• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1772 0

had quite enough of the scene beyond the window. He had been right. He felt relief at the advent of darkness. In one hour he would go to bed and sleep, as he did every evening at ten-thirty. In the meantime he emptied his mind, abandoned his thoughts, memories, anxieties - allowed his concern for Ralph to slip from his consciousness with the reminder that, in essence, nothing of this realm mattered, that it was just a passing show, that emotions were no more than the excess baggage of the ego. Having done this, he concentrated even harder on washing from his mind the actual thought that nothing mattered. Eventually he bordered on a trance-state, and gradually he attained the peace of mind he had achieved during his last shift in the flux-tank. He felt the joyous unburdened essence of the continuum around him, though without quite the intensity or the rapture he would have had experienced when fluxing. What he felt now was a second best, but a state nevertheless for which he was profoundly grateful.

On the edge of his consciousness he could hear - no, feel, think, somehow sense, the calling... the desire of the intelligence, which he had intuited in his last flux, for him to conjoin with the sublime, the infinite continuum.

For an eternal moment, Bobby hovered between this reality and the next.

Quite suddenly he was pitched from his trance. One second he had awareness of the nada-continuum, and the next that contact was broken. At first he was disoriented; this had never happened before. Normally he found it difficult to maintain the level of concentration needed to remain in the trance-state, and usually returned to himself slowly to find that an hour or more had elapsed in what seemed like seconds.

This time the transition was abrupt and wrenching.

Something touched his shoulder, and he realised that an earlier touch was what had interrupted his meditation. He felt something on his arm - the touch of a hand, firm but not rough.

Yesterday at this time he had still had his eyes shut. He was still in darkness, for which he was grateful. More hands held him, and he imagined the sensory confusion he would have suffered if his delayed vision had relayed to him an empty room.

The hands were trying to ease him from his chair.

No! he shouted, unable to hear himself. What do you want?

Not for ten years had he experienced the touch of another human being other than that of his brother. Now he felt the touch of hands on his shoulders and arms. The sudden intimacy of the unexpected assault filled him with an overwhelming fear.

No!

He struggled; still in darkness, he twisted and writhed. Strong arms clamped his arms and legs, and he felt a disconcerting buoyancy as he was hoisted from his chair and carried through the air.

Bobby screamed in silence.

His yesterday-self had chosen that moment to open his eyes, rise from his chair and walk towards the door. Bobby felt sick with the resulting disorientation. In real-time he was being borne from the room, kicking and struggling, by perhaps four or five men - judging from the restraining holds on his arms and legs - while his vision relayed to him his sedate walk through the hall to the bathroom as he had prepared for bed last night.

He could feel himself being carried along in a hurry, his abductors turning from his room, then moving from the hall into the elevator: with a flailing right hand he struck the plastic interior of the lift cage. The forward motion stopped, but the hold on him was still as strong. He gave up his struggle and felt a belly-lurching sensation as the lift dropped. Visually, he was watching his toothbrush rise to his mouth, and a second later he tasted the sour tang of the mint toothpaste. He had closed his eyes yesterday while doing this, and now he experienced a blessed period of darkness accompanied by the sound of his electric toothbrush and running water.

The lift hit bottom and he was carried out. He could feel the bounce of footsteps, the rush of warm air against his skin as he was taken into the street. He hoped that a passer-by might see what