For a second I was bored through by the gray, cold, drill-eyes. I don't know whether he believed that what I said was the truth (almost!), or whether he had some secret reason for sparing me for a while, but he wrote a short note, handed it to one of those who had held me and again I was free. That is, I was again included in the orderly, endless, Assyrian rows of Numbers. The quadrangle, the freckled face and the temple with the map of blue veinlets disappeared forever around the corner. We walked again--a million-headed body; and in each one of us resided that humble joyfulness with which in all probability molecules, atoms and phagocytes live. In the ancient days the Christians understood this feeling; they are our only (though very imperfect) direct forerunners. The greatness of the "Church of the United Flock" was known to them. They knew that resignation is virtue, and pride--a vice; that "We" is from God, "I" from the devil. I was walking, keeping step with the others yet separated from them. I was still trembling from the emotion just felt, like a bridge over which a thundering ancient steel train has passed a moment before. I _felt_ myself. To feel one's self, to be conscious of one's personality, is the lot of an eye inflamed by a cinder, or an infected finger, or a bad tooth. A healthy eye, or finger, or tooth is not felt; it is non-existent as it were. Is it not clear then, that consciousness of oneself is a sickness? Apparently I am no longer a phagocyte which quietly, in a business-like way devours microbes (microbes with freckled faces and blue temples); apparently I am myself a microbe, and she too, I-330, is a microbe, a wonderful, diabolic microbe! It is quite possible that there are already thousands of such microbes among us, still pretending to be phagocytes, as I pretend. What if today's accident, although in itself not important, is only a beginning, only the first meteorite of a shower of burning and thundering stones which the infinite may have poured out upon our glass paradise? RECORD TWENTY-THREE Flowers The Dissolution of a Crystal If only (?) They say there are flowers that bloom only once in a hundred years. Why not suppose the existence of flowers that bloom only once a thousand years? We may have known nothing about them until now only because today is the "once in a thousand years"?