Again a sound from behind. Turning, backing a little so that he could take in both men at once, Clawly saw that Conjerly was sitting up, rubbing his face. He took away his hands and his small eyes stared at Clawly—blankly at first. Then his expression changed too, became a "Well?"—though more angry, indignant, less urbane. It was an expression that did not belong to the man who had lain there drugged.
The words Clawly had barely caught were still humming in his ears.
Even as he phrased his excuse—"... came to talk with you about the program ... heard sounds of distressed breathing ... alarmed ... walked in ..."—even as he considered the possibility of immediate physical attack and the best way to meet it, he came to a decision.
He would see Firemoor.
VIII.
In what a shadow, or deep pit of darkness,
Doth womanish and fearful mankind live!
The Duchess of Malfi, John Webster.
With bent shoulders, sunken head, paralyzed arm still dangling at his side, Thorn crouched uncomfortably in his lightless cell, as if the whole actual weight of the Black Star—up to the cold, cloud-piercing pinnacle where "they" held council—were upon him. His mind was tired to the breaking point, oppressed by the twisted, tyrannous world into which he had blundered, by the aching body not his own, by the brain which refused to think his thoughts in the way he wanted to think them.
And yet, in a sense, the human mind is tireless—an instrument built for weary decades of uninterrupted thinking and dreaming. And so Thorn continued to work on, revolving miseries, regrets, and fears, striving to unlock the stubborn memory chambers of the unfamiliar brain, turning from that to equally hopeless efforts to make plans. Mostly it struggled nightmarishly with the problem of escape back to his own world, and with the paradoxical riddles which that problem involved. He must, Thorn told himself, still be making partial use of his brain back in World I—to give it a name—just as Thorn II—to give him a name—must be making use of these locked memory chambers. All thought had to be based on a physical brain; it couldn't go on in emptiness. Also, since Universes I and II—to give them names—were independent, self-contained space-time set-ups, they couldn't have an ordinary spatial relationship—they couldn't be far from or near to each other. The only linkage between them seemed to be the mental ones between quasi-duplicate brains, and such linkages would not involve distance in any common sense of the term. His transition into World II had seemed to take place instantaneously; hence, pragmatically speaking, the two universes could be considered as super-imposed on each other. Whether he was in one or the other was just a matter of viewpoint.