Sade reached out and slapped his face repeatedly with his open palm. Hands clamped behind him, Norman took it, barely feeling the stinging blows, their impact light under the impact of what he saw.
"Yes! It's real!" Sade halted his slapping and, laughing like a fiend, rolled up his sleeves. He held his hands up close before Norman's eyes. Norman shuddered, staring at Sade's right hand. Slightly smaller, ghastly white but firm, where the stump of Sade's right arm had been was now flesh. Blood coursed through the bulging veins, a pale hand extended pudgy fingers.
Sade howled with laughter as Norman drew back from the thing as from a snake. "It's real!" Sade shouted, gleefully. "Flesh and blood! I have two hands now!" Exultantly, he held his clenched fists before Norman's white face. "In these hands I shall hold the pulse of the universe, to let it throb or halt at my will. I shall be neither king nor dictator—I shall be a god! The power of life and death in the universe is mine!"
Lifting his gaze from the hands, Norman met the fat man's eyes coldly. "How'd you do this, Sade?"
Sade's laughter dwindled to a greasy smile. "After seeing what the power of Vulcan did to your friend, perhaps it is fitting that you should see this power in reverse." He nodded at the patrolmen. "Bring him along."
In an arm-lock on both sides, Norman was dragged down the same corridor where he had followed Keren in his futile attempt to escape. They halted at a door at its far end. Sade opened the door and Norman was shoved in.
The place was white-walled and bare, like a hospital room but without the usual furniture. On a four-legged platform in the center of the room lay a large porcelain cylinder, like a chamber used for sterilizing surgical instruments, but the surface of the cylinder was smooth, without gadgets, only a heavily bolted cap at one end. Sade patted the cylinder as a sculptor might admire the work of his chisel. "This holds what John Gordon sought and what you seek now to save his life," he smirked. "This container holds fluid from Vulcan's Fountains of Youth!"
Standing before the cylinder, Norman's mind's eye searched the situation for some chance of escape. Here was what he had come so far to obtain and he was powerless to take it. But perhaps it wasn't time; there was much he needed to know.
"Vulcan's power is a radiation," Sade said, "but not from the Sun. It's a liquid under the ground, like Earthian oil—a radioactive element such as science has only found traces of in the cosmic rays. More powerful than radium, it exudes an exciter to growth—a living force."