Читать книгу Essential Science Fiction Novels - Volume 4 - August Nemo, John Dos Passos, Griffith George Chetwynd - Страница 41

Infusorian

Doomsday

Her Room

This morning while we were in the refectory, my neighbor to my left whispered to me in a frightened tone:

“But why don’t you eat? Don’t you see, they are looking at you!”

I had to pluck up all my strength to show a smile. I felt it—like a crack in my face; I smiled and the borders of the crack drew apart wider and wider; it was quite painful.

What followed was this: no sooner had I lifted the small cube of paste upon my fork, than my fork jerked from my hand and tinkled against the plate, and at once the tables, the walls, the plates, the air even, trembled and rang; and outside too, an enormous, iron, round roar reaching the sky—floating over heads and houses it died away in the distance in small, hardly perceptible circles like those upon water.

I saw faces instantaneously grow faded and bleached; I saw mouths filled with food suddenly motionless and forks hanging in air. Then everything became confused, jumped off the centuries-old tracks, everybody jumped up from his place (without singing the Hymn!) and confusedly, in disorder, hastily finishing chewing, choking, grasping one another.... They were asking: “What? What happened? What?...” And the disorderly fragments of the Machine which was once perfect and great, fell down in all directions,—down the elevators, down the stairs.... Stamping of feet.... Pieces of words like pieces of torn letters carried by the wind....

The same outpour from the neighboring houses. A minute later the avenue seemed like a drop of water under a microscope: the infusoria locked up in the transparent, glass-like drop of water were tossing around, to the sides, up and down.

“Ah!” Some one’s triumphant voice. I saw the back of a neck and a finger pointing to the sky. I remember very distinctly a yellow-pinkish nail and under the nail a crescent crawling out as if from under the horizon. The finger was like a compass; all eyes were raised to the sky.

There, running away from an invisible pursuit, masses of cloud were rushing upon each other; and colored by the clouds the aeros of the Guardians, with their tubes like antennae, were floating. And farther to the west—something like.... At first nobody could understand what it was, even I, who knew (unfortunately) more than the others. It was like a great hive of black aeros swarming somewhere at an extraordinary height—they looked like hardly noticeable, swiftly moving points.... Nearer and nearer.... Hoarse, guttural sounds began to reach the earth and finally we saw birds just over our heads! They filled the sky with their sharp, black, descending triangles. The stormy wind drove them down and they began to land on the cupolas, on the roofs, poles and balconies.

“Ah—ah!” and the triumphant back of the neck turned, and I saw that man with the protruding forehead but it seemed that the title, so to speak, was all that was left of him: he seemed to have crawled out from under his forehead and on his face, around the eyes and lips, bunches of rays were growing. Through the noise of the wind and wings and cawing, he cried to me:

“Do you realize? Do you realize! They have blown up the Wall! The Wall has been blown up! Do you understand?”

Somewhere in the background, figures with their heads drawn in were hastily rushing by, and into the houses. In the middle of the pavement a mass of those who had been already operated upon; they moved towards the west....

... Hairy bunches of rays around the lips and eyes.... I grasped his hands:

“Tell me. Where is she? Where is I-330? There? Beyond the Wall or...? I must.... Do you hear me? At once.... I cannot....”

“Here!” he shouted in a happy, drunken voice, showing strong yellow teeth, “here in town, and she is acting! Oh, we are doing great work!”

Who are those “we”? Who am I?

There were about fifty around him. Like him, they seemed to have crawled out from under their foreheads. They were loud, cheerful, strong-toothed, swallowing the stormy wind. With their simple, not at all terrible-looking electrocutors (where did they get them?) they started to the west, towards the operated ones, encircling them, keeping parallel to forty-eighth avenue....

Stumbling against the tightly-drawn ropes woven by the wind, I was running to her. What for? I did not know. I was stumbling.... Empty streets.... The city seemed foreign, wild, filled with the ceaseless, triumphant, hubbub of birds. It seemed like the end of the world, Doomsday.

Through the glass of the walls in quite a few houses (this cut into my mind) I saw male and female Numbers in shameless embraces—without curtains lowered, without pink checks, in the middle of the day!...

The house—her house; the door ajar. The lobby, the control desk, all was empty. The elevator had stopped in the middle of its shaft. I ran panting up the endless stairs. The corridor. Like the spokes of a wheel figures on the doors dashed past my eyes; 320, 326, 330,—I-330! Through the glass wall everything in her room was seen to be upside down, confused, creased. The table overturned, its legs in the air like a beast. The bed was absurdly placed away from the wall, obliquely. Strewn over the floor—fallen, trodden petals of the pink checks.

I bent over and picked up one, two, three of them; all bore the name D-503. I was on all of them, drops of myself, of my molten, poured-out self. And that was all—that was left....

Somehow I felt they should not lie there on the floor and be trodden upon. I gathered a handful of them, put them on the table and carefully smoothed them out, glanced at them and ... laughed aloud! I never knew it before but now I know, and you too, know, that laughter may be of different colors. It is but a distant echo of an explosion within us; it may be the echo of a holiday, red, blue and golden fireworks, or at times it may represent pieces of human flesh exploded into the air....

I noticed an unfamiliar name on some of the pink checks. I do not remember the figures but I do remember the letter—F. I brushed the stubs from the table to the floor, stepped on them, on myself, stamped on them with my heels,—and went out....

I sat in the corridor on the window-sill in front of her door and waited long and stupidly. An old man appeared. His face was like a pierced, empty bladder with folds; from beneath the puncture something transparent was still slowly dripping. Slowly, vaguely I realized—tears. And only when the old man was quite far off I came to and exclaimed:

“Please ... listen.... Do you know ... Number I-330?”

The old man turned around, waved his hand in despair and stumbled farther away....

I returned home at dusk. On the west side the sky was twitching every second in a pale blue electric convulsion:—a subdued, heavy roar was proceeding from that direction. The roofs were covered with black charred sticks,—birds.

I lay down; and instantly like a heavy beast sleep came and stifled me....

RECORD THIRTY-EIGHT

I Don’t Know What Title—Perhaps the Whole Synopsis May Be Called a Cast-off Cigarette-butt.

I awoke. A bright glare painful to look at. I half closed my eyes. My head seemed filled with some caustic blue smoke. Everything was enveloped in fog and through the fog:

“But I did not turn on the light ... then how is it....”

I jumped up. At the table, leaning her chin on her hand and smiling, was I-330, looking at me.

She was at the very table at which I am now writing. Those ten or fifteen minutes are already behind me, cruelly twisted into a very firm spring. Yet it seems to me that the door closed after her only a second ago and that I could still overtake her and grasp her hand,—and that she might laugh out and say....

I-330 was at the table. I rushed towards her.

“You? You! I have been.... I saw your room.... I thought you....” But midway I hurt myself upon the sharp, motionless spears of her eyelashes and I stopped. I remembered: she looked at me in the same way before,—in the Integral. It was urgent to tell her everything in one second and in such a way that she should believe—or she would never....

“Listen, I-330, I must.... I must ... everything! No, no, one moment—let me have a glass of water first.”

My mouth was as dry as though it were lined with blotting paper. I poured a glass of water but I could not.... I put the glass back upon the table, and with both hands firmly grasped the carafe.

Now I noticed that the blue smoke was from a cigarette. She brought the cigarette to her lips and with avidity she drew in and swallowed the smoke as I did water; then she said:

“Don’t. Be silent. Don’t you see it matters little? I came anyway. They are waiting for me below.... Do you want these minutes which are our last...?”

Abruptly she threw the cigarette on the floor and bent backwards over the side of the chair to reach the button in the wall (it was quite difficult to do so), and I remember how the chair swayed slightly, how two of its legs were lifted. Then the curtains fell.

She came close to me and embraced me. Her knees, through her dress, were like a slow, gentle, warm, enveloping and permeating poison....

Suddenly (it happens at times) you plunge into sweet, warm sleep—when all at once, as if something pricks you, you tremble and your eyes are again widely open. So it was now; there on the floor in her room were the pink checks stamped with traces of footsteps, one of them bore the letter F. and some figures.... Plus and minus fused within my mind into one lump.... I could not say even now what sort of a feeling it was but I crushed her so that she cried out with pain....

One more minute out of these ten or fifteen; her head thrown back, lying on the bright white pillow, her eyes half closed, a sharp, sweet line of teeth.... And all this reminded me in an irresistible, absurd, torturing way about something forbidden, something not permissible at that moment. More tenderly, more cruelly, I pressed her to myself, more bright grew the blue traces of my fingers....

She said, without opening her eyes (I noticed this), “They say you went to see the Well-Doer yesterday, is it true?”

“Yes.”

Then her eyes opened widely and with delight I looked at her and saw that her face grew quickly paler and paler, that it effaced itself, disappearing,—only the eyes remained.

I told her everything. Only for some reason, what I don’t know—(no, it is not true, I know the reason) I was silent about one thing: His assertion at the end that they needed me only in order....

Like the image on a photographic plate in a developing fluid, her face gradually reappeared; the cheeks, the white line of teeth, the lips. She stood up and went to the mirror-door of the closet. My mouth was dry again. I poured water but it was revolting to drink it; I put the glass back on the table and asked:

“Did you come to see me because you wanted to inquire...?”

A sharp, mocking triangle of brows drawn to the temples looked at me from the mirror. She turned around to say something but said nothing.

It was not necessary; I knew.

To bid her good-bye, I moved my foreign limbs, struck the chair with them. It fell upside down, dead, like the table in her room. Her lips were cold ... just as cold was once the floor, here, near my bed....

When she left I sat down on the floor, bent over the cigarette-butt....

I cannot write any more—I no longer want to!