We - Yevgeny Zamyatin (whitelam books txt) 📗

Guardians! You, to whom I talk, they hear me, every one of them hears me⁠—I talk to you: we know! We don’t know your numbers yet but we know everything else. The Integral shall not be yours! The test flight will be carried out to the end and you yourselves, you will not dare to make another move! You with your own hands will help to go on with the test and afterward⁠ ⁠… well, I have finished!”

Silence. The glass plates under my feet seemed soft, cotton-like. My feet too⁠—soft, cotton-like. Beside me⁠—she with a dead-white smile, angry blue sparks. Through her teeth to me:

“Ah! It is your work! You did your ‘duty’! Well.⁠ ⁠…” She tore her hand from mine; the walkyrie helmet with indignant wings was soon to be seen some distance in front of me. I was alone, torpid, silent. Like everyone else I followed into the dining saloon.

But it was not I, not I! I told nobody, save these white, mute pages.⁠ ⁠… I cried this to her within me, inaudibly, desperately, loudly. She was across the table, directly opposite me and not once did she even touch me with her gaze. Beside her, someone’s ripe, yellow, bald head. I heard (it was I-330’s voice):

“ ‘Nobility’ of character! But my dear professor, even a superficial etymological analysis of the word shows that it is a superstition, a remnant of the ancient feudal epoch. We.⁠ ⁠…”

I felt I was growing pale⁠—and that they would soon notice it. But the phonograph within me performed the prescribed fifty chewing movements for every bite. I locked myself into myself as though into an opaque house; I threw up a heap of rocks before my door and lowered the window-blinds.⁠ ⁠…

Afterward, again the telephone of the commander was in my hands and again we made the flight with icy, supreme anxiety through the clouds into the icy, starry, sunny night. Minutes, hours passed.⁠ ⁠… Apparently all that time the logical motor within me was working feverishly at full speed. For suddenly somewhere at a distant point of the dark blue space I saw my desk, and the gill-like cheeks of U- over it and the forgotten pages of my records! It became clear to me; nobody but she⁠ ⁠… everything was clear to me!

If only I could reach the radio-room soon⁠ ⁠… winglike helmets, the odor of blue lightnings⁠ ⁠… I remember telling her something in a low voice and I remember how she looked through me and how her voice seemed to come from a distance:

“I am busy. I am receiving a message from below. You may dictate yours to her.”

The small, boxlike little cabin.⁠ ⁠… I thought for a second and then dictated in a firm voice:

“Time 14:40. Going down. Motors stopped. The end of all.”

The commander’s bridge. The machine-heart of the Integral stopped; we were falling; my heart could not catch up and would remain behind and rise higher and higher into my throat.⁠ ⁠… Clouds.⁠ ⁠… And then a distant green spot⁠—everything green, more and more distinct, running like a storm towards us. “Soon the end.”

The porcelain-like white distorted face of the Second Builder! It was he who struck me with all his strength; I hurt my head on something; and through the approaching darkness while falling I heard:

“Full speed⁠—aft!”

A brusque jolt upward.⁠ ⁠…

Record Thirty-Five

In a ring⁠—A carrot⁠—A murder.

I did not sleep all night. The whole night but one thought.⁠ ⁠… As a result of yesterday’s mishap my head is tightly bandaged⁠—it seems to me not a bandage but a ring, a pitiless ring of glass-iron, riveted about my head. And I am busy with the same thought, always the same thought in my riveted circle: to kill U-. To kill U- and then go to her and say: “Now do you believe?” What is most disquieting is that to kill is dirty, primitive. To break her head with something⁠—the thought of it gives me a peculiar sensation of something disgustingly sweet in my mouth, and I am unable to swallow my saliva; I am always spitting into my handkerchief, yet my mouth feels dry.

I had in my closet a heavy piston-rod which cracked during the casting and which I brought home in order to find out the cause of the cracking with a microscope. I made my manuscript into a tube (let her read me to the last letter!), pushed the broken piston into that tube and went downstairs. The stairway seemed endless, the steps disgustingly slippery, liquid. I had to wipe off moisture from my mouth very frequently. Downstairs⁠ ⁠… my heart dropped. I took out the piston and went to the controller’s table, but she was not there; instead an empty, icy desk with inkblots. I remembered that today all work was stopped; everybody was to go to be operated upon. Hence there was no need for her to stay here. There was nobody to be registered.⁠ ⁠…

The street. It was windy. The sky seemed to be composed of soaring panels of cast-iron. And exactly as it seemed for one moment yesterday, the whole world was broken up into separate, sharp, independent fragments, and each of these fragments was falling at full speed; each would stop for a second, hang before me in the air and disappear without trace. It was as if the black, precise letters on this page should suddenly move apart and begin to jump hither and thither in fright, so that there was not a word on the page, only nonsensical “ap,” “jum,” “wor.” The crowd seemed just as nonsensical, dispersed (not in rows), going forward, backward, diagonally, transversely.⁠ ⁠…

Then nobody. For a second while I was dashing at full speed, suddenly stopping, I saw on the second floor in the glass cage hanging in the air⁠—a man and a woman⁠—a kiss; she standing with her whole body bent backward brokenly: “This is for the last time, forever.⁠ ⁠…”

At a corner a thorny, moving bush of heads. Above the heads, separate, floating in the air, a banner: