the first hint of warning to the beginning of the dodging motion, less than half a second had passed.

He started to spin around as the heavy object went by him, but another warning yelped in his mind. He twisted a little, but it was too late.

Something burned horribly through his body, like a thousand million acid-tipped, white-hot needles jabbing through skin and flesh and sinking into the bone. He couldn't even scream.

He blacked out as if he'd been a computer suddenly deprived of power.

II

Of course, came the thought, a very good way to put out a fire is to pour cold water on it. That's a very good idea.

At least, it had put out the fire.

Fire? What fire? The fire in his body, the scalding heat that had been quenched by the cold water.

Slowly, as though it were being turned on through a sluggishly turning rheostat, consciousness came back to The Guesser.

He began to recognize the sensations in his body. There was a general, all-over dull ache, punctuated here and there by sharper aches. There was the dampness and the chill. And there was the queer, gnawing feeling in the pit of his stomach.

At first, he did not think of how he had gotten where he was, nor did he even wonder about his surroundings. There seemed merely to be an absolute urgency to get out of wherever he was and, at the same time, an utter inability to do so. He tried to move, to shift position, but his muscles seemed so terribly tired that flexing them was a high-magnitude effort.

After several tries, he got his arms under his chest, and only then did he realize that he had been lying prone, his right cheek pressed against cold, slimy stone. He lifted himself a little, but the effort was too much, and he collapsed again, his body making a faint splash as he did so.

He lay there for a while, trying to puzzle out his odd and uncomfortable environment. He seemed to be lying on a sloping surface with his head higher than his feet. The lower part of his body was immersed in chill, gently-moving water. And there was something else—

The smell.

It was an incredible stench, an almost overpowering miasma of decay.

He moved 

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