I dashed to the entrance of a house to stop for a breath, my back close to the door,—and immediately, like a splinter borne by the wind, a human being was thrown towards me.
“All the while I ... I have been following you. I do not want ... do you see? I do not want ... I am ready to....”
Small round hands on my sleeves, round dark blue eyes—it was O-90. She just slipped along my body like a unif which, its hanger broken, slips along the wall to fall upon the floor. Like a little bundle she crumpled below me on the cold door-step, and I stood over her, stroking her head, her face,—my hands were wet. I felt as if I were very big and she very small, a small part of myself. I felt something quite different from what I feel towards I-330. I think that the ancients must have had similar feelings towards their private children.
Below, passing through her hands with which she was covering her face, a voice came to me:
“Every night I ... I cannot! If they cure me.... Every night I sit in the darkness alone and think of him, and of what he will look like when I.... If cured I should have nothing to live with—do you understand me? You must ... you must....”
An absurd feeling yet it was there; I really must! Absurd, because this “duty” of mine was nothing but another crime. Absurd, because white and black cannot be one, duty and crime cannot coincide. Or perhaps there is no black and white in life, but everything depends upon the first logical premise? If the premise is that I unlawfully gave her a child....
“It is all right, but don’t, only don’t ...” I said. “Of course I understand.... I must take you to I-330, as I once offered to, so that she....”
“Yes.” (This in a low voice, without uncovering her face.)
I helped her rise. Silently we went along the darkening street, each busy with his own thoughts, or perhaps with the same thought.... We walked between silent leaden houses, through the tense, whipping branches of the wind....
Through the whistling of the wind all at once I heard, as if splashing through ditches, the familiar footsteps coming from some unseen point. At the corner I turned around, and among the clouds, flying upside-down reflected in the dim glass of the pavement I saw S-. Instantly my arms became foreign, swinging out of time, and I began to tell O-90 in a low voice that tomorrow, yes tomorrow, was the day of the first flight of the Integral, and that it was to be something that never happened before in all history, great, miraculous.