"Fran!"
But she was white and rigid in his arms, thrusting him away, gasping with terror. "What are you doing? Max, no!"
It was an icy shock, a rejection like a flood of ice, thrusting him back into the wild senselessness of his sudden mad universe. He felt only the desolation of being alone. He wept, feeling the tears on his cheek.
Did God cry?
Crying? Clutching desperately at this frigid slip of a girl for salvation, when the whole universe awaited him? He pushed himself up, away from her; he heard her voice as if from a great distance, making words, but he was past words.
Blackness closed in about them; time slowed, the eddies of air swirled to a halt, and lances of fire swirled through his mind. Then, beyond the realm of three dimensions he saw her, clearly.
His mind shattered into a thousand crystals, reflecting prismatically pounding emotions he could not directly face. He looked at Fran, into her, through her, beyond her.
He saw; not the immobilized figure of a frightened woman, her body helpless beneath his own on the sofa. In fact, he saw not even the sofa.
He saw; beyond the immediacy of the fields of motion contained in finite space as his body, he comprehended other patterns of sub-atomic flux. Below him was a geometrically ordered matrix, a precise framework simply constructed. But above it he found an area of disorder. Complexity, confusion, patterns and sub-patterns of a structure so immensely varied and subtly differentiated as to be nearly incomprehensible. The motion! Movement! Life!
It offended him. It was vulgar, teeming, unruly, impossible! He began to reach out to it....