"You are funny! How could it ever enter the heads of those within the Wall that we are here? Remember; take yourself. Did you ever think it was possible? They are busy hunting us _there_,--let them! You are delirious!" Her smile was light and cheerful and I too, was smiling; the earth was drunken, cheerful, light, floating.... RECORD TWENTY-EIGHT Both of Them Entropy and Energy The Opaque Part of the Body If your world is similar to the world of the ancients, then you may easily imagine that one day you suddenly come upon a sixth or a seventh continent, upon some Atlantis, and you find there unheard of cities, labyrinths, people flying through the air without the aid of wings or aeros, stones lifted into the air by the power of a gaze,--in brief, imagine that you see things that cannot come to your mind even if you suffer from dream-sickness. That is how I feel now. For you must understand that no one has ever gone beyond the Green Wall since the Two Hundred Years' War, as I already have told you. I know that it is my duty to you, my unknown friends, to give more details about that unsuspected strange world which opened to me yesterday. But for the time being I am unable to return to that subject. Everything is so novel, so novel it is like a rainstorm, and I am not big enough to collect it all. I spread out the folds of my unif, my palms,--and yet pailfuls splash past me and only drops can reach these pages.... At first I heard behind me, behind the door, a loud voice. I recognized her voice, the voice of I-330, tense, metallic--and another one, almost inflexible, like a wooden ruler, the voice of U-. Then the door came open with a crack and both of them shot into the room. _Shot_ is the right word. I-330 put her hand on the back of my armchair and smiled over her shoulder but only with her teeth, at U-. I should not care to stand before such a smile. "Listen," she said to me, "this woman seems to have made it her business to guard you from me like a little child. Is it with your permission?" "But he _is_ a child. Yes! That is why he does not notice that you ... that it is only in order.... That all this is only a foul game! Yes! And it is my duty...." For a second (in the mirror) the broken, trembling line of brows. I leaped, controlling with difficulty the other self within me, the one with the hairy fists; with difficulty, pushing every word through my teeth, I cried straight into her face, into her very gills: "Get out of here at once! Out! At once!" The gills swelled at first into brick-red lumps, then fell and became gray. She opened her mouth to say something but without a word she slammed it shut and went out. I threw myself towards I-330. "Never, never will I forgive myself! She dared! You ... but you don't think, do you, that you, that she.... This is all because she wants to register on me but I...."