Part 8

Later when I sat down to describe all these adventures, I sought in my memory and consulted some books; and now I understand, of course! I was in a state of temporary death. This state was known to the ancients, but as far as I am informed it is unknown to us. I have no conception of how long I was dead, probably not longer than five or ten seconds, but after awhile I arose from the dead and opened my eyes. It was dark. But I felt I was falling down--down--down. I stretched out my hand to attach myself to something but the rough wall scratched my fingers; it was running away from me, upward. I felt blood on my fingers. It was clear that all this was not merely a play of my sick imagination. But what was it? What?

I heard my own frequent, trembling breaths. (I am not ashamed to confess this, it was all unexpected and incomprehensible.) A minute, two, three passed; I was still going down. Then a soft bump. The thing that had been falling away from under my feet was motionless. I found in the darkness a knob, and turned it; a door opened; there was a dim light. I now noticed behind me a square platform, travelling upward. I tried to run back to it but it was too late. "I am cut off here," I thought. Where "here" might be, I did not know.

A corridor. A heavy silence. The small lamps on the vaulted ceiling resembled an endless, twinkling, dotted line. The corridor was similar to the "tube" of our underground railways but it was much narrower, and made not of our glass but of some other, very ancient material. For a moment I thought of the underground caves where they say many tried to save themselves during the Two Hundred Years' War. There was nothing to do but to walk ahead.

I walked, I think, for about twenty minutes. A turn to the right, the corridor became wider, the small lamps brighter. There was a dim droning somewhere.... Was it a machine or voices? I did not know. I stood before a heavy, opaque door, from behind which came the noise. I knocked. Then I knocked again, louder. Now there was silence behind the door. Something clanked; the door opened slowly and heavily.

I don't know which of us was the more dumbfounded; the thin blade-like doctor stood before me!

"You here!" his scissors opened and remained open.

And I, as if I did not know a human word, stood silent, merely stared, without comprehending that he was talking to me. He must have told me to leave, for with his thin paper stomach he slowly pressed me to the side, to the more brightly lighted end of the corridor and poked me in the back.

"Beg your pardon ... I wanted ... I thought that she, I-330 ... but behind me...."

"Stay where you are," said the doctor brusquely, and he disappeared.

At last! At last she was nearby, here, and what did it matter where "here" was? I saw the familiar saffron-yellow silk, the smile-bite, the eyes with their curtains drawn.... My lips quivered, so did my hands and knees, and I had a most stupid thought: "Vibrations make sounds. Shivering must make a sound. Why then don't I hear it?"

Her eyes opened for me widely. I entered into them.

"I could not ... any longer!... Where have you been?... Why?..."

I was unable to tear my eyes away from her for a second, and I talked as if in a delirium, fast and incoherently, or perhaps I only thought without speaking out: "A shadow ... behind me. I died. And from the cupboard.... Because that doctor of yours ... speaks with his scissors.... I have a soul ... incurable ... and I must walk...."

"An incurable soul? My poor boy!" I-330 laughed. She covered me with the sparkles of her laughter; my delirium left me. Everywhere around her little laughs were sparkling! How good it was!

The doctor reappeared from around the turn, the wonderful, magnificent, thinnest doctor.

"Well?" He was already beside her.

"Oh, nothing, nothing. I shall tell you later. He got here by accident. Tell them that I shall be back in about a quarter of an hour."

The doctor slid around the corner. She lingered. The door closed with a heavy thud. Then slowly, very slowly, piercing my heart with a sharp sweet needle, I-330 pressed against me with her shoulder and then with her arm, with her whole body, and we walked away as if fused into one.

I do not remember now where we turned into darkness; in the darkness we walked up some endless stairway in silence. I did not see but I knew, I knew that she walked as I did, with closed eyes, blind, her head thrown a little backward, biting her lips and listening to the music, that is to say, to my almost audible tremor.

I returned to consciousness in one of the innumerable nooks in the courtyard of the Ancient House. There was a fence of earth with naked stone ribs and yellow teeth of walls half fallen to pieces. She opened her eyes and said, "Day-after-tomorrow at sixteen." She was gone.

Did all this really happen? I do not know. I shall learn day-after-tomorrow. One real sign remains: on my right hand the skin has been rubbed from the tips of three fingers. But today, on the _Integral_ the Second Builder assured me that he saw me touch the polishing wheel with those very same fingers. Perhaps I did. It is quite probable. I don't know. I don't know anything.

RECORD EIGHTEEN

Logical Debris Wounds and Plaster Never Again

Last night as soon as I had gone to bed, I fell momentarily to the bottom of the ocean of sleep like an overloaded ship which has been wrecked. The heavy thicket of wavy green water enveloped me. Then slowly I floated from the bottom upward, and somewhere in the middle of that course, I opened my eyes,--my room! The morning was still green and motionless. A fragment of sunshine coming from the mirror on my closet door shone into my eyes. This fragment does not permit me to sleep, being thus an obstacle in the way of exactly fulfilling the rules of the Tables which prescribe so many hours of sleep. I should have opened the closet but I felt as though I were in a spider web, and cobweb covered my eyes; I had no power to sit up.

Yet I got up and opened the closet door; suddenly, there behind that door, making her way through the mass of garments which hung there, was I-330! I have become so accustomed of late to most improbable things, that as far as I remember I was not even surprised; I did not even ask a question. I jumped into the closet, slammed the mirror-door behind me and breathlessly, brusquely, blindly, avidly I clung to her. I remember clearly even now:--through the narrow crack of the door a sharp sun-ray like lightning broke into the darkness and played on the floor and walls of the closet, and a little higher the cruel ray-blade fell upon the naked neck of I-330, and this for some reason seemed to me so terrible that I could not bear it, and I screamed;--and again I opened my eyes. My room!

The morning was still green and motionless. On the door of my closet was a fragment of the sunshine. I was in bed. A dream? Yet my heart was still wildly beating, quivering and twitching; there was a dull pain in the tips of my fingers and in my knees. _This_ undoubtedly _did_ happen! And now I am unable any more to distinguish what is dream from what is actuality; irrational numbers grow through my solid, habitual, tri-dimensional life; and instead of firm, polished surfaces--there is something shaggy and rough....

I waited long for the Bell to ring. I was lying thinking, untangling a very strange logical chain. In our superficial life, every formula, every equation, corresponds to a curve or a solid. We have never seen any curve or solid corresponding to my square-root of minus one. The horrifying part of the situation is that there exist such curves or solids; unseen by us they do exist, they must, inevitably; for in mathematics as on a screen, strange sharp shadows appear before us. One must remember that mathematics like death, never makes mistakes, never plays tricks. If we are unable to see those irrational curves or solids, it only means that they inevitably possess a whole immense world somewhere beneath the surface of our life....

I jumped up without waiting for the waking Bell and began to pace up and down the room. My mathematics, the only firm and immovable island of my shaken life, this too was torn from its anchor and was floating, whirling. Then it means that that absurd thing, the "soul," is as real as my unif, as my boots, although I do not see them since they are behind the door of the closet. If boots are not a sickness, why should the "soul" be one? I sought, but I could not find, a way out of the logical confusion. It looked to me like that strange and sad debris beyond the Green Wall; my logical debris too, is filled with extraordinary, incomprehensible, wordless but speaking beings. It occurred to me for a moment that through some strange, thick glass I saw _it_; I saw it at once infinitely large and infinitely small, scorpion-like with hidden but ever perceptible sting; I _saw_ the square-root of minus one. Perhaps it was nothing else but my "soul," which like the legendary scorpion of the ancients, was voluntarily stinging itself with....

The Bell! The day began. All I saw and felt neither died, nor disappeared, it merely became covered with daylight, as our visible world does not die or disappear at the end of the day but merely becomes covered with the darkness of night. My head was filled by a light, thin haze. Through that haze I perceived the long glass tables and the globe-like heads busy chewing, slowly, silently, in unison. At a distance, through the haze, the metronome was slowly beating its tick-tock, and to the accompaniment of this customary and caressing music I joined with the others in counting automatically to fifty: fifty is the number of chewing movements required by the law of the State for every piece of food. And automatically then, keeping time, I went downstairs and put my name down in the book for the outgoing Numbers,--as everyone did. But I felt I _lived_ separately from everybody; I lived by myself separated by a soft wall which absorbs noises; beyond that wall there was my world.

Here a thought occurred to me. If that world is only my own, why should I tell about it in these records? Why should I recount all these absurd "dreams" about closets, endless corridors? With great sorrow I notice that instead of a correct and strictly mathematical poem in honor of the United State, I am writing a fantastic novel. Oh! if only it were a novel and not my actual life, full of X's, square-roots of minus one and down-fallings! Yet all may be for the best. Probably you, my unknown readers, are children still as compared with us. We are brought up by the United State; consequently we have reached the highest summits attainable by man. And you, being children, may swallow without crying all the bitter things I am to give you only if they be coated with the syrup of adventures.

* * * * *

_The Same Evening_

Are you familiar with the following sensation? You are in an aero and you dash upward along a blue spiral line; the window is open and the wind rushes past your face, whistling. There is no earth. The earth is forgotten. The earth is as far from you as Venus, Saturn or Jupiter. That is how I live now. A hurricane wind beats into my face; I forget the earth, forget rosy, dear O-90. Yet the earth does exist and sooner or later I must plane down to that earth; only I close my eyes to avoid seeing the date at which there is the name O-90 written on my Tables.

This evening the distant earth reminded me of itself. In order to fulfill the recommendation of the doctor (I desire sincerely, most sincerely I desire to be cured), I wandered for two hours and eight minutes over the straight lines of the deserted avenues. Everybody was in the auditoriums, in accordance with the Table. Only I, cut off from the rest, I was alone. Strictly speaking, it was a very unnatural situation. Imagine a finger cut off from the whole, from the hand; a separate human finger, somewhat hunched, running over the glass sidewalk. I was such a finger. What seemed most strange and unnatural was that the finger had no desire to be with its hand, with its fellows. I want either to be alone or with _her_; to transfuse my whole being into hers through a contact with her shoulder or through our interwoven fingers.

I came home as the sun was setting. The pink dust of evening was covering the glass of the walls, the golden peak of the Accumulating Tower, the voices and smiles of the Numbers. Is it not strange: the passing rays of the evening sun fall to the earth at the same angle as the awakening rays of the morning, yet they make everything seem so different; the pink tinge is different. At sunset it is so quiet, somewhat melancholy; at sunrise it is resounding, boisterous.

In the hall downstairs when I entered, I saw U-, the controller. She took a letter from the heaps of envelopes covered with pink dust and handed it to me. I repeat: she is a very respectable woman and I am sure she has only the very best feelings towards me.... Yet, every time I see those cheeks hanging down, which look like the gills of a fish, I....

Holding out her dry hand with the letter, U- sighed. But that sigh only very slightly moved in me the curtains which separate me from the rest of the world. I was completely projected upon the envelope which trembled in my hand. I had no doubt but that it was a letter from I-330.

At that moment I heard another sigh, such a deliberate one, underscored with two lines, that I raised my eyes from the envelope and saw a tender, cloudy smile coming from between the gills, through the bashful jalousies of lowered eyes. And then:

"You poor, poor, dear!..." a sigh underscored with three lines, and a glance at the letter, an imperceptible glance. (What was in the letter she naturally knew, _ex officio_.)

"No, really?... Why?"

"No, no, dear, I know better than you. For a long time I have watched you and I see that you need some one with years of experience of life to accompany you."

I felt all pasted around by her smile. It was like a plaster upon the wounds which were to be inflicted upon me by the letter I held in my hand. Finally, through the bashful jalousies of her eyes, she said in a very low voice: "I shall think about it, dear. I shall think it over. And be sure that if I feel myself strong enough ..."

"Great Well-Doer! Is it possible that my lot is?... Is it possible that she means to say, that she?..."

My eyes were dimmed and filled with thousands of sinusoids; the letter was trembling. I went near the light, to the wall. There the light of the sun was going out; from the sun was falling thicker and thicker the dark, sad, pink dust, covering the floor, my hands, the letter. I opened the envelope and found the signature as fast as I could,--the first wound! It was not I-330; it was O-90! And another wound: in the right-hand corner a slovenly splash,--a blot! I cannot bear blots. It matters little whether they are made by ink or by ... well, it matters not by what. Heretofore, such a blot would have had only a disagreeable effect, disagreeable to the eyes; but now--why did that small gray blot seem to be like a cloud and seem to spread about me a leaden, bluish darkness? Or was it again the "soul" at work? Here is a transcript of the letter:

"You know, or perhaps you don't ... I cannot write well. Little it matters! Now you know that without you there is for me not a single day, a single morning, a single spring, for R- is only ... well, that is of no importance to you. At any rate, I am very grateful to him, for without him, alone all these days, I don't know what would.... During these last few days and nights I have lived through ten years, or perhaps twenty years. My room seemed to me not square but round; I walk around without end, round after round, always the same thing, not a door to escape through. I cannot live without you because I love you; and I should not, I cannot be with you any more,--because I love you! Because I see and I understand that you need no one now, no one in the world save that other, and you must realize that it is precisely because I love you I must ...

"I need another two or three days in order to paste together the fragments of myself and thus restore at least something similar to the O-90 of old. Then I shall go myself, and myself I shall state that I take your name from my list, and this will be better for you; you must feel happy now. I shall never again...."

"Good-bye, O-."

Never again. Yes, that is better. She is right. But, why then?... Why then?...

RECORD NINETEEN

The Infinitesimal of the Third Order From Under the Forehead Over the Railing

There in the strange corridor lighted by the dotted line of dim little electric lamps ... or no, no, later, when we had already reached one of the nooks in the courtyard of the Ancient House, she said, "Day-after-tomorrow." That "day-after-tomorrow" is today. And everything seems to have wings and to fly; the day flies; and our _Integral_ too already has wings. We finished placing the motor and tried it out today, without switching it in. What magnificent, powerful salvos! Each of them sounded for me like a salute in honor of _her_, the only one,--in honor of today!

At the time of the first explosion about a dozen loafing Numbers from the docks stood near the main tube--and nothing was left of them save a few crumbs and a little soot. With pride I write down now that this occurrence did not disturb the rhythm of our work even for a second. Not a man shrank. We and our lathes continued our rectilinear or curved motions with the same sparkling and polished precision as before, as if nothing had happened. As a matter of fact, what did happen? A dozen Numbers represent hardly one hundred millionth part of the United State. For practical consideration, that is but an infinitesimal of the third order. That _pity_, a result of arithmetical ignorance, was known to the ancients; to us it seems absurd.

It seems droll to me also, that yesterday I was thinking, even relating in these pages about a gray blot! All that was only the "softening of the surface" which is normally as hard as diamond, like our walls. (There is an ancient saying: "Shooting beans at a stone wall--")

Sixteen o'clock. I did not go for the supplementary walk; who knows, she might come now, when the sun is so noisily bright.

I am almost the only one in his room. Through the walls full of sunshine I see for a distance to the right and to the left and below strings of other rooms, repeating each other as if in a mirror, hanging in the air and empty. Only on the bluish stairway, striped by the golden ink of the sun, is seen rising a thin, gray shadow. Already I hear steps, and I see through the door and I feel a smile pasted to my face like a plaster. But it passed to another stairway and down. The click of the switchboard! I threw myself to that little white slit and ... an unfamiliar male Number! (A consonant 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.