I Am to Burn Eternally

I had just stepped into the dock where the Integral is being built when the Second Builder hurried to meet me. His face—round, white, as usual—a china plate; and his words, like something exquisitely tasty, served up on the plate: “Well, while it pleased you to be sick the other day, we had, I’d say, quite a bit of excitement here in the chiefs absence.”

“Excitement?”

“Oh, yes! The bell rang at the end of the workday, and everybody began to file out. And imagine— the doorman caught a man without a number. I’ll never understand how he managed to get in. He was taken to the Operational Section. They’ll know how to drag the why and how out of the fellow…” (All this with the tastiest smile.)

The Operational Section is staffed with our best and most experienced physicians, who work under the direct supervision of the Benefactor Himself. They have a variety of instruments, the most effective of them all the famous Gas Bell. Essentially, it is the old school laboratory experiment: a mouse is placed under a glass jar and an air pump gradually rarefies the air inside it And so on. But, of course, the Gas Bell is a much more perfect apparatus, using all sorts of gases. And then, this is no longer torture of a tiny helpless animal. It serves a noble end: it safeguards the security of the One State —in other words, the happiness of millions. About five centuries ago, when the Operational Section was first being developed, there were some fools who compared the Section to the ancient Inquisition, but that is as absurd as equating a surgeon performing a tracheotomy with a highwayman; both may have the same knife in then-hands, both do the same thing—cut a living man’s throat—yet one is a benefactor, the other a criminal; one has a + sign, the other a…

All this is entirely clear—within a single second, at a single turn of the logical machine. Then suddenly the gears catch on the minus, and something altogether different comes to ascendancy—the key ring, still swaying in the door. The door had evidently just been shut, yet I-330 was already gone, vanished. That was something the machine could not digest in any way. A dream? But even now I felt that strange sweet pain in my right shoulder— I-330 pressing herself against the shoulder, next to me in the fog. “Do you like fog?” Yes, I love the fog… I love everything, and everything is firm, new, astonishing, everything is good…

“Everything is good,” I said aloud.

“Good?” The china eyes goggled at me. “What is good about this? If that unnumbered one had managed… it means that they are everywhere, all around us, at all times… they are here, around the Integral, they…”

“Who are they?”

“How would I know who? But I feel them, you understand? All the time.”

“And have you heard about the newly invented operation—excision of the imagination?” (I had myself heard something of the kind a few days earlier.)

“I know about it. But what has that to do with…?”

“Just this: in your place, I would go and ask to be operated on.”

Something distinctly lemon-sour appeared on the plate. The good fellow was offended by the hint that he might possibly possess imagination… Oh, well, only a week ago I would have been offended myself. Not today. Today I know that I have it, that I am ill. I also know that I don’t want to be cured. I don’t, and that’s all there is to it We ascended the glass stairs. Everything below was as clearly visible as if it were spread out on the palm of my hand.

You, who read these notes, whoever you may be—you have a sun over your heads. And if you have ever been as ill as I am now, you know what the sun is like—what it can be like—in the morning. You know that pink, transparent, warm gold, when the very air is faintly rosy and everything is suffused with the delicate blood of the sun, everything is alive: the stones are alive and soft; iron is alive and soft; people are alive, and everyone is smiling. In an hour, all this may vanish, in an hour the rosy blood may trickle out, but for the moment everything lives. And I see something pulsing and flowing in the glass veins of the Integral. I see—the Integral is pondering its great, portentous future, the heavy load of unavoidable happiness it will carry upward, to you, unknown ones, who are forever searching and never finding. You shall find what you seek, you shall be happy—it is your duty to be happy, and you do not have much longer to wait.

The body of the Integral is almost ready: a graceful, elongated ellipsoid made of our glass—as eternal as gold, as flexible as steel. I saw the transverse ribs and the longitudinal stringers being attached to the body from within; in the stern they were installing the base for the giant rocket motor. Every three seconds, a blast; every three seconds the mighty tail of the Integral will eject flame and gases into cosmic space, and the fiery Tamerlane of happiness will soar away and away…

I watched the men below move in regular, rapid rhythm, according to the Taylor system, bending, unbending, turning like the levers of a single huge machine. Tubes glittered in their hands; with fire they sliced and welded the glass walls, angles, ribs, brackets. I saw transparent glass monster cranes rolling slowly along glass rails, turning and bending as obediently as the men, delivering their loads into the bowels of the Integral. And all of this was one: humanized machines, perfect men. It was the highest, the most stirring beauty, harmony, music… Quick! Below! To join them, to be with them!

And now, shoulder to shoulder, welded together with them, caught up in the steel rhythm… Measured movements; firmly round, ruddy cheeks; mirror-smooth brows, untroubled by the madness of thought. I floated on the mirror-smooth sea. I rested.

Suddenly one of them turned to me serenely. “Better today?”

“Better? What’s better?”

“Well, you were out yesterday. We had thought it might be something dangerous…” A bright forehead, a childlike, innocent smile.

The blood rushed to my face. I could not, could not lie to those eyes. I was silent, drowning…

The gleaming white round china face bent down through the hatch above. “Hey! D-503! Come up, please! We’re getting a rigid frame here with the brackets, and the stress…”

Without listening to the end, I rushed up to him. I was escaping ignominiously, in headlong flight I could not raise my eyes. The glittering glass stairs flashed under my feet, and every step increased my hopelessness: I had no place here—I, the criminal, the poisoned one. Never again would I merge into the regular, precise, mechanical rhythm, never again float on the mirrorlike untroubled sea. I was doomed to burn forever, to toss about, to seek a corner where to hide my eyes-forever, until I finally found strength to enter that door and…

And then an icy spark shot through me: I—well, I didn’t matter; but I would also have to tell about her, and she, too, would be…

I climbed out of the hatch and stopped on the deck. I did not know where to turn now, I didn’t know why I had come there. I looked up. The midday-weary sun was rising dully. Below me was the Integral, gray-glassy, unalive. The rosy blood had trickled out It was clear to me that all of this was merely my imagination, that everything remained as it had been before, yet it was also clear…

“What’s wrong with you, 508, are you deaf? I have been calling and calling… What’s the matter?” The Second Builder shouted into my ear. He must have been shouting for a long time.

What’s the matter with me? I have lost the rudder. The motor roars, the aero quivers and rushes at full speed, but there is no rudder, no controls, and I don’t know where I’m flying: down-to crash into the ground in a moment, or up-into the sun, into the flames…

Sixteenth Entry

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