Why don’t you admit it, Grange, Larry thought as he staggered through the companionway toward his cabin. That’s what you always wanted, isn’t it—a place of importance?
A place in the sun, they call it.
“You’re going to get a place in the sun, all right,” he mumbled aloud. “Right smack in the middle of the sun with everyone else aboard this ship!”
The humor of it amused him perversely. He smiled—but it was closer to a leer—and lunged into his cabin. What he said to Sheila was no joke. He really did have a splitting headache. It had come on suddenly and it was like no headache he had ever known. It pulsed and throbbed and beat against his temples and held red hot needles to the backs of his eyeballs, almost blinding him. It sapped all his strength, leaving him physically weak. He was barely able to close the door behind him and stagger to the shower.
An ice cold shower, he thought would help. He stripped quickly and got under the needle spray. By that time he was so weak he could barely stand.
A place in the sun, he thought….
Something grabbed his mind and wrenched it.
Johnny Mayhem awoke.
Awakening came slowly, as it always did. It was a rising through infinite gulfs, a rebirth for a man who had died a hundred times and might die a thousand times more as the years piled up and became centuries. It was a spinning, whirling, flashing ascent from blackness to coruscating colors, brightness, giddiness.