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. …