Machines have no imagination.
Have you ever seen the face of a pump cylinder break into a distant, foolish, dreamy smile while it works?
Have you ever heard of cranes restlessly turning from side to side and sighing at night, during the hours designated for rest?
No!
And you? Blush with shame! The Guardians have noticed more and more such smiles and sighs of late. And —hide your eyes—historians of the One State ask for retirement so that they need not record disgraceful events.
But this is not your fault—you are sick. The name of this sickness is IMAGINATION.
It is a worm that gnaws out black lines on the forehead. It is a fever that drives you to escape ever farther, even if this “farther” begins where happiness ends. This is the last barricade on our way to happiness.
Rejoice, then: this barricade has already been blown up.
The road is open.
The latest discovery of State Science is the location of the center of imagination—a miserable little nodule in the brain in the area of the pans Varolii. Triple-X-ray cautery of this nodule—and you are cured of imagination—
FOREVER.
You are perfect. You are machinelike. The road to one hundred per cent happiness is free. Hurry, then, everyone—old and young—hurry to submit to the Great Operation. Hurry to the auditoriums, where the Great Operation is being performed. Long live the Great Operation! Long live the One State ! Long live the Benefactor!
You… If you were reading all this not in my notes, resembling some fanciful ancient novel, if this newspaper, still smelling of printers’ ink, were trembling in your hands as it does in mine; if you knew, as I know, that this is the most actual reality, if not today’s, then tomorrow’s—would you not feel as I do? Wouldn’t your head reel, as mine does? Wouldn’t these eerie, sweet, icy needle pricks run down your back, your arms? Would it not seem to you that you’re a giant, Atlas—and if you straighten up, you will inevitably strike the glass ceiling with your head?
I seized the telephone receiver. “I-330… Yes, yes, 330.” And then I cried out breathlessly, “You’re home, yes? Have you read it? You’re reading it? But this is, this is… It’s remarkable!”
“Yes…” A long, dark silence. The receiver hummed faintly, pondered something… “I must see you today. Yes, at my place, after sixteen. Without fail.”
Dearest! Dear, such a dear! “Without fail…” I felt myself smiling and could not stop. And now I would carry this smile along the street—high, like a light.
Outside, the wind swept at me. It whirled, howled, whipped, but I felt all the more exultant: whistle, scream—it doesn’t matter now—you can no longer topple walls. And if cast-iron, flying clouds tumble overhead—let them tumble: they cannot blot out the sun. We have forever chained it to the zenith—we, Joshuas, sons of Nun.
At the corner a dense group of Joshuas stood with their foreheads glued to the glass wall. Inside, a man already lay stretched out on the dazzling white table. From under the white the bare soles of his feet formed a yellow angle; white doctors were bent over his head; a white hand stretched to another hand a hypodermic syringe filled with something.
“And you, why don’t you go in?” I asked, addressing no one, or, rather, everyone.
“And what about you?” A spherical head turned to me.
“I will, later. I must first…”
Somewhat embarrassed, I withdrew. I really had to see her, 330, first. But why “first”? This I could not answer.
The dock. Icy-blue, the Integral shimmered, sparkled. In the machine compartment the dynamo hummed gently, caressingly, repeating some word over and over again—and the word seemed familiar, one of my own. I bent over it and stroked the long, cold tube of the engine. Dear… so dear. Tomorrow you will come alive; tomorrow, for the first time in your life, you will be shaken by the fiery, flaming sparks within your womb…
How would I be looking at this mighty glass monster if everything had remained as yesterday? If I knew that tomorrow at twelve I would betray it… yes, betray…
Cautiously, someone touched my elbow from the back. I turned: the platelike flat face of the Second Builder.
“You know it already?” he said.
“What? The Operation? Yes? How strangely— everything, everything—at once…”
“No, not that: the trial flight has been postponed to the day after tomorrow. All because of this Operation… And we were rushing, doing our best—and all for nothing…”
“All because of this Operation…” What a ridiculous, stupid man. Sees nothing beyond his flat face. If he only knew that, were it not for the Operation, he would be locked up in a glass box tomorrow at twelve, rushing about, trying to climb the walls…
In my room, at half past fifteen. I entered and saw U. She sat at my table—bony, straight, rigid, her right cheek set firmly on her hand. She must have waited long, for, when she jumped up to meet me, five dents remained on her cheek from her fingers.
For a second I recalled that wretched morning, and herself there, raging by the table, next to I-330… But only for a second, and then the memory was washed away by today’s sun. It was like entering the room on a bright day and absently turning the switch: the bulb lights up, but is invisible—pallid, absurd, unneeded…
Without a thought, I held my hand out to her, I forgave her everything. She seized both of my hands and pressed them hard in her own bony ones. Her sagging cheeks quivering with excitement like some ancient ornaments, she said, “I have been waiting… Only for a moment… I only wanted to say how happy I am, how glad for you! You understand—tomorrow, or the day after, you will be well—completely well, newly born…
I saw some sheets of paper on the table—the last pages of my notes. They lay there as I left them in the evening. If she had seen what I had written there… However, it no longer mattered; now it was merely history, ridiculously distant, like something seen through the wrong end of binoculars…
“Yes,” I said. “And you know—just now I was walking down the street, and there was a man before me, and his shadow on the pavement. And imagine, the shadow glowed. And it seems to me—I am certain—that tomorrow there will be no shadows. No man, no object will cast a shadow… The sun will shine through everything…”
She spoke gently and sternly. “You are a dreamer! I would not permit the children at school to speak like that…”
And she went on about the children—how she had taken them all to the Operation, and how they had had to be tied up there… and that “love must be ruthless, yes, ruthless,” and that she thought she would at last decide…
She smoothed the gray blue cloth over her knees, quickly and silently plastered me over with her smile, and left.
Fortunately, the sun had not yet stopped today; it was still running, and now it was sixteen. I knocked at the door, my heart beating…
“Come in!”
And I was down on the floor near her chair, embracing her legs, head thrown back and looking into her eyes—one, then the other—and in each one seeing myself, in marvelous captivity…
And then, outside the wall, a storm. Clouds darkening—more and more like cast iron. Let them! My head could not contain the flow of riotous, wild words—spilling over the rim. I spoke aloud, and, together with the sun, we were flying somewhere… But now we knew where—and behind us, planets—planets spraying flame, inhabited by fiery, singing flowers—and mute, blue planets, where sentient, rational stones were organized into societies— planets which, like our earth, had reached the summit of absolute, and hundred per cent happiness…
Suddenly, from above, “But don’t you think that the society at the summit is precisely a society organized of stones?” The triangle of her eyebrows grew sharper, darker. “And happiness… Well, after all, desires torment us, don’t they? And, clearly, happiness is when there are no more desires, not one… What a mistake, what ridiculous prejudice it’s been to have marked happiness always with a plus sign. Absolute happiness should, of course, carry a minus sign—the divine minus.”
