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: "Well, then. How much fuel for the motors shall we load on? If we count on three, or say three and a half hours...." I see before me, over a draught, my hand with the counter and the logarithmic dial at the figure 15. "Fifteen tons. But you'd better take ... yes, better take a thousand." I said that because I _know_ that tomorrow.... I noticed that my hands and the dial began to tremble. "A thousand! What do you need such a lot for? That would last a week! No, more than a week!" "Well, nobody knows...." I do know.... The wind whistled, the air seemed to be stuffed to the limit with something invisible. I had difficulty in breathing, difficulty in walking, and with difficulty, slowly but without stopping for a second the hand of the Accumulating Tower was crawling, at the end of the avenue. The peak of the Tower reached into the very clouds;--dull, blue, groaning in a subdued way, sucking electricity from the clouds. The tubes of the Musical Tower resounded. As always--four abreast. But the rows did not seem as firm as usual; they were swinging, bending more and more, perhaps because of the wind. There! They seemed to have stumbled upon something at the corner, and they drew back and stopped, congealed, a close mass, a clot, breathing rapidly; at once all had stretched their necks like geese. "Look! No look, look--there, quick!" "_They?_ Are those _they_?" "Ah, never! Never! I'd rather put my head straight into the Machine...." "Silence! Are you crazy?"