The horses were not yet ready, so, feeling a peculiar concentration of his physical forces and his intellect on what he had to do, he started off on foot without waiting.
CHAPTER 9
THE DOCTOR WAS NOT yet up, and the footman said that he had been up late, and had given orders not to be waked, but would get up soon. The footman was cleaning the lamp-chimneys, and making a proper mess of the job.
Levin waited impatiently in the street for the doctor, and finally decided that he could wait no longer, and would burst in on the man and wake him if he had to. He stormed back toward the doctor’s door-but was stopped by a fat little man in a tattered lab coat, who appeared in the shadows holding a small silver box. This man was not Federov, but looked much like him: the same tangled beard, the same beady eyes, the tattered lab coat.
“Rearguard,” the man said gravely.
“Action,” Levin responded immediately.
The man stepped fully from the shadows. “Konstantin Dmitrich, my name is Dmitriev.”
“I cannot speak to you now! I have urgent business this night!”
“Not so urgent as this,” the agent of UnConSciya replied. “Levin, the time has come.”
“No,” Levin protested, his voice rising. “It cannot be tonight!” Levin moved to push past him, and the man who called himself Dmitriev scowled and pressed the button on his little box. Levin yelped in pain as he banged against some sort of radiating, semi-invisible bars, and a small electric shock quivered through his system.
“I am sorry,” said Dmitriev, scratching at his tangled beard. “But I require your complete attention.
His eyes wide with rage, Levin stared at the squat man in his shabby coat. “Why do you encage me? I am with you! And I swear to you that tomorrow I shall offer whatever aid I can. Only you must find me tomorrow.”
“We do not have the luxury of waiting for tomorrow. We have a chance to stop the furnaces, tonight, to halt the melting down of the Class Ills. But we require a man trusted in society, a man beyond suspicion, and we need him tonight.”
“Then you must find another man!” Levin threw himself at the invisible enclosure, and a ripple of fiery pain exploded across his chest.
“Stop it-stop that,” cried Dmitriev. “You will kill yourself.”
“You must free me!” Levin shouted, half mad with his need to fetch the doctor and return to Kitty’s side. He hurled his shoulder once more against the invisible bars that held him, and was thrown down onto the street writhing and clutching at himself.
“No… no… I beg of you to stop,” said Dmitriev with desperation, as Levin stumbled back to his feet.
“Let me free! Ahhh!”
He lunged again, and this time felt the shock in every synapse of his body, jolting up and down his spinal column, pooling at the base of his brain. Levin collapsed on the street, twitching and muttering like a madman. Dmitriev looked nervously around. “You cannot persist in this. Rearguard,” he insisted again. “Rearguard!”
“Kitty.”
Levin groaned, crawled to his feet. On all fours he limped into the barely perceptible bars like a wounded animal, shuddered with pain, and collapsed feebly in the street.
“I cannot let you die, Konstantin Levin,” the man from UnConSciya said at last. “You have a more important part to play. I cannot let you die.” He clicked the button on the box, and with a barely audible whoosh Levin’s invisible prison disappeared. He staggered toward the door of the doctor’s home.
“Only… only think of your country,” said the operative to Levin’s back, now pleading when only a moment ago he had been commanding.
Levin lifted his hand to pull on the makeshift bellpull that the doctor’s household had rigged in place of a Class I Doorchime.
“Konstantin Dmitritch! Do it for your Class III.”
Levin turned, and hissed, “What of him?”
“I am sorry to tell you this, but Socrates and Tatiana have been captured in Urgensky caught up in a mass purge of Class II robots. They are on the way here, even now, to be melted down with the others. Unless we can stop it… and we can stop it. You can.”
Levin, feverish with pain and the desperate need to return to his wife, shook his head rapidly, like a mad dog shakes off a plaguing flea, and rang the bell of the doctor’s house.
When Levin got home with the doctor, he had nearly pushed the encounter from his mind. He drove up at the same time as the princess, Kitty’s mother, and they went up to the bedroom door together. The princess had tears in her eyes, and her hands were shaking. Seeing Levin, she embraced him, and burst into tears.
From the moment when he had woken and understood what was going on, Levin had prepared his mind to bear resolutely what was before him, and without considering or anticipating anything, to avoid upsetting his wife, and on the contrary to soothe her and keep up her courage. Without allowing himself even to think of what was to come, of how it would end, judging from his inquiries as to the usual duration of these ordeals, Levin had in his imagination braced himself to bear up and to keep a tight rein on his feelings for five hours, and it had seemed to him he could do this. But when he came back from the doctor’s and saw her sufferings again, he fell to repeating more and more frequently: “Lord, have mercy on us, and succor us!” He sighed, and flung his head up, and began to feel afraid he could not bear it, that he would burst into tears or run away. Such agony it was to him. And only one hour had passed.
He thought at one moment during this unbearable hour of Socrates. There would be time, he told himself. There would be time to help him, to save him. Tomorrow… And his mind then passed over these thoughts, returning to what was before him: to Kitty, and to his child, teetering on the cusp of existence.
This was a time for humans.
After that hour there passed another hour, two hours, three, the full five hours he had fixed as the furthest limit of his sufferings, and the position was still unchanged; and he was still bearing it because there was nothing to be done but bear it; every instant feeling that he had reached the utmost limits of his endurance, and that his heart would break with sympathy and pain.
But still the minutes passed by and the hours, and still hours more, and his misery and horror grew and were more and more intense.
All the ordinary conditions of life, without which one can form no conception of anything, had ceased to exist for Levin. He lost all sense of time. Minutes-those minutes when she sent for him and he held her moist hand, which would squeeze his hand with extraordinary violence and then push it away-seemed to him hours, and hours seemed to him minutes. Where he was all this time, he knew as little as the time of anything. He saw her swollen face, sometimes bewildered and in agony, sometimes smiling and trying to reassure him. He saw the old princess too, flushed and overwrought, with her gray curls in disorder, forcing herself to gulp down her tears, biting her lips; he saw Dolly too and the doctor, smoking fat cigarettes, rifling through some old medical manual, its pages yellowed from generations of disuse; and the old prince walking up and down the hall with a frowning face. But why they came in and went out, where they were, he did not know.
All he knew and felt was that what was happening was what had happened nearly a year before in the hotel of the country town when the alien terror had burst from Nikolai’s chest. But that had been grief-grief and terror-this was joy. Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of life; they were loopholes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which there came glimpses of something sublime. And in the contemplation of this sublime something the soul was exalted to inconceivable heights of which it had before had no conception, while reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with it.