trays.

Zarias shouted thickly behind me. "Stop him before he brings—"

I have to choose my words carefully now. For what happened in the next instant is still not too clear in my memory. There was a sudden feeling of tension in the air. It was the hunch, the sixth sense, that thrills through a radiologist sometimes just before a blow-up.

"Look out!" Burris yelled, and I knew from that that he felt it, too.

And then it hit us. I'm not trying to be cryptic about all this. It's just that it was so unearthly it's hard to describe. There was a feeling of tingling force going through my body, and at the same moment something jabbed into my mind. I mean that I felt an alien intrusion battering into my thoughts.

I want to be precise. And I know that what I've just written may recall fantasies of alien beings delicately and deftly probing into the human mind. It wasn't like that at all. The nearest I can describe it is this way—if my mind were a complicated watch, what had grabbed it was the uncertain, fumbling hand of a child.

"Frank!" said Marie uncertainly, her face drained of all color. And then she suddenly screamed it. "Frank!"

Burris was the one who saved us then. He said afterward that he felt that sickening, fumbling mental grasp as we did, but that his first premonition of a blow-up had given him a certain physical momentum that carried him through.

Anyway, he was the one who shoved us toward the door into the corridor. I don't remember much of that moment. I dimly recall seeing Mathers, his ascetic face blank and strange, walking stiffly toward Andersen as the Dane stood working the chamber-controls.

I don't remember any more of it until the moment I found myself out in the corridor with Zarias and Marie and Varez and young Carew, and heard Burris frantically slamming the Main Physics door. The grabbling of impossible fingers on my brain stopped then. I turned around shakily and found young Carew being sick against the corridor wall.

"What is it?" cried Marie, her eyes wide with horror. "Something that touched our minds, that radiation—"

Zarias saved us from collapse in that moment, I think. The Greek's black eyes were blazing with scientific passion now.

"Andersen was right—he sensed 

 Prev. P 9/19 next