We: New Edition Page 18

  Suddenly a voice from above: “But don’t you think that apex ... is nothing more than stones united into an organized society?”

  And, as the triangle got sharper and darker: “And happiness

  ... what is it, after all? Desires are a torment, aren’t they? And it’s clear that happiness is when there are no longer any desires, not even one.... What a mistake, what a stupid prejudice it’s been all these years to put a plus sign in front of happiness. Absolute happiness should of course have a minus sign, a divine minus.”

  I remember muttering distractedly: “Absolute minus is 273°. ...”

  “Minus 273°. Exactly. Rather cool, but doesn’t that alone prove that we’re at the apex?”

  She was somehow talking for me, through me, the same as she did that other time, long ago, and spinning out my thoughts to the end. But there was something so eerie in this that I couldn’t stand it, and with a great effort I forced out the word: “No.”

  “No,” I said. “You’re ... you’re joking....”

  She started to laugh, very loud ... too loud. She laughed until, an instant later, she’d reached some kind of edge, from which she stepped back, and down. There was a pause.

  She stood up. She put her hands on my shoulders. She gave me a long slow stare. Then she drew me to her and everything vanished except for her sharp burning lips.

  “Farewell!”

  This word came from far away above me and was a long time coming—a minute, maybe, or two.

  “What do you mean, farewell?”

  “You are sick. You’ve committed crimes on account of me. It was a torment for you, wasn’t it? But now comes the Operation, and you’ll be cured of me. So ... farewell.”

  “No!” I began to shout.

  A mercilessly sharp triangle, black on white: “What is this? Don’t you desire happiness?”

  My head was going in all directions. Two logical trains had crashed, piling on top of each other, crumpling, flying apart....

  “Well, how about it? I’m waiting. Choose: the Operation and 100 percent happiness, or ...”

  “I can’t live without you, I don’t want to live without you,” I either said or thought, I don’t know which, but 1-330 heard me.

  “Yes, I know,” she answered. Then, with her hands still on my shoulders and her eyes still looking into mine: “In that case, I’ll see you tomorrow. Tomorrow at 12:00. You remember?”

  “No. It’s been postponed one day. The day after tomorrow....”

  “So much the better for us. At 12:00 the day after tomor row. ...”

  I was walking alone down the street in the twilight. The wind was twisting, carrying, driving me like a scrap of paper; fragments of the cast-iron sky were flying, flying—they had another day, or two, to fly through the infinite.... I was brushing against the yunies of those walking the other way, but I was all alone. I could see it clearly: All were saved, but there was no saving me, not any longer. I did not want to be saved....

  RECORD 32

  I Do Not Believe Tractors The Human Chip

  Do you believe that you will die? Yes, man is mortal, I am a man, ergo ... No, that isn’t what I mean. I know that you know that. What I’m asking is: Have you ever actually believed it, believed it completely, believed not with your mind but with your body, actually felt that one day the fingers now holding this very piece of paper will be yellow and icy ... ?

  No, of course you don’t believe it—which is the reason why, up to now, you haven’t jumped from the tenth floor to the pavement, why you’ve gone on eating, turning pages, shaving, smiling, writing....

  It’s the same—yes, exactly the same—with me today. I know that this little black hand on my watch is going to creep down to here, midnight, and that it will then climb slowly back upward, to cross at a certain moment some final point, at which time an incredible tomorrow will commence. This I know, but I somehow do not believe it—or maybe it seems to me that the twenty-four hours are going to be twenty-four years. And that is why I can still do something, hurry somewhere, answer questions, climb up the ladder to the INTEGRAL. I still feel it rocking on the water and understand that I have to hold on to the handrail and that it’s cold glass I feel under my hand. I see the transparent living cranes bending their goose necks, sticking out their beaks, and carefully, tenderly feeding the INTEGRAL the terrible explosive food for its engines. And, down below on the river, I have a clear view of the blue watery veins and nodules inflated by the wind. But even so, all this is very separate from me, strange, flat—like a diagram on a sheet of paper. And it’s also strange that the flat diagrammatic face of the Second Builder is suddenly talking: “So what do you say? How much fuel shall we take on for the engines? If you count three, or say, three and a half hours...”

  Before me, in three-dimensional projection on the diagram, I see my hand, which is holding a calculator, the logarithmic dial of which points to the number 15.

  “Fifteen tons. No, better make that ... yes, make it 100...”

  This is because I do after all know that tomorrow ...

  And out of the corner of my eye I see my hand, the one holding the dial, begin almost imperceptibly to tremble.

  “A hundred? But why such a lot? That’s enough for a week. What am I saying? For much longer than a week!”

  “There’s no telling ... who knows?” I know.

  The wind whistles and all the air, right up to the sky, seems tightly packed with some invisible substance. I have trouble breathing, trouble walking, and down there at the end of the avenue, the hand on the clock of the Accumulator Tower has trouble slowly crawling along, never stopping for a second. The spire of the tower, dim and blue, is in the clouds, where it howls vacantly as it sucks electricity. The pipes of the Musical Factory are howling.

  In rows, four across, same as always. But the rows seem to be unstable, somehow, maybe from the wind that’s shaking and twisting them. More and more. Now they’ve bumped against something on the corner, recoiled, and now they’re a dense, frozen, tight clot, breathing hard, and all craning their necks at once.

  “Look! No, look there! Hurry!”

  “Them! It’s them!”

  “Me? Never! Not for anything—stick my head in the Machine first!”

  “Shut up! You’re crazy!”

  The door of the auditorium at the corner is wide open and out of it is coming a slow, heavy column of about fifty men. Or rather, not “men”—that isn’t the word. Those weren’t feet but some kind of heavy, forged wheels, drawn by some invisible drive mechanism. Not men but some kind of tractors in human form. Above their heads, snapping in the breeze, was a white banner embroidered with a golden sun, in the rays of which was a device: “We are the first! We have already had the Operation! Everybody follow us!”

  They were plowing through the crowd, slowly but irresistibly, and you could see that if there was a wall or a tree or a house in their way instead of us, they would plow right through the wall, tree, house without stopping. Now they’re already in the middle of the avenue. Now they’ve stretched out into a chain, hand in hand, facing us. And we—a tense little clot of bristling heads—we wait. We crane our necks. Clouds. Whistling wind.

  Suddenly the left and right wings of the chain quickly close in on us, faster and faster, like a heavy car running downhill, lock us in a ring, and ... toward the wide-open doors, through the doors, inside ...

  Someone’s piercing scream: “It’s a roundup! Run for it!”

  And there was a stampede. Right near the wall there was still a narrow little breach in the living ring. Everybody headed that way, heads out, heads momentarily sharpened into wedges, with sharp elbows, ribs, shoulders, sides. They were like a stream of water compressed by a fireman’s hose —they fanned out and scattered stamping feet, swinging arms, and yunies all over the place. Out of somewhere my eyes caught sight of a body bent double like the letter S with transparent ear-wings—then he was gone, sunk into the earth, and I was alone in the midst of flailing arms a
nd feet. I ran for it.

  A stop for breath in some kind of entranceway, my back pressed up against the doors, and instantly, as if the wind was blowing it, a little sliver of humanity comes toward me.

  “I’ve been behind you ... the whole time.... I don’t want it, see ... I don’t want it. I agree ... ”

  Tiny round hands on my sleeve, round blue eyes: It’s her, O. Then she sort of slips down the wall and settles on the ground. There she bent over and made a small lump of herself on the cold stairs, and I, standing above her, caress her head, her face, with my wet hands. This made me look very big and her very small, like a small part of myself. This was totally different from the way it was with I-330, and it occurred to me that it was something like the way the ancients treated their own personal children.

  I can hardly hear what she is saying down there, talking through the hands covering her face: “Every night I ... I can’t ... if they cure me ... every night, alone in the dark, I think about him—how he’ll turn out, how I’ll do for him ... I wouldn’t have anything to live for, see? ... You’ve got to ... got to ...”

  It was a stupid feeling, but I did in fact feel certain: Yes, I’ve got to. Stupid, because what I had to do was one more crime. Stupid, because white cannot be black at the same time, a duty can’t also be a crime. Or else there’s nothing in life that is black or white and color depends on some fundamental logical postulate. And if you start from the postulate that I gave her a child illegally ...

  “Okay, but just calm down ... calm down ...” I say. “You understand, I’ve got to take you to 1-330 ... as I wanted to earlier ... so that she can ...”

  “Yes.” (This in a low voice, her hands still over her face.)

  I helped her get up. Then, without saying a word, each thinking his own thoughts, or maybe each thinking about one and the same thing, we go along the darkening street among the quiet leaden houses, through the wind’s tense whipping branches....

  At one transparent, tense point I heard behind me, through the whistling wind, the familiar sound of feet squelching through puddles. At the turn I looked back through the upside-down reflection of the racing rainclouds in the dim glass pavement and saw S. Immediately I start waving my arms in some strange awkward way and yelling to O that tomorrow, yes, tomorrow, the INTEGRAL will make its first test flight, and that this will be something absolutely incredible, marvelous, terrifying....

  In her circular blue amazement, O looks at me, then looks at my loud, idiotically waving hands. But I don’t let her get a word out—I go on talking and talking. But inside me, where only I can hear it, a separate feverish thought is humming and knocking: “You can’t ... somehow you’ve got to ... You can’t let him follow you to 1-330 ....”

  Instead of heading left, I cut off to the right. The bridge obediently presented its slavishly bent back to the three of us: me, O, and him, S, who was following. From the brightly lit buildings on the opposite bank lights were sprinkling into the water and shattering into thousands of feverishly leaping sparks, spattered with mad white foam. The wind was humming—it sounded like a bass string made of ship’s hawser and strung somewhere low overhead. And through the bass, all the time, behind me ...

  The building where I live. At the entrance O stopped and started saying something like: “No, you promised ...”

  But I didn’t let her finish, pushed her quickly through the door, and we were inside, in the lobby. At the control desk—the familiar sagging cheeks, shaking with excitement; a dense clot of Numbers standing around and some argument in progress, heads are sticking through the banisters of the second floor; people are running down the stairs, one at a time. But that would wait.... For now, I hurried to take O to the opposite corner and sat down with my back to the wall (on the other side of the wall I’d seen a dark, large-headed figure slipping back and forth along the sidewalk) and took out a pad of paper.

  O sank slowly into her chair as though her body, under her yuny, was melting, evaporating, leaving only an empty garment, and empty eyes that absorbed you with their blue vacancy. Her tired voice said: “Why’d you bring me here? You tricked me?”

  “No ... sh-h! Look! See there ... on the other side of the wall?”

  “Yes. A shadow.”

  “He’s always behind me.... I can’t. Look—I can’t ... I’m going to write a couple of words here and you’re going to take the note and leave ... alone. I know he’ll stay here.”

  Beneath the yuny her burgeoning body shifted again, the belly grew slightly rounder, her cheeks showed a barely perceptible morning light, a dawn.

  I stuck the note into her cold fingers, pressed her hand, and for the last time took a drink with my eyes from her blue eyes.

  “Farewell! Perhaps there’ll be another time.... ”

  She drew back her hand. Bent over, she slowly started off, took two steps, turned around quickly, and was at my side again. Her lips moved, her eyes, her lips, all of her, telling me one and the same, one and the same word over and over. ... What an unbearable smile. What pain....

  Then there was a human sliver hunched over in the entrance, a tiny shadow on the other side of the wall, never glancing back, moving more and more quickly....

  I went up to U’s desk. Puffing out her gills with alarm and outrage, she said: “Look ... they’re all crazy! That one swears he saw some kind of naked man covered all over with fur near the Ancient House....”

  A voice out of the tight little bunch bristling with heads: “Yes! And I say it again: I saw him. I did.”

  “How do you like that, eh? It’s delirium!”

  And this “delirium” of hers was so certain, so inflexible, that I asked myself: “Maybe it really is delirium—all that’s been happening to me and around me in the last few days?”

  But I glanced at my hairy hands and words came back to me: “You probably have a drop of forest blood yourself. ... Maybe that’s why my feeling for you is ...”

  No, fortunately, it isn’t delirium. No, unfortunately, it isn’t delirium.

  RECORD 33

  (No Time for Contents, Last Note)

  This day has arrived.

  Get the paper quick, maybe it’s there.... I read the paper with my eyes (that’s no mistake: My eyes are like a pen now, or a calculator, something you hold in your hand, something you feel is not you—a tool).

  There it is in big print all across page one:The enemies of happiness are not asleep. Hold on to happiness with both hands! Work will be suspended tomorrow—all Numbers will report for the Operation. Those not in compliance will be subject to the Machine of the Benefactor.

  Tomorrow! Is there really going to be some kind of tomorrow?

  By force of daily inertia I extended my hand (a tool) to the bookshelf and inserted today’s Gazette into the gold-embossed binder along with the others. Halfway to the shelf, I think: “How come? What difference does it make? I’m never coming back to this room, not ever again....”

  And the paper falls out of my hand onto the floor. And I stand up and look round the room, every square centimeter of it, quickly gathering stuff up, feverishly jamming into some invisible suitcase everything I’d be sorry to leave behind— table, books, chair. That’s the chair I-330 sat in that time, with me down there on the floor.... The bed ...

  Another minute passes, two ... maybe I’m waiting for some stupid miracle—the telephone will ring, maybe, and she’ll say that ...

  No. There isn’t any miracle....

  I’m leaving ... for the unknown. These are my last lines. Farewell to you, my unknown, my dear readers, with whom I’ve lived through so many pages, to whom, when I came down with “soul,” I revealed all of myself, right down to the last pulverized screw, the last busted spring....

  I’m leaving.

  RECORD 34

  Those on Leave A Sunny Night Radio- Valkyrie

  Oh, if only I had really smashed myself and everyone into smithereens, if only I had really turned up with her somewhere on the other side of the Wall, among
beasts baring their yellow tusks, if only I really had never come back here. It would have been a thousand, a million times easier. And now what? Go and strangle that ... ? But what good would that do?

  No, no, no! Get hold of yourself, D-503. Line yourself up on a strong logical axis ... even if it won’t be for long, bear down on the lever with all your weight ... and, like an ancient slave, keep on turning the millstones of syllogisms until you’ve written, thought through, everything that’s happened....

  When I boarded the INTEGRAL, everyone had already assembled, each in his place, and all the honeycombs of the gigantic glass beehive were filled. Down below through the glass decks one could see tiny antlike people beside the telegraphs, dynamos, transformers, altimeters, valves, dial-pointers, engines, pumps, and pipes. In the wardroom were some types leaning over tables and instruments—no doubt on assignment from the Scientific Bureau. Next to them was the Second Builder with two of his assistants.

  These three all had their heads retracted into their shoulders like turtles, their faces gray, autumnal, dim.

  “Well, how goes it?” I asked.

  “Oh ... fairly grim,” one of them answered with a dim gray smile. “No telling where we might have to land. In general, there’s no telling....”

  I couldn’t bear to look at them—to look at men whom I would, in an hour’s time, with these very hands, cast out forever from the cozy figures of the Table of Hours, whom I would tear away forever from the maternal breast of OneState. They reminded me of the tragic figures of “The Three on Leave,” a story known to every schoolboy. This story tells of how three Numbers, as an experiment, were given leave from work for a whole month: Do as you like, go where you like. g The poor things hung around the place where they usually worked and kept on looking inside with starved eyes. They would dawdle around the square and for hours at a stretch they would go through the motions that their organisms had begun to require every day at a certain time: They would saw and plane the air, bang invisible hammers, clobber crude castings of iron that no one could see. After ten days of this, they finally couldn’t take it any longer. They all joined hands, went into the water, and, in step with the March, went in deeper and deeper until the water put an end to their torment....