Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/187

Rh “Ah, never! Never! I’d rather put my head straight into the Machine”

“Silence! Are you crazy?”

On the corner, the doors of the auditorium were ajar, and a wide column of about fifty people—the word “people” is not the right one. These were heavy-wheeled automatons seemingly bound in iron and moved by an invisible mechanism. Not people, but a sort of human-like tractor. Over their heads, floating in the air—a white banner with a golden sun embroidered on it, and the rays of the sun: “We are the first! We have already been operated upon! Follow us, all of you!”

Slowly, unhesitatingly they moved through the crowd, and it was clear that if they had had in their way a wall, a tree, a house, they would have moved on just as unhesitatingly through the wall, the tree, the house. In the middle of the avenue they fused and stretched out into a chain, arm in arm, their faces turned toward us. And we, a human clot, tense, the hair pricking our heads, we waited. Our necks were stretched out goose fashion. Clouds. The wind whistled. Suddenly the wings of the chain from right and left bent quickly around us, and faster, faster, like a heavy engine descending a hill, they closed the ring and pulled us toward the yawning doors and inside

Somebody’s piercing cry: “They are driving us in! Run!”

Everybody ran. Close to the wall there was still an open, living gate of human beings. Everybody dashed through it, heads forward. Their heads became sharp wedges, and with their ribs, shoulders, hips Like a stream of water compressed in a fire hose they spurted out in the form of a fan, and all around me stamping feet, raised arms, unifs The double curved S- with his transparent wing ears appeared for a moment close before my eyes; he disappeared as suddenly; I was alone among arms and legs appearing for a second and disappearing. I was running