Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/179

Rh though “further” may begin where happiness ends. It is last the barricade on our road to happiness.

''Rejoice! This Barricade Has Been Blasted at Last! The Road Is Open!''

The latest discovery of our State science is that there is a center for fancy—a miserable little nervous knot in the lower region of the frontal lobe of the brain. A triple treatment of this knot with X-rays will cure you of fancy.

Forever!

You are perfect; you are mechanized; the road to one hundred-per-cent happiness is open! Hasten then all of you, young and old, hasten to undergo the Great Operation! Hasten to the auditoriums where the Great Operation is being performed! Long live the Great Operation! Long live the United State! Long live the Well-Doer!

You, had you not read all this in my records—which look like an ancient, strange novel—had you, like me, held in your trembling hands the newspaper, smelling of typographic ink if you knew, as I do, that all this is a most certain reality—if not the reality of today, then that of tomorrow—would you not feel the very things I feel? Would your head not whirl as mine does? Would there not run over your back and arms those strange, sweet, icy needles? Would you not feel that you were a giant, an Atlas?—that if you only stood up and straightened out you would reach the ceiling with your head?

I snatched the telephone receiver.

“I-330. Yes Yes. Yes 330!” And then, swallowing my own words, I shouted, “Are you at home? Yes? Have you read? You are reading now? Isn’t it, isn’t it stupendous?”

“Yes” A long, dark silence. The wires buzzed almost imperceptibly. She was thinking.

“I must see you today without fail. Yes, in my room, after sixteen, without fail!”