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"Ohhh. Ahhh. Heee. Teee," the heat ripples clamored. Even the flames
smoldering on his own clothes roared gibberish in his ears.
"MANTERCEISTMANN!" they bellowed.
Color was pain to him. . . heat, cold, pressure; sensations of
intolerable heights and plunging depths, of tremendous accelerations
and crushing compressions:
Touch was taste to him. . . the feel of wood was acrid and chalky
in his mouth, metal was salt, stone tasted sour-sweet to the touch of
his fingers, and the feel of glass cloyed his palate like over-rich pastry.
Smell was touch . . . Hot stone smelled like velvet caressing his
cheek. Smoke and ash were harsh tweeds rasping his skin, almost the
feel of wet canvas. Molten metal smelled like blow hammering his
heart, and the ionization of the PyrE explosion filled the air with
ozone that smelled like water trickling through his fingers.
He was not blind, not deaf, not senseless. Sensation came to
him, but filtered through a nervous system twisted and short-
circuited by the shock of the PyrE concussion. He was suffering from
Synaesthesia, that rare condition in which perception receives
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messages from the objective world and relays these messages to the
brain, but there in the brain the sensory perceptions are confused
with one another. So, in Foyle, sound registered as sight, motion
registered as sound, colors became pain sensations, touch became
taste, and smell became touch. He was not only trapped within the
labyrinth of the inferno under Old St. Pat's; he was trapped in the
kaleidoscope of his own cross-senses.
Again desperate, on the ghastly verge of extinction, he
abandoned all disciplines and habits of living; or, perhaps, they were
stripped from him. He reverted from a conditioned product of
environment and experience to an inchoate creature craving escape
and survival and exercising every power it possessed. And again the
miracle of two years ago took place. The undivided energy of an entire
human organism, of every cell, fiber, nerve, and muscle empowered
that craving, and again Foyle space-jaunted.
He went hurtling along the geodesical space lines of the curving
universe at the speed of thought, far exceeding that of light. His
spatial velocity was so frightful that his time axis was twisted from the
vertical line drawn from the Past through Now to the Future. He went
flickering along the new near horizontal axis, this new space-time
geodesic, driven by the miracle of a human mind no longer inhibited
by concepts of the impossible.
Again he achieved what Helmut Grant and Enzio Dandridge and
scores of other experimenters had failed to do, because his blind
panic forced him to abandon the spatio-temporal inhibitions that had
defeated previous attempts. He did not jaunte to Elsewhere, but to
Elsewhen. But most important, the fourth dimensional awareness,
the complete picture of the Arrow of Time and his position on it which
is born in every man but deeply submerged by the trivia of living, was
in Foyle close to the surface. He jaunted along the spacetime
geodesics to Elsewheres and Elsewhens, translating "i," the square
root of minus one, from an imaginary number into reality by a
magnificent act of imagination.
He jaunted.
He jaunted back through time to his past. He became the
Burning Man who had inspired himself with terror and perplexity on
the beach in Australia, in a quack's office in Shanghai, on the Spanish
Stairs in Rome, on the Moon, in the Skoptsy Colony on Mars. He
jaunted back through time, revisiting the savage battles that he
himself had fought in Gully Foyle's tiger hunt for vengeance. His
flaming appearances were sometimes noted; other times not.
He jaunted.
He was aboard "Nomad," drifting in the empty frost of space.
He stood in the door to nowhere.
The cold was the taste of lemons and the vacuum was a rake of
talons on his skin. The sun and the stars were a shaking ague that
racked his bones.
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"GLOMMHA FREDNIS!" motion roared in his ears.
It was a figure with its back to him vanishing down the corridor;
a figure with a copper cauldron of provisions over its shoulder; a
figure darting, floating, squirming through free fall. It was Gully
Foyle.
"MEEHAT JESSROT," the sight of his motion bellowed. "Aha!
Oh-ho! M'git not to kak," the flicker of light and shade answered.
"Oooooooh? Soooooo?" the whirling raffle of debris in his wake
murmured. The lemon taste in his mouth became unbearable. The
rake of talons on his skin was torture.
He jaunted.
He reappeared in the furnace beneath Old St. Pat's less then a
second after he had disappeared from there. He was drawn, as the
seabird is drawn, again and again to the flames from which it is
struggling to escape. He endured the roaring torture for only another
moment.
He jaunted.
He was in the depths of Gouffre Martel.
The velvet black darkness was bliss, paradise, euphoria.
"Ah!" he cried in relief.
"AH!" came the echo of his voice, and the sound was translated
into a blinding pattern of light.
The Burning Man winced. "Stop!" he called, blinded by the
noise. Again came the dazzling pattern of the echo:
A distant clatter of steps came to his eyes in soft patterns of
vertical borealis streamers:
It was the search party from the Couffre Martel hospital,
tracking Foyle and Jisbella McQueen by geophone. The Burning Man
disappeared, but not before he had unwittingly decoyed the searchers
from the trail of the vanished fugitives.
He was back under Old St. Pat's, reappearing only an instant
after his last disappearance. His wild beatings into the unknown sent
him stumbling up geodesic space-time lines that inevitably brought
him back to the Now he was trying to escape, for in the inverted
saddle curve of space-time, his Now was the deepest depression in the
curve.
HE WAS ON THE BRAWLING SPANISH
STAIRS. RE WAS ON THE BRAWLING
SPANISH STAIRS. HE WAS ON THE
BRAWLING SPANISH STAIRS. HE WAS
ON THE BRAWLING SPANISH STAIRS.
HE WAS ON TIE BRAWLING SPANISH
STAIRS. HE WAS ON THE BRAWLING
SPANISH STAIRS. HE WAS ON THE
BRAWLING SPANISH STAIRS. HE WAS
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ON THE BRAWLING SPANISH STAIRS.
He could drive himself up, up, up the geodesic lines into the
past or future, but inevitably he must fall back into his own Now, like
a thrown ball hurled up the sloping walls of an infinite pit, to land,
hang poised for a moment, and then roll back into the depths.
But still he beat into the unknown in his desperation.
Again he jaunted.
He was on Jervis beach on the Australian coast.
The motion of the surf was bawling: "LOGGERMIST
CROTEHAYEN!" [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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