Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/186

their long necks, carefully feeding the Integral with the terrible explosive food which the motors need. I still see below on the river the blue veins and knots of water swollen by the wind. . . . Yet all this seems very distant from me, foreign, flat, like a draft on a sheet of paper. And it seems to me strange, when the flat draft-like face of the Second Builder suddenly asks:

“Well, then. How much fuel for the motors shall we load on? If we count on three, or say three and a half hours . . .”

I see before me, over a draft, my hand with the counter and the logarithmic dial at the figure 15.

“Fifteen tons. But you’d better take . . . yes, better take a thousand.”

I said that because I know that tomorrow . . . I noticed that my hands and the dial began to tremble.

“A thousand! What do you need such a lot for? That would last a week! No, more than a week!”

“Well, nobody knows . . .”

I do know. . . .

The wind whistled, the air seemed to be stuffed to the limit with something invisible. I had difficulty in breathing, difficulty in walking, and with difficulty, slowly but without stopping for a second, the hand of the Accumulating Tower was crawling, at the end of the avenue. The peak of the Tower reached into the very clouds—dull, blue, groaning in a subdued way, sucking electricity from the clouds. The tubes of the Musical Tower resounded.

As always—four abreast. But the rows did not seem as firm as usual; they were swinging, bending more and more, perhaps because of the wind. There! They seemed to stumble upon something at the corner; they drew back and stopped, congealed, a close mass, a clot, breathing rapidly; at once all of them stretched their necks like geese.

“Look! No, look, look—there, quick!”

“They? Are those they?”