Nothing. I lay in the dark and tried to will an arm to move, my head to turn. It was as though I had no arm, no head—just a mind—alone in the dark. I strained to sense the ropes that held me down: still nothing. No ropes, no arms, no body. There was no pressure against me from the couch, no vagrant itch or cramp, no physical sensation. I was a disembodied brain, lying nestled in a great bed of pitchblack cotton wool.
Then, abruptly, I was aware of myself—not the gross mechanism of bone and muscle, but the neuro-electric field generated within a brain alive with flashing currents and a lightning interplay of molecular forces. A sense of orientation grew. I occupied a block of cells ... here in the left hemisphere. The mass of neural tissue loomed over me, gigantic. And "I" ... "I" was reduced to the elemental ego, who possessed as a material appurtenance "my" arms and legs, "my" body, "my" brain.... Relieved of outside stimuli, I was able now to conceptualize myself as I actually was: an insubstantial state existing in an immaterial continuum, created by the action of neural currents within the cerebrum, as a magnetic field is created in space by the flow of electricity.
And I knew what had happened. I had opened my mind to invasion by alien memories. The other mind had seized upon the sensory centers and driven me to this dark corner. I was a fugitive within my own skull.
For a timeless time I lay stunned, immured now as the massive stones of Bar-Ponderone had never confined me. My basic self-awareness still survived, out was shunted aside, cut off from any contact with the body itself.
With shadowy fingers of imagination I clawed at the walls surrounding me, fought for a glimpse of light, for a way out.
And found none.
Then, at last, I began again to think.
I must analyze my awareness of my surroundings, seek out channels through which impulses from sensory nerves flowed, and tap them.
I tried cautiously; an extension of my self-concept reached out with ultimate delicacy. There were the ranked infinities of cells, there the rushing torrents of gross fluid, there the taut cables of the interconnecting web, and there—