The wild man with a barometer—Epilepsy—If.
Until today everything in life seemed to me clear (that is why, I think, I always had a sort of partiality toward the word “clear”), but today … I don’t understand. First, I really was assigned to auditorium 112 as she said, although the probability was as 500:10,000,000 or 1:20,000. (500 is the number of auditoriums and there are 10,000,000 Numbers.) And second … but let me relate things in successive order. The auditorium: an enormous half-globe of glass with the sun piercing through. The circular rows of noble, globe-like, closely-shaven heads. With joy in my heart I looked around. I believe I was looking in the hope of seeing the rose-colored scythe, the dear lips of O- , somewhere among the blue waves of the unifs. Then I saw extraordinarily white, sharp teeth like the. … But no! Tonight at twenty-one o’clock O- was to come to me; therefore my desire to see her was quite natural. The bell. We stood up, sang the Hymn of the United State, and our clever phono-lecturer appeared on the platform with a sparkling golden megaphone.
“Respected Numbers, not so long ago our archaeologists dug up a book written in the twentieth century. In this book the ironical author tells about a Wild Man and a barometer. The Wild Man noticed that every time the barometer’s hand stopped on the word ‘rain,’ it actually rained. And as the Wild Man craved rain, he let out as much mercury as was necessary to put it at the level of the word ‘rain’ (on the screen a Wild Man with feathers, letting out the mercury. Laughter).
“You are laughing at him, but don’t you think the ‘European’ of that age deserves more to be laughed at? He, like the Wild Man, wanted rain—rain with a little r , an algebraic rain; but he remained standing before the