Part 9

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!

Looking from this summit down to the bottom, where something is still left swarming like worms, from this summit all that is left over in us from the ancients seems alike. Alike are the unlawful coming motherhood of O-90, a murder, and the insanity of that Number who dared to throw verses into the face of the United State; and alike is the judgment for them--premature death. This is that divine justice of which those stone-housed ancients dreamed, lit by the naive pink rays of the dawn of history. Their "God" punished sacrilege as a capital crime.

You Uranians, morose and as black as the ancient Spaniards, who were wise in knowing so well how to burn at the stake, you are silent; I think you agree with me. But I hear you, pink Venerians, saying something about "tortures, executions, return to barbarism." My dear Venerians, I pity you! You are incapable of philosophical, mathematical thinking. Human history moves upward in circles, like an aero. The circles are at times golden, sometimes they are bloody, but all have 360 degrees. They go from 0° to 10°, 20°, 200°, 360°,--and then again 0°. Yes, we have returned to zero. But for a mathematically working mind it is clear that this zero is different; it is a perfectly new zero. We started from zero to the right and came to zero on the left. Hence instead of plus zero, we are at minus zero. Do you understand?

This zero appears to me now as a silent, immense, narrow rock, sharp as a blade. In cruel darkness, holding our breath, we set sail from the black night-side of the zero rock. For centuries we, Columbuses, floated and floated; we made the circuit of the whole world and at last! Hurrah! Salute! We climbed up the masts; before us now was a new side of the zero rock, hitherto unknown, bathed in the Polar light of the United State; a blue mass covered with rainbow sparkles! Suns!--a hundred suns! A million rainbows! What does it matter if we are separated from the other, black side of the zero rock only by the thickness of a blade? A knife is the most solid, the most immortal, the most inspired invention of man. The knife served on the guillotine. The knife is the universal tool for cutting knots. The way of paradoxes follows its sharp edge, the only way becoming to a fearless mind....

RECORD TWENTY-ONE

The Duty of an Author The Ice-swells The Most Difficult Love

Yesterday was her day and again she did not come. Again there came her incoherent note, explaining nothing. But I am tranquil, perfectly tranquil. If I do act as I am told to in the note, if I do go to the controller on duty, produce the pink check and then, having lowered the curtains if I do sit alone in my room, I do all this of course not because I have no power to act contrary to her desire. It seems funny? Decidedly not! It is quite simple: separated from all curative, plaster-like smiles I am enabled quietly to write these very lines. This first. And second: I am afraid to lose in her, in I-330, perhaps the only clue I shall ever have to the understanding of all the unknowns, like the story of the cupboard, or my temporary death, for instance. To understand, to discover these unknowns as the author of these records, I feel it simply my duty. Moreover, the unknown is naturally the enemy of man. And _Homo Sapiens_ only then becomes Man in the complete sense of the word, when his punctuation includes no question marks, only exclamation points, commas and periods.

Thus, guided by what seems to me simply my duty as an author, I took an aero today at sixteen o'clock and went to the Ancient House. A strong wind was blowing against me. The aero advanced with difficulty through the thicket of air, its transparent branches whistling and whipping. The city below seemed a heap of blue blocks of ice. Suddenly--a cloud, a swift, oblique shadow. The ice became leaden; it swelled. As in springtime when you happen to stand at the shore and wait; in one more minute everything will move and pull and crack! But the minute passes and the ice remains motionless; you feel as though you yourself are swelling, your heart beats more restlessly, more frequently.... But why do I write about all this? And whence all these strange sensations? For is there such an iceberg as could ever break the most lucid, solid crystal of our life?

At the entrance of the Ancient House I found no one. I went around it and found the old janitress near the Green Wall. She held her hand above her eyes, looking upward. Beyond the Wall, sharp black triangles of some birds; they would rush, cawing, in onslaught on the invisible fence of electric waves, and as they felt the electricity against their breasts, they would recoil and soar once more beyond the Wall.

I noticed oblique, swift shadows on the dark, wrinkled face, a quick glance at me.

"Nobody here, nobody, nobody! No! And no use coming here...."

In what respect is it "no use" and what a strange idea, to consider me somebody's shadow. Perhaps all of you are only my shadows. Did I not populate these pages which only recently were white quadrangular deserts, with you? Without me would they whom I shall guide over the narrow paths of my lines, could they ever see you?

Of course I did not say all this to the old woman. From experience I know that the most torturing thing is to inoculate someone with a doubt as to the fact that he or she is a three-dimensional reality and not some other reality. I remarked only, quite drily, that her business was to open the gate, and she let me into the courtyard.

It was empty. Quiet. The wind remained beyond the walls, distant as on that day, when shoulder to shoulder, two like one, we came out from beneath, from the corridors,--if it ever really happened. I walked under stone arches, my steps resounded against the damp vaults and fell behind me, sounding as though someone were continually following me. The yellow walls with patches of red brick were watching me through their square spectacles, windows,--watching me open the squeaky doors of a barn, look into corners, nooks and hidden places.... A gate in the fence and a lonely spot. The monument of the Two Hundred Years' War. From the ground naked, stone ribs were sticking out. The yellow jaws of the wall. An ancient oven with a chimney like a ship petrified forever among red-brick waves.

It seemed to me that I had seen those yellow teeth once before. I saw them still dimly in my mind, as at the bottom of a barrel, through water. And I began to search. I fell into caves occasionally; I stumbled over stones; rusty jaws caught my unif a few times; salt drops of sweat ran from my forehead into my eyes.

Nowhere! I could find that exit from below, from the corridors, nowhere! There was none. Well, perhaps it was better that it happened so. Probably that _all_ was only one of my absurd "dreams."

Tired out, covered with cobweb and dust, I opened the gate to return to the main yard, when suddenly ... a rustle behind me, splashing steps, and there before me were the pink wing-like ears and the double-curved smile of S-. Half closing his eyes, he bored his little drills into me and asked:

"Taking a walk?"

I was silent. My arms were heavy.

"Well, do you feel better now?"

"Yes, thank you. I think I am getting normal again."

He let me go. He lifted his eyes, looked upward, and I noticed his Adam's apple for the first time; it resembles a broken spring, sticking out from beneath the upholstery of a divan.

Above us, not very high (about 50 meters) aeros were buzzing. By their low, slow flight and by the observation tubes which hung down, I recognized them. They were the aeros of the Guardians. But there were not two or three, as usual, there were about ten or twelve (I regret to have to confine myself to an approximate figure).

"Why are there so many today?" I dared to ask S-.

"Why? Hm.... A real physician begins to treat a patient when he is still well but on the way to becoming sick tomorrow, day-after-tomorrow or within a week. Prophylaxis! Yes!"

He nodded and went splashing over the stones of the yard. Then he turned his head and said over his shoulder, "Be careful!"

Again I was alone. Silence. Emptiness. Far beyond the Green Wall the birds and the wind. What did he mean? My aero ran very fast with the wind. Light and heavy shadows from the clouds. Below blue cupolas, cubes of glass-ice were becoming leaden and swelling....

_The Same Evening_

I took up my pen just now in order to write upon these pages a few thoughts which, it seems to me, will prove useful for you, my readers. These thoughts are concerned with the great Day of Unanimity which is now not far away. But as I sat down, I discovered that I cannot write at present; instead I sit and listen to the wind beating the glass with its dark wings; all the while I am busy looking about and I am waiting, expecting.... What? I do not know. So I was very glad when I saw the brownish-pink gills enter my room, heartily glad I may say. She sat down and innocently smoothed a fold of her unif that fell between her knees, and very soon she pasted upon me, all over me, a host of smiles,--a bit of a smile on each crack of my face and this gave me pleasant sensations, as if I were tightly bound like an infant of the ancients in a swaddling-cloth.

"Imagine! Today, when I entered the classroom" (she works in the Child-Educational Refinery), "I suddenly noticed a caricature upon the blackboard. Indeed! I assure you! They had pictured me in the form of a fish! Perhaps I really--"

"No, no! Why do you say that?" I hastily exclaimed. When one was near her, it was clear indeed that she had nothing resembling gills. No. When I referred to gills in these pages I was certainly irreverent.

"Oh, after all it does not matter. But the act as such, think of it! Of course I called the Guardians at once. I love children very much and I think that the most difficult and the most exalted love is--cruelty. You understand me, of course."

"Certainly!" Her sentence so closely resembled my thoughts! I could not refrain from reading to her a passage from my Record No. 20, beginning "Quietly, metallically, distinctly, do the thoughts" ... etc. I felt her brownish-pink cheeks twitching and coming closer and closer to me. Suddenly I felt in my hands her firm, dry, even slightly prickling fingers.

"Give, give this to me please. I shall have it phonographed and make the children learn it by heart. Not only your Venerians need all this, but we ourselves right now, tomorrow, day-after-tomorrow."

She glanced around and said in a very low voice:

"Have you heard, they say that on the Day of Unanimity--"

I sprang to my feet.

"What? What do they say? What--on the Day of Unanimity?"

The coziness of my room, its very walls, seemed to have vanished. I felt myself thrown outside, where the tremendous, shaggy wind was tossing about and where the slanting clouds of dusk were descending lower and lower....

U- boldly and firmly grasped me by the shoulders. I even noticed how her fingers, responding to my emotion, trembled slightly.

"Sit down, dear, and don't be upset. They say many things; must we believe them all? Moreover, if only you need me, I shall be near you on that day. I shall leave the school-children with someone else and I shall stay with you, for you, dear, you too are a child and you need...."

"No, no!" (I raised my hands in protest). "Not for anything! You really think then that I am a child and that I cannot do without a.... Oh, no! Not for anything in the world." (I must confess I had other plans for that day!)

She smiled. The wording of that smile apparently was: "Oh, what a stubborn, what a stubborn boy!" She sat down, eyelids lowered. Her hands modestly busied themselves with fixing the fold of the unif which fell again between her knees, and suddenly, about something entirely different, she said:

"I think I must decide ... for your sake.... But I implore you, do not hurry me. I must think it over."

I did not hurry her, although I realized that I ought to have been delighted, as there is no greater honor than to crown someone's evening years.