a shiver; faint crackling of the tubes in the Machine. The prone body enveloped in a light, glowing mist – and melting, melting before our eyes, dissolving with appalling speed. Then nothing – only a small puddle of chemically pure water, which but a moment ago had pulsed redly, wildly in the heart…
All this was elementary and known to everyone: yes, dissociation of matter; yes, splitting of the atoms of the human body. And yet each tune it was a miracle – a token of the superhuman power of the Benefactor.
Above us, facing Him, the flushed faces of ten female numbers, lips parted with excitement, flowers swaying in the wind.[4]
According to the old custom, ten women garlanded with flowers the Benefactor’s unif, still wet with spray. With the majestic step of a high priest, He slowly descended and slowly walked between the stands. And in His wake, the delicate white branches of female hands raised high, and a million-voiced storm of cheers, shouted in unison. Then cheers in honor of the host of Guardians, invisibly present somewhere here, within our ranks. Who knows, perhaps it was precisely these Guardians who had been foreseen by the imagination of ancient man when he created his dread and gentle “archangels” assigned to each man from his birth.
Yes, there was something of the old religions, something purifying like a storm, in that solemn ceremony. You who will read this – are you familiar with such moments? I pity you if you are not…
Tenth Entry
Topics: A Letter. A Membrane. My Shaggy Self
Yesterday was to me like the paper through which chemists filter their solutions: all suspended particles, all that is superfluous remains on this paper. And this morning I went downstairs freshly distilled, transparent.
Downstairs in the vestibule, the controller sat at her table, glancing at the watch and writing down the numbers of those who entered. Her name is U… but I had better not mention her number, lest I say something unflattering about her. Although, essentially, she is quite a respectable middle-aged woman. The only thing I dislike about her is that her cheeks sag like the gills of a fish (but why should that disturb me?).
Her pen scraped, and I saw myself on the page – D-503, and next to me an inkblot.
I was just about to draw her attention to it when she raised her head and dripped an inky little smile at me. “There is a letter for you. Yes. You will get it, my dear, yes, yes, you will get it.”
I know that the letter, which she had read, still had to pass the Office of the Guardians (I believe there is no need to explain to you this natural procedure), and would reach me not later than twelve. But I was disturbed by that little smile; the ink drop muddied my transparent solution. So much, in fact, that later, at the Integral construction site, I could not concentrate and even made a mistake in my calculations, which had never happened to me before.
At twelve, again the pinkish-brown gills, and finally the letter was in my hands. I don’t know why I did not read it at once, but slipped it into my pocket and hurried to my room. I opened it, ran through it, and sat down… It was an official notification that number I-330 had registered for me and that I was to be at her room today at twenty-one. The address was given below.
No! After everything that had happened, after I had so unequivocally shown my feelings toward her! Besides, she did not even know whether I had gone to the Office of the Guardians. After all, she had no way of learning that I had been sick – well, that I generally could not… And despite all this…
A dynamo whirled, hummed in my head. Buddha, yellow silk, lilies of the valley, a rosy crescent… Oh, yes, and this too: O was to visit me today. Ought I to show her the notice concerning I-330? I didn’t know. She would not believe (indeed, how could she?) that I’ve had nothing to do with it, that I was entirely… And I was sure – there would be a difficult, senseless, absolutely illogical conversation… No, only not that Let everything be resolved automatically: I would simply send her a copy of the notice. I hurriedly stuffed the notice into my pocket – and suddenly saw this dreadful, apelike hand of mine. I recalled how I-330 had taken my hand that time, during the walk, and looked at it. Did she really…
And then it was a quarter to twenty-one. A white night. Everything seemed made of greenish glass. But a very different glass from ours – fragile, unreal, a thin glass shell; and under it something whirling, rushing, humming… And I would not have been astonished if the cupolas of the auditoriums had risen up in slow, round clouds of smoke, and the elderly moon smiled inkily – like the woman at the table in the morning, and all the shades dropped suddenly in all the houses, and behind the shades…
A strange sensation: I felt as though my ribs were iron rods, constricting, definitely constricting my heart – there was not room enough for it. I stood before the glass door with the golden figures: I-330. She was sitting with her back to me, at the table, writing something. I entered.
“Here…” I held out the pink coupon. “I was notified today, and so I came.”
“How prompt you are! One moment, may I? Sit down, I’ll just finish.”
Again her eyes turned down to the letter – and what was going on within her, behind those lowered shades? What would she say? What was I to do a minute later? How could I find out, how calculate it, when all of her was – from there, from the savage, ancient land of dreams?
I looked at her silently. My ribs were iron rods; I could not breathe… When she spoke, her face was like a rapid, sparkling wheel – you could not see the individual spokes. But now the wheel was motionless. And I saw a strange combination: dark eyebrows raised high at the temples – a mocking, sharp triangle. And yet another, pointing upward – the two deep lines from the corners of her mouth to the nose. And these two triangles somehow contradicted one another, stamped the entire face with an unpleasant, irritating X, like a slanting cross. A face marked with a cross.
The wheel began to turn, the spokes ran together…
“So you did not go to the Office of the Guardians?”
“I did not… could not – I was sick.”
“Certainly. I thought so. Something had to prevent you – no matter what.” (Sharp teeth, smile.) “But now you are in my hands. You remember – ‘Every number who has failed to report to the Office of the Guardians within forty-eight hours, is considered…’ ”
My heart thumped so violently that the rods bent. Caught stupidly, like a boy. And stupidly I kept silent. And I felt: I’m trapped, I cannot move a hand or a foot.
She stood up and stretched lazily. Then she pressed a button, and the shades dropped, crackling lightly. I was cut off from the world, alone with her.
I-330 was somewhere behind me, near the closet. Her unif rustled, fell. I listened, all of me listened. And I remembered… no, it flashed upon me within one hundredth of a second…
I had had occasion recently to calculate the curve for a street membrane of a new type (now these membranes, gracefully camouflaged, were installed on every street, recording all conversations for the Office of the Guardians). And I remembered the rosy, concave, quivering film, the strange creature consisting of a single organ – an ear. I was such a membrane at this moment.
A click of the fastening at the collar, on the breast still lower. The glass silk rustled down the shoulders, knees, dropped to the floor. I heard, more clearly than I could see, one foot step out of the bluish-gray silk pile, the other…
The tautly stretched membrane quivered and recorded silence. No: sharp blows of a hammer against the iron rods, with endless pauses. And I heard – I saw her behind me, thinking for a second.
And now – the closet doors, the click of an opening lid – and again silk, silk…
“Well, if you please.”
I turned. She was in a light, saffron-yellow dress of the ancient model. This was a thousand times more cruel than if she had worn nothing. Two pointed tips through the filmy silk, glowing pink-two embers through the ash. Two delicately rounded knees…
She