“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 its own thoughts.
In the narrow passage gray unifs were passing, gray faces and for a second, one face with its hair low over the forehead, eyes gazing from deep beneath it—it was that same man. I understood: they had come and there was no escape from it for me; only minutes remained, a few dozens of minutes.... An infinitesimal, molecular quiver of my whole body. This did not cease to the very end,—it was as if an enormous motor were placed under the very foundation of my body which was so light that the walls, partitions, cables, beams, lights—everything was quivering....
I did not yet know whether she was there. But I had no time.... They were calling me: quick! To the commander’s bridge; time to go ... where?
Gray, rayless faces. Below in the water—tense blue veins. Heavy, cast-iron patches of sky. It was so difficult to lift my cast-iron hand and take up the receiver of the commander’s telephone!... “Up! Forty-five degrees!”
A heavy explosion—a jerk—a rabid greenish-white mountain of water aft—the deck beneath my feet began to move, soft as rubber; and everything below, the whole life, forever.... For a second, falling deeper and deeper into a sort of funnel, becoming more and more compressed—the icy-blue relief-map of the City, the round bubbles of cupolas, the lonely leaden finger of the Accumulating Tower.... Then instantaneously a cotton curtain of cloud.... We pierced it, and there was the sun and the blue sky! Seconds, minutes, miles—the blue was hardening, fast filling with darkness; like drops of cold silver sweat appeared the stars....
A sad, unbearably bright, black, starry, sunny night.... As if one had become deaf, one still saw that the pipes were roaring, but one only saw, dead silence all about. The sun was mute. It was natural, of course. One might have expected it; we were beyond the terrestrial atmosphere. The transition was so quick, so sudden that everyone became timid and silent. Yet I ... I thought I felt even easier under that fantastic, mute sun. I had bounded over the inevitable border, having left my body somewhere there below, and I was soaring bodiless to a new world,
where everything was to be different, upside down.
“Keep the same course!” I shouted into the engine-room, or perhaps it was not I but a phonograph in me, and the same machine with a mechanical, hinge-like movement handed the commander’s trumpet to the Second Builder. All permeated by that most delicate, molecular quiver known only to me, I ran down the companionway, to seek....
The door of the saloon.... An hour later it was to latch and lock itself.... At the door stood an unfamiliar Number. He was small, with a face like a hundred or a thousand others which are usually lost in a crowd, but his arms were exceptionally long,—they reached down to the knees as though by mistake they had been taken from another set of human organs and fastened to his shoulders.