Dr. Howard Sprinnell slipped a hypo needle swiftly into Fred's neck, withdrew it and dabbed with a piece of surgical wool.
"Off you go, Fred."
He was breaking into pieces, but he didn't care. He slept and woke and slept and woke in the chair in old Cloud Spinner's office and now he was coming apart and he just did not care. Fred Williams had had several years of simple apathy. It came naturally to him. His body rested, tired and inert, lacking in vigor from lack of food, and his mind separated slowly from it, like a man standing up in a pool of pygmies. His heart, hands, liver, stomach, viscera had their pygmy minds all bundled in with his, and now falling away in separation as he rose from them.
His mind rose away from his body in the chair altogether. He viewed his body with unconcern, and the chair in which it sat, and the room, and through the walls the surrounding offices, and the rooms of the Federal police station, where the Security trooper named Joe who had taken the beer sat picking his teeth and gabbing with a pair of young Federal cops, and the roof of the block in which the station stood.
His mind went up like a balloon, rising swiftly into the atmosphere, and the city shrank away under him like a toy plan, a kid's aid to Better Civics, Home Town box VI, no Solar Credits necessary. He shifted automatically away from the main airport, but a moment later he went clean through an airliner cockpit, cabins with passengers, exhaust, and out exactly where he was before. His mind followed the airliner involuntarily, until he asked himself why, and immediately continued rising into the sky, looking down at the ground and the great spherical horizon.
His mind rose into cloud and examined minutely a water molecule floating from a piece of dust as big as a rock. His sense of proportion sent him shooting out of the top of the cloud suddenly, like a startled fish. The ground became a globe gradually, and as the clouds below became little wisps over the light blue haze of the Earth, his feeling of liberation increased and he rose faster. He went through layer after layer of radiation sparking fitfully around him, and fiercer belts. And then the dust thinned out like scattered transparent ball bearings, and his mind approached the satellite stations riding over the Earth. He was tempted to go through one, but it seemed unimportant and he rose out.
The Moon was swinging down away from him, a vast pitted ball bigger to his mind than the Earth now. He put on more speed, so that his mind flashed away from the Sun. Then as he paused an odd thing happened. One moment he was up there, alone above the small Earth and its smaller Moon, and the next instant his mind had flashed right into the center of the Sun, deep in the inferno of its core, where violence and variegated light surrounded him. And then he was out again, and his mind zoomed off as if he were sitting in the front seat of a low-slung car with the landmarks coming at a rush toward him and away to the side. The Galaxy fell away behind his mind in this fashion and the Great Nebula of Andromeda passed by.
His mind roamed for a while among the other galactic clusters and the spiral galaxies. He found his mind could appear at any point he wished, without the long rush through space. He could transfer instantaneously from place to place, and he hopped in this way at random from Crab to Lagoon and in to Polaris and out to the Great Spiral of Ursa Major, and onward to the open centers of the universe.
In deeper space, where endless banks of galaxies roller-coasted away from each other, he felt a change of quality come over his mind. It turned within itself where all the vivid stars became mere floating lights on the surface of a bubble outside. Here, within his mind, was deeper space and yet another liberation. His mind hung like a grape about to empty into a vat, which in this larger sense was truly himself. Insofar as he, Fred Williams, was a mind, it was only a skin around the greater liquid, in which indeed he perceived all things held in common.