We / Мы. Книга для чтения на английском языке

“Ah, our mathematician! Dreaming?”

I started. Black eyes, lacquered with laughter; thick, Negroid lips. The poet R-13, my old friend – and with him, pink O.

I turned angrily. If they had not intruded, I think I finally would have torn the V-1 out of myself with the flesh, and entered the Office.

“Not dreaming. Admiring, if you wish!” I answered sharply.

“Certainly, certainly! By rights, my good friend, you should not be a mathematician; you ought to be a poet! Yes! Really, why not transfer to us poets, eh? How would you like that? I can arrange it in a moment, eh?”

R-13 speaks in a rush of words; they spurt out in a torrent and spray comes flying from his thick lips.

Every “p” is a fountain; “poets” – a fountain.

“I have served and will continue to serve knowledge,” I frowned. I neither like nor understand jokes, and R-13 has the bad habit of joking.

“Oh, knowledge! This knowledge of yours is only cowardice. Don’t argue, it’s true. You’re simply trying to enclose infinity behind a wall, and you are terrified to glance outside the wall.

Yes! Just try and take a look, and you will shut your eyes. Yes!”

“Walls are the foundation of all human…” I began.

R spurted at me like a fountain. O laughed roundly, rosily. I waved them off – laugh if you please, it doesn’t matter to me. I had other things to think about I had to do something to expunge, to drown out that damned V-1.

“Why not come up to my room,” I suggested.

“We can do some mathematical problems.” I thought of that quiet hour last evening – perhaps it would be quiet today as well.

O glanced at R-13, then at me with clear, round eyes. Her cheeks flushed faintly with the delicate, exciting hue of our coupons.

“But today I… Today I am assigned to him,” she nodded at R, “and in the evening he is busy… So that…”

R’s wet, lacquered lips mumbled good-humoredly “Oh, half an hour will be enough for us. Right, O? I don’t care for your problems, let’s go up to my place for a while.

”

I was afraid to remain alone with myself, or rather, with that new, foreign being who merely by some odd chance had my number – D-503. And I went with them to R’s place. True, he is not precise, not rhythmical, he has a kind of inside-out, mocking logic; nevertheless, we are friends. Three years ago we had chosen together the charming, rosy O. This bound us even more firmly than our school years.