"MAX!"
A body had flung itself at him, kicking, scratching, screaming. He was toppled back and suddenly lying on the floor, back in the narrow confines of a single body again. His head rang and her words were slowly becoming words again.
They hurt his ears, jangling with their ridiculous cadences against the sublime expanse of perception. "No, no! I loved you, but you—you're mad—you're not Max—"
And then she had flung herself through the door and was gone, her running footsteps growing fainter on the stairs.
Slowly, Max surrendered himself to a chair, without any awareness of his human motions. The old chair enveloped him with the old overstuffed cushioned arms and gave him a musty embrace and for a moment he was part of all its enfolding past, the weariness that had come into its unrejecting depths for comfort and rest. His face was still wet with the tears he had shed before, and now they began to swell and flow again, erupting and cascading almost without volition.
Fran was gone.
She was gone, and she had been all he had, all that was ever really real to him. Dimly he sensed, without knowing, that it had been a double failure. Fran had refused, rejected his need—but was it Fran's fault, that he had been unable to reach her? Had he ever been able to reach any human creature? Had he ever wanted to, except in his own selfish desire? He spoke of loving Fran, and yet he had shied away from that answer—until he needed her.
And so his vast paranormal powers were meaningless, because the physical universe itself was without meaning. Ordered, yes. Finely structured. But with no more meaning than an alarm clock. He could be God, and yet the only safety and sanity he had felt was when Fran drew him back from the brink of the bewildering nothingness into the shelter of her breast.
But for all his control of things, he had been unable to achieve that blending that meant power. He had only a meaningless power over things which now, in essence, were only nothingness in various rates of flow....