by delirium, for only in such a state would he have bothered to pursue a
magic cure in this pile of Xeroxes.
He knelt in the scattered papers for a minute or two, preoccupied by the
strange though painless burning sensation that filled his body, trying
to understand its source and meaning. In some places-along his spine,
across the top of his head, at the base of his throat, in his
testicles-the heat was accompanied by an eerie tingle.
He almost felt as if a billion fire ants had made their home within him
and were moving by the millions through his veins and arteries and
through a maze of tunnels they had burrowed in his flesh and bone.
Finally he got to his feet, and a fierce anger rose in him for no
specific reason, and with no particular target.
He kicked out furiously, stirring up a briefly airborne, noisy cloud of
papers.
A frightening rage seethed under the surface of the mindswamp, and he
was just perceptive enough to realize that it was in some way quite
different from the previous rages to which he had succumbed. This one
was . . . even more primal, less focused, less of a human rage, more
like the irrationally churning fury of an animal. He felt as if some
deeply buried racial memory were asserting itself, something crawling up
out of the genetic pit, up from ten million years ago, up from the
faraway time when men were only apes, or from a time even farther
removed than that, from an unthinkably ancient age when men were as yet
only amphibian creatures crawling painfully onto a volcanic shore and
breathing air for the first time. It was a cold rage instead of hot
like the ones before it, as cold as the heart of the Arctic, a billion
years of coldness.
reptilian. Yes, that was the feel of it, an icy reptilian rage, and
when he began to grasp its nature, he recoiled from further
consideration of it and desperately hoped that he would be able to keep
it under control.
The mirror.
He was certain that changes had taken place in him while he had been
unconscious on the living-room floor, and he knew he should go into the
bathroom and look at himself in the mirror. But suddenly he was shaken
anew by fear of what he was becoming, and he could not find the courage
to take even one step in that direction.
Instead, he decided to employ the Braille approach by which he had
previously discovered the first alterations in his face. Feeling the
differences before seeing them would prepare him somewhat for the shock
of his appearance.
Hesitantly he raised his hands to explore his face but did not get that
far because he saw that his hands were changing, and he was arrested by
the sight of them.
They were not radically different hands from what they had been, but
they were unquestionably not his hands anymore, not the hands he had
used all his life. The fingers were longer and thinner, perhaps a whole
inch longer, with fleshier pads at the tips. The nails were different,
too, thicker, harder, yellowish, more pointed than ordinary fingernails.
They were nascent claws, damned if they weren’t, and if the
metamorphosis continued, they would probably develop into even more
pointed, hooked, and razor-sharp talons. His knuckles were changing, to
larger, bonier, almost like arthritic knuckles.
He expected to find his hands stiff and less usable than they had been,
but to his surprise the altered knuckles worked easily, fluidly, and
proved superior to the knucldes out of which they had grown. He worked
his hands experimentally and discovered that he was incredibly
dexterous, his elongated fingers possessed a new suppleness and
startling flexibility.
And he sensed that the changes were continuing unchecked, though not
fast enough for him to actually see the bones growing and the flesh
remaking itself. But by tomorrow his hands would surely be far more
radically changed than they were now.
This was electrifyingly different from the apparent random, tumorlike
excrescences of bone and tissue that had formed across his forehead.
These hands were not just the result of an excess of growth hormones and