Windy suck trail
I doubt it. Hes probably five thousand miles under our feet, sucked down by the back-pressure. A century from now he’ll come up through Vesuvius. The next morning I flew again to Toms house. He came out to the landing strip to meet me. Climbing out of my little plane, holding his manuscript in my hand, I walked toward him. I arranged on my face a knowing, smiling, cynical look that would tell him I had guessed his secret. He did not answer that.No, its not the master, he said and went out. He studied their own well-fatted pig that was down at the corner of the property snouting some superior mud from here to there. He refrained from pointing out that this shoat of theirs lived fantastically better than they did, having as many rooms as he had muds, no peaches to pick, no woman to make loud noises in his ears. Have you ever seen the radiator grille of a car after its run into a lamppost? Well, one section of the grid looked very much like that. Something had battered it in, as if a gargantuan madman had gone to work on it with a sledge hammer. Fredric! Youd kill a nine-year-old boy! I started to tell her what I thought of her meetings, how much damage she was doing, how far she was setting Libo back. I decided there wouldnt be any use. People who do that kind of thing, her kind of thing, get their kicks out of the ego-bloating effect of their power over audiences and don’t give a good goddamn about how much damage they do. Anyway, now I know Im getting smarter every day. I know punctuation and I can spell good. I like to look up all the hard words in the dictionary and I remember them. I’m reading a lot now, and Miss Kin-than says I read very fast. Sometimes I even understand what I’m reading about, and it stays in my mind. Thereare times when I can close my eyes and think of a page and it all comes back like a picture. Double your meaning, double your fun. Well—I cant be sure about that. I mean, it’s true that until now I was taking the most appalling risks. Like going out to work all day and leaving my wife at home alone— why, anything might have happened to her! And not seeing Hank for months on end. And not checking with Joe every chance I got, so that if he was killed I could have time to fix up another Contact to take his place. Each night, the godstch-tched. He finger-fluffed his whiskers in that habitual way of his before asking,Fenton Egan has no idea you wrote the anonymous note that sent him to Larkin Street, I take it? No, said Goldy. Topology is preserved. But I dont —or, hell—I really don’t know. If he grew so big he was outside the psychicecology, he might just have faded away.” The big pataphysicist wrinkled up his face inside his beard.“Alice should be required reading for mathenauts,” he muttered. “The real trouble is no one has ever been outside and been back to tell about it. The animal experiments and theNorbert Wiener and Wilbur on thePaul R. Halmos. They just disappeared.” “You know,” I said, “You can map the volume of a sphere into the whole universe using the ratio: Ir: R equals R:Or, where Ir and Or are the inside and outside distances for the points. Maybe that’s what happened to Ted. Maybe he’s just outside the ship, filling all space with his metamath and his acne?” She wouldnt happen to be here, would she? They gave her clothes to the Salvation Army, I said, in as near an approximation to an answer as I could arrive at. Professor LaVaux saw him to the door. For the rest, return to abstraction was impossible. Time, entropy, had robbed them of their knowledge, their heritage. Yet they still hoped and expended themselves to leave, well, call it a seed of sorts. The creature wrapped itself cozily around the abbey like a moist rag. It started on the East Wing, then gooed over the North, slithered part of itself to the West and met its tail with its nose on the South. The moment of confrontation, front to rear, was rare for the creature and for an instant it fell under the impression that it had encountered a friend. It would have tipped its hat if it had a hat, but it had no hat so it snorted recognition. Its rear end gave no sign, except a faint pulsation, so the creature bit it in primitive rage. A bubble of pain ran through its nervous system along internal cords like seaweed and reached its medulla oblongata with a clonk. The creature wailed. A teardrop formed and gurgled out of a red eye..
