I did not understand. What did she mean by that? The same evening I learned that they led away three Numbers, although nobody speaks out loud about that, or about anything that happened. This ostensible silence is due to the educational influence of the Guardians who are ever present among us. Conversations deal chiefly with the quick fall of the barometer and the forthcoming change in the weather. RECORD TWENTY-NINE Threads on the Face Sprouts An Unnatural Compression It is strange: the barometer continues to fall yet there is no wind. There is quiet. Above, the storm which we do not yet hear has begun. The clouds are rushing with a terrific speed. There are few of them as yet; separate fragments; it is as if there above us an unknown city were being destroyed and pieces of walls and towers were rushing down, coming nearer and nearer with terrific speed, but it will take some days of rushing through the blue infinite before they reach the bottom, that is us, below. And below there is silence. There are thin, incomprehensible, almost invisible threads in the air; every autumn they are brought here from beyond the Wall. They float slowly, and suddenly you feel something foreign and invisible on your face; you want to brush it off, but no, you cannot rid yourself of it. You feel it especially near the Green Wall, where I was this morning. I-330 made an appointment with me to meet her in the Ancient House in that "Apartment" of ours. I was not far from the rust-red, opaque mass of the Ancient House, when I heard behind me short hasty steps and rapid breathing. I turned around and saw O-90 trying to catch up to me. She seemed strangely and perfectly rounded. Her arms and breast, her whole body, so familiar to me, was rounded out, stretching her unif. It seemed as though it would soon tear the thin cloth and come out into the sun, into the light. I think that there in the green debris, in springtime, the unseen sprouts try thus to tear their way through the ground in order to emit their branches and leaves and to bloom. For a few seconds she shone into my face with her blue eyes in silence. "I saw you on the Day of Unanimity." "I saw you, too." I at once remembered; below, in a narrow passage she had stood, pressing herself to the wall, protecting her abdomen with her arms, and automatically I glanced now at her abdomen which rounded the unif. She must have noticed, for she became pink, and with a rosy smile: "I am so happy ... so happy! I am so full of ... you understand, I am ... I walk and I hear nothing around me.... And all the while I listen within, within me...."