Or did that strange hairless, hollow-eyed, fiend-faced man even exist? Thinking back over everything, Dane couldn't help but wonder. In retrospect, a nightmare quality clung to the whole incident, as if perhaps it were delusion, hallucination, rather than reality.
In any case, it didn't matter, because now, dying here, he'd never know.
And that was too bad, in a way, because there were so many things Dane knew in his heart he'd like to have uncovered. Things like the secret of his own identity, his past and future ... the meaning of the shining shaft he'd seen and that he knew was somehow bound close to his own destiny ... the business of the Kalquoi yat-stick, and how it came to be in the bleak asteroidal cave where the survey ship had found him.
The gelatinous mass had reached his neck now. It wouldn't be much longer.
Dane laughed harshly. "Come on, damn it! Get it over with!" He wrenched his right arm free; hurled the yat-stick out into the center of the viscid mass attacking him.
The ooze crept to his chin. Time stood still, every second dragging out to an eternity.
Dane closed his eyes.
As if it were a signal, a rhythm seemed to start up in his brain: Dane ... Dane ... Dane....
His own name, endlessly repeated. The beginning of a death-throe madness, perhaps, Dane decided with a queer sense of abstraction.
Like magic, the pattern changed: John Dane ... John Dane ... John Dane....