Radio-Walkyrie
Oh, if only I actually had broken myself to pieces! If only I actually had found myself with her in some place beyond the Wall, among beasts showing their yellow tusks; if only I actually had never returned here! It would be a thousand, a million times easier! But now—what? Now to go and choke that—! But would it help? No, no, no! Take yourself in hand, D-503! Set into yourself the firm logical hub; at least for a short while weigh heavily with all your might on the lever, and like the ancient slave, turn the millstones of syllogisms until you have written down and understood everything that happened....
When I boarded the Integral, everybody was already there and everybody occupied his place; all the cells of the gigantic hive were filled. Through the glass of the decks,—tiny, ant-like people below, at the telegraph, dynamo, transformers, altimeters, ventilators, indicators, motor, pumps, tubes.... In the saloon people sitting over tables and instruments, probably those commissioned by the Scientific Bureau. Near them the Second Builder and his two aides. All three had their heads down between their shoulders like turtles, their faces gray, autumnal, rayless.
“Well?” I asked.
“Well, somewhat uncanny,” replied one of them smiling a gray rayless smile, “Perhaps we shall have to land in some unknown place. And, generally speaking, nobody knows....”
I hardly could bear to look at them, when in an hour or so I was to throw them out with my own hands, to cast them out from the cozy figures of our Tables of Hours, forever to tear them away from the mother’s breast of the United State. They reminded me of the tragic figures of “The Three Forgiven Ones”—a story known to all of our school-children. It tells about three Numbers, who by way of experiment were exempted for a whole month from any work.[3] “Go wherever you will, do what you will,” they were told. The unhappy three wandered the whole time about the place of their usual work and gazed within with hungry eyes. They would stop on the plazas and for hours busy themselves repeating the motions which they were used to making during certain hours of the day; it became a bodily necessity for them to do so. They would saw and plane the air; with unseen sledge-hammers they would bang upon unseen stakes. Finally, on the tenth day they could bear it no longer; they took one another by the hand, entered the river, and to the accompaniment of the March they waded deeper and deeper until the water forever ended their sufferings.
[3] It happened long ago, in the third century A. T. (After the Tables).
I repeat, it was hard for me to look at them, and I was anxious to leave them.
“I just want to take a glance into the engine-room, and then off!” I said.
They were asking me questions: What voltage should be used for the initial spark, how much ballast water was needed in the tank aft. As if a phonograph were somewhere within me, I was giving quick and precise answers but I, my inner self, was busy with its own thoughts.
In the narrow passage gray unifs were passing, gray faces and for a second, one face with its hair low over the forehead, eyes gazing from deep beneath it—it was that same man. I understood: they had come and there was no escape from it for me; only minutes remained, a few dozens of minutes.... An infinitesimal, molecular quiver of my whole body. This did not cease to the very end,—it was as if an enormous motor were placed under the very foundation of my body which was so light that the walls, partitions, cables, beams, lights—everything was quivering....
I did not yet know whether she was there. But I had no time.... They were calling me: quick! To the commander’s bridge; time to go ... where?
Gray, rayless faces. Below in the water—tense blue veins. Heavy, cast-iron patches of sky. It was so difficult to lift my cast-iron hand and take up the receiver of the commander’s telephone!... “Up! Forty-five degrees!”
A heavy explosion—a jerk—a rabid greenish-white mountain of water aft—the deck beneath my feet began to move, soft as rubber; and everything below, the whole life, forever.... For a second, falling deeper and deeper into a sort of funnel, becoming more and more compressed—the icy-blue relief-map of the City, the round bubbles of cupolas, the lonely leaden finger of the Accumulating Tower.... Then instantaneously a cotton curtain of cloud.... We pierced it, and there was the sun and the blue sky! Seconds, minutes, miles—the blue was hardening, fast filling with darkness; like drops of cold silver sweat appeared the stars....
A sad, unbearably bright, black, starry, sunny night.... As if one had become deaf, one still saw that the pipes were roaring, but one only saw, dead silence all about. The sun was mute. It was natural, of course. One might have expected it; we were beyond the terrestrial atmosphere. The transition was so quick, so sudden that everyone became timid and silent. Yet I ... I thought I felt even easier under that fantastic, mute sun. I had bounded over the inevitable border, having left my body somewhere there below, and I was soaring bodiless to a new world, where everything was to be different, upside down.
“Keep the same course!” I shouted into the engine-room, or perhaps it was not I but a phonograph in me, and the same machine with a mechanical, hinge-like movement handed the commander’s trumpet to the Second Builder. All permeated by that most delicate, molecular quiver known only to me, I ran down the companionway, to seek....
The door of the saloon.... An hour later it was to latch and lock itself.... At the door stood an unfamiliar Number. He was small, with a face like a hundred or a thousand others which are usually lost in a crowd, but his arms were exceptionally long,—they reached down to the knees as though by mistake they had been taken from another set of human organs and fastened to his shoulders.
The long arm stretched out and barred the way.
“Where do you want to go?”
It was clear that he was not aware I knew everything. All right! Perhaps it was necessary that it should be so. From above him, in a deliberately significant tone I said:
“I am the Builder of the Integral and I am directing the test flight. Do you understand?”
The arm drew away.
The saloon. Heads covered with bristles, gray iron bristles, and yellow heads, and bald, ripe heads were bent over the instruments and maps. Swiftly, with a glance, I gathered them in with my eyes, off I ran, back along the long passage, then through the hatch into the engine-room. There it was hot from the red tubes, overheated by the explosions; a constant roar,—the levers were dancing their desperate drunken dance, quivering ceaselessly with a barely noticeable quiver; the arrows on the dials.... There! At last! Near the tachometer, a notebook in his hand, was that man with the low forehead.
“Listen,” I shouted straight into his ear (because of the roar), “Is she here? Where is she?”
“She? There at the radio.”
I dashed over there. There were three of them, all with receiving helmets on. And she seemed a head taller than usual, wingy, sparkling, flying like an ancient walkyrie, and those bluish sparks from the radio seemed to emanate from her,—from her also that ethereal, lightning-like odor of ozone.
“Someone—well, you for instance,” I said to her, panting from having run, “I must send a message down to earth, to the docks. Come, I shall dictate it to you.”
Close to the apparatus there was a small box-like cabin. We sat at the table side by side. I found her hand and pressed it hard.
“Well, what is going to happen?”
“I don’t know. Do you realize how wonderful it is? To fly without knowing where ... no matter where? It will soon be twelve o’clock and nobody knows what.... And when night.... Where shall you and I be tonight? Perhaps somewhere on the grass, on dry leaves....”
Blue sparks emanated from her and the odor of lightning, and the vibration became more and more frequent within me.
“Write down,” I said loudly, panting (from having run), “Time: eleven-twenty; speed 5800....”
“Last night she