We
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 per-cent
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 absent-mindedly 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 any thing! 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 per-cent
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....
"Good-bye."
The words came from afar, from above, and reached me not at once,
only after a minute, perhaps two minutes later.
"Why ... why 'good-bye'?"
"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--good-bye."
"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
per-cent 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.