me: the sun, the fog, the gold—for me. I did not ask where we were going; what did it matter? It was pleasure to walk, to ripen, to become stronger and more tense. …
“Here …” I-330 stopped at a door. “It so happens that today there is someone on duty who … I told you about him in the Ancient House.”
Carefully guarding the forces ripening within me, I read the sign: “Medical Bureau.” Automatically only I understood.
… A glass room, filled with golden fog; shelves of glass, colored bottles, jars, electric wires, bluish sparks in tubes; and a male Number—a very thinly flattened man. He might have been cut out of a sheet of paper. Wherever he was, whichever way he turned, he showed only a profile, a sharply pointed, glittering blade of a nose and lips like scissors.
I could not hear what I-330 told him; I merely saw her lips when she was talking; and I felt that I was smiling, irrepressibly, blissfully. The scissors-like