the stones are alive and soft; iron is alive and soft; people are alive, and everyone is smiling. In an hour, all this may vanish, in an hour the rosy blood may trickle out, but for the moment everything lives. And I see something pulsing and flowing in the glass veins of the Integral. I see—the Integral is pondering its great, portentous future, the heavy load of unavoidable happiness it will carry upward, to you, unknown ones, who are forever searching and never finding. You shall find what you seek, you shall be happy—it is your duty to be happy, and you do not have much longer to wait.
The body of the Integral is almost ready: a graceful, elongated ellipsoid made of our glass—as eternal as gold, as flexible as steel. I saw the transverse ribs and the longitudinal stringers being attached to the body from within; in the stern they were installing the base for the giant rocket motor. Every three seconds, a blast; every three seconds the mighty tail of the Integral will eject flame and gases into cosmic space, and the fiery Tamerlane of happiness will soar away and away…
I watched the men below move in regular, rapid rhythm, according to the Taylor system, bending, unbending, turning like the levers of a single huge machine. Tubes glittered in their hands; with fire they sliced and welded the glass walls, angles, ribs, brackets. I saw transparent glass monster cranes rolling slowly along glass rails, turning and bending as obediently as the men, delivering their loads into the bowels of the Integral. And all of this was one: humanized machines, perfect men. It was the highest, the most stirring beauty, harmony, music… Quick! Below! To join them, to be with them!
And now, shoulder to shoulder, welded together with them, caught up in the steel rhythm… Measured movements; firmly round, ruddy cheeks; mirror-smooth brows, untroubled by the madness of thought. I floated on the mirror-smooth sea. I rested.
Suddenly one of them turned to me serenely. “Better today?”
“Better? What’s better?”
“Well, you were out yesterday. We had thought it might be something dangerous…” A bright forehead, a childlike, innocent smile.
The blood rushed to my face. I could not, could not lie to those eyes. I was silent, drowning…
The gleaming white round china face bent down through the hatch above. “Hey! D-503! Come up, please! We’re getting a rigid frame here with the brackets, and the stress…”
Without listening to the end, I rushed up to him. I was escaping ignominiously, in headlong flight I could not raise my eyes. The glittering glass stairs flashed under my feet, and every step increased my hopelessness: I had no place here—I, the criminal, the poisoned one. Never again would I merge into the regular, precise, mechanical rhythm, never again float on the mirrorlike untroubled sea. I was doomed to burn forever, to toss about, to seek a corner where to hide my eyes-forever, until I finally found strength to enter that door and…
And then an icy spark shot through me: I—well, I didn’t matter; but I would also have to tell about her, and she, too, would be…
I climbed out of the hatch and stopped on the deck. I did not know where to turn now, I didn’t know why I had come there. I looked up. The midday-weary sun was rising dully. Below me was the Integral, gray-glassy, unalive. The rosy blood had trickled out It was clear to me that all of this was merely my imagination, that everything remained as it had been before, yet it was also clear…
“What’s wrong with you, 508, are you deaf? I have been calling and calling… What’s the matter?” The Second Builder shouted into my ear. He must have been shouting for a long time.
What’s the matter with me? I have lost the rudder. The motor roars, the aero quivers and rushes at full speed, but there is no rudder, no controls, and I don’t know where I’m flying: down-to crash into the ground in a moment, or up-into the sun, into the flames…
Sixteenth Entry
I have not written anything for several days, I don’t know how many. All the days are one day. All the days are one color—yellow, like parched, fiery sand. And there is not a spot of shadow, not a drop of water… On and on endlessly over the yellow sand. I cannot live without her, yet since she vanished so incomprehensibly that day in the Ancient House, she…
I have seen her only once since that day, during the daily walk. Two, three, four days ago—I do not know; all the days are one. She flashed by, filling for a second the yellow, empty world. And, hand in hand with her, up to her shoulder, the double-bent S and the paper-thin doctor. And there was a fourth one—I remember nothing but his fingers: they would fly out of the sleeves of his unif like clusters of rays, incredibly thin, white, long. I-330 raised her hand and waved to me. Over her neighbor’s head she bent toward the one with the ray-like fingers. I caught the word Integral. All four glanced back at me. Then they were lost in the gray-blue sky, and again—the yellow, dessicated road.
That evening she had a pink coupon to visit me. I stood before the annunciator and implored it, with tenderness, with hatred, to click, to register in the white slot: I-330. Doors slammed; pale, tall, rosy, swarthy numbers came out of the elevator; shades were pulled down on all sides. She was not there. She did not come.
And possibly, just at this very moment, exactly at twenty-two, as I am writing this, she stands with closed eyes, leaning against someone with her shoulder, saying to someone, “Do you love?” To whom? Who is he? The one with the raylike fingers, or the thick-lipped, sputtering R? Or S?
S… Why am I constantly hearing his flat steps all these days, splashing as through puddles? Why is he following me all these days like a shadow? Before me, beside me, behind—a gray-blue, two-dimensional shadow. Others pass through it, step on it, but it is invariably here, bound to me as by some invisible umbilical cord. Perhaps this cord is she—I-330? I don’t know. Or perhaps they, the Guardians, already know that I…
Suppose you were told: Your shadow sees you, sees you all the time. Do you understand me? And suddenly you have the strangest feeling: your hands are not your own, they interfere with you. And I catch myself constantly swinging my arms absurdly, out of time with my steps. Or suddenly I feel that I must glance back, but it’s impossible, no matter how I try, my neck is rigid, locked. And I run, I run faster and faster, and feel with my back —my shadow runs faster behind me, and there is no escape, no escape anywhere…
Alone, at last, in my room. But here there is something else—the telephone. I pick up the receiver. “Yes, I- 330, please.” And again I hear a rustle in the receiver, someone’s steps in the hall, past her room—and silence… I throw down the receiver—I can’t, I can’t endure it any longer. I must run there, to her.
This happened yesterday. I hurried there, and wandered for an hour, from sixteen to seventeen, near the house where she lives. Numbers marched past me, row after row. Thousands of feet stepped rhythmically, a million-footed monster floated, swaying, by. And only I was alone, cast out by a storm upon a desert island,
