Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/195

“Well, somewhat uncanny,” one of them replied, smiling a gray, rayless smile. “Perhaps we shall have to land in some unknown place. And, generally speaking, nobody knows . . .”

I could hardly 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 Table of Hours, to tear them away forever 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.^[1] “Go wherever you will, do what you will,” they were told. The unhappy three spent their whole time wandering around their usual place of work and gazing within with hungry eyes. They would stop on the plazas and busy themselves for hours repeating the motions which they had been 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 ended their sufferings forever.

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 my own thoughts.