We
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, tick-tock 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!