“Lacking all those, yes. We were vapors, merely. For a long time. Until today.”
And now I am here, thought Leonard Sale. “You are here,” said that voice. “To give substance to our mentalities. To give us our needed body.”
I’m only one, thought Sale. “Nevertheless, you are of use.”
I'm an individual, thought Sale. I resent your intrusion.
“He resents our intrusion! Did you hear him, Iorr? He resents!”
“As if he had a right to resent!”
Be careful, warned Sale. I'll blink my eyes and you'll be gone, phantoms! I'll wake up and rub you out!
“But you'll have to sleep again, some time!” cried Iorr. “And when you do, we'll be here, waiting, waiting, waiting. For you.”
What do you want? “Solidity. Mass. Sensation again.” You can't both have it. “We'll fight that out between us.”
A hot clamp twisted his skull. It was as if a spike had been thrust and beaten down between the bivalvular halves of his brain.
Now it was terribly clear. Horribly, magnificently clear. He was their universe. The world of his thoughts, his brain, his skull, divided into camps, that of Iorr, that of Tylle. They were using him!
Pennants flung up on a pink mind sky! Brass shields caught the sun. Grey animals shifted and came rushing in bristling tides of sword a plume and trumpet.
Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! The rushing.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! The roaring.
Nowwwwwwwwwwwwww! The whirling.
Mmmmmmmmmmmmm—
Ten thousand men hurtled across the small hidden stage. Ten thousand men floated on the shellacked inner ball of his eye. Ten thousand javelins hissed between the small bone hulls of his head. Ten thousand jeweled guns exploded. Ten thousand voices chanted in his ears. Now his body was riven and extended, shaken and rolled, he Was screaming, writhing, the plates of his skull threatened to burst asunder. The gabbling, the shrilling, as across bone plains of mind and continent of inner marrow, through gullies of vein, down hills of artery, over rivers of melancholy, came armies and armies, one army, two armies, swords flashed in the sun, bearing down upon each other, fifty thousand minds snatching, scrabbling, cutting at him, demanding, using. In a moment, the hard collision, one army on another, the rush, the blood, the sound, the fury, the death, the insanity!
Like cymbals, the armies struck!
He leaped up, raving. He ran across the desert. He ran and ran and did not stop running.
He sat down and cried. He sobbed until his lungs ached. He cried very hard and long. Tears ran down his cheeks and into his upraised, trembling fingers. “God, God, help me, oh God, help me,” he said.
All was normal again.
It was four o'clock in the afternoon. The rocks were baked by the sun.
84
