This very thing, yes, exactly this is alive in me today. I know that that small black hand on the clock will slide down here towards midnight, then again it will start to ascend, and it will cross some last border and the improbable tomorrow will have arrived. I know it, but somehow I do not believe it, or perhaps I think that twenty-four hours are twenty-four years. Therefore I am still able to act, to hurry, to answer questions, to climb the rope-ladder to the Integral . I am still able to feel how the latter is shaking the surface of the water, and I still understand that I must grasp the railing, and I am still able to feel the cold glass in my hand. I see the transparent, living cranes, bending their long necks, carefully feeding the Integral with the terrible explosive food which the motors need. I still see below on the river the blue veins and knots of water swollen by the wind.⁠ ⁠… Yet all this seems very distant from me, foreign, flat⁠—like a draught on a sheet of paper. And it seems to me strange, when the flat, draught-like face of the Second Builder, suddenly asks: