Department was only beginning, there were yet to be found some fools who compared our Operation Department with the ancient Inquisition. But this is as absurd as to compare a surgeon performing a tracheotomy with a highway cutthroat. Both use a knife, perhaps the same kind of a knife, both do the same thing, viz. , cut the throat of a living man, yet one is a well-doer, the other is a murderer; one is marked plus, the other minus. … All this becomes perfectly clear in one second, in one turn of our logical wheel, the teeth of which engage that minus , turn it upward and thus change its aspect. That other matter is somewhat different; the ring in the door was still oscillating, apparently the door had just closed, yet she, I-330 , had disappeared; she was not there! The logical wheel could not turn this fact. A dream? But even now I feel still in my right shoulder that incomprehensible sweet pain of I-330 near me in the fog, pressing herself against me. “Thou lovest fog?” Yes, I love the fog too. I love everything and everything appears to me wonderful, new, tense; everything is so good! …
“So good,” I said aloud.
“Good?” The porcelain eyes bulged out. “What good do you find in that? If that man without a number contrived to sneak in, it means that there are others around here, everywhere, all the time, here around the Integral , they—”
“Whom do you mean by ‘they’?”
“How do I know who? But I sense them, all the time.”
“Have you heard about the new operation which has been invented? I mean the surgical removal of fancy?” (There really were rumors of late about something of the sort.)
“No, I haven’t. What has that to do with it?”