Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/200

Behind me:

“I assure you, I saw a face!”

“Go away! Tell it to someone else!”

“Well, look for yourself! Here is the telescope.”

They had already disappeared. Endless green desert—and in that desert, dominating it completely and dominating me, and everybody, the piercing vibrations of the gong; dinnertime, one minute to twelve.

For a second the little world around me became incoherent, dispersed. Someone’s brass badge fell to the floor. It mattered little. Soon it was under my heel. A voice: “And I tell you, it was a face!” A black square, the open door of the main saloon. White teeth pressed to-gether, smiling . . . And at that moment, when the clock began slowly to strike, holding its breath between beats, and when the front rows began to move toward the dining saloon, the rectangle of the door was suddenly crossed by the two familiar, unnaturally long arms.

“STOP!”

Someone’s fingers sank piercing into my palm. It was I-330. She was beside me.

“Who is it? Do you know him?”

“Is he not? . . . Is he not? . . .?”

He was already lifted upon somebody’s shoulders. Above a hundred other faces, his face like hundreds, like thousands of other faces, yet unique among them all. . . .

“In the name of the 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, 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