"No, but I wanted to. I swear by the Well-Doer, I wanted to!"
For a second I was bored through by the gray, cold, drill-eyes.
I don't know whether he believed that what I said was the truth
(almost!), or whether he had some secret reason for sparing me for a
while, but he wrote a short note, handed it to one of those who had
held me and again I was free. That is, I was again included in the
orderly, endless, Assyrian rows of Numbers.
The quadrangle, the freckled face and the temple with the map of
blue veinlets disappeared forever around the corner. We walked
again--a million-headed body; and in each one of us resided that
humble joyfulness with which in all probability molecules, atoms and
phagocytes live.
In the ancient days the Christians understood this feeling; they are
our only (though very imperfect) direct forerunners. The greatness
of the "Church of the United Flock" was known to them. They knew
that resignation is virtue, and pride--a vice; that "We" is from
God, "I" from the devil.
I was walking, keeping step with the others yet separated from them.
I was still trembling from the emotion just felt, like a bridge
over which a thundering ancient steel train has passed a moment
before. I _felt_ myself. To feel one's self, to be conscious of
one's personality, is the lot of an eye inflamed by a cinder, or an
infected finger, or a bad tooth. A healthy eye, or finger, or tooth
is not felt; it is non-existent as it were. Is it not clear then,
that consciousness of oneself is a sickness?
Apparently I am no longer a phagocyte which quietly, in a
business-like way devours microbes (microbes with freckled faces
and blue temples); apparently I am myself a microbe, and she too,
I-330, is a microbe, a wonderful, diabolic microbe! It is quite
possible that there are already thousands of such microbes among us,
still pretending to be phagocytes, as I pretend. What if today's
accident, although in itself not important, is only a beginning,
only the first meteorite of a shower of burning and thundering
stones which the infinite may have poured out upon our glass
paradise?