What was Bob Feller?

"I ... guess so."

The room exploded in blinding light that seared his eyes and lanced his brain.

"Are you sure?"

"Oh yes! Oh God, yes!"

The agony was over and once again the room was mercifully black.

"You hate the cities."

The cities.

The decaying houses and the rotting tenements. The stinking alleys and the littered parks and the filthy buildings.

And the lawns and the happy kids and the beaches....

He didn't answer.

Somewhere within his mind a wheel started to spin. Slow. Then faster and faster until he was sweating and shaking with nausea and then it felt like he was flying apart into small fragments that tore and buffeted each other and pained....

Of course he hated the cities.

For a moment, peace.

"The apes. You hate the apes. You hate the human race."

The human race. His race. The pieces that were Stanley Martin started to flow together, to coalesce once more into a single individual....

And then his nerve endings and ganglions felt sharp, searing pain. Pain that threaded along his nerves and burned into every segment of his body, pain that threatened to fry his cortical centers.

Pain that scattered the particles of personality that were Stanley Martin and shriveled them to nothingness. Pain that obliterated the last traces of conscience and memory.

"You hate the human race," a voice repeated 

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