But when he emerged from the room he was a different man entirely.
Erect, alive, intense, queerly handsome, and now in formal attire, he
mounted with the sure grace of a panther to the speaker's platform.
Once only he glanced at the nineteen-point outline of his address.
As there is no point in keeping it a secret, it was as follows: 1.
Cepheid and Cerium--How Long Is a Yardstick? 2. Double Trouble--Is
Ours a Binary Universe? 3. Cerebrum and Cortex--the Mathematics of
Melancholia. 4. Microphysics and Megacyclic Polyneums. 5. _Ego, No,
Hemeis_--the Personality of the Subconscious. 6. Linear Convexity
and Lateral Intransigence. 7. Betelgeuse Betrayed--the Myth of
Magnitude. 8. Mu-Meson, the Secret of Metamorphosis. 9. Theogony and
Tremor--the Mathematics of Seismology. 10. Planck's Constant and
Agnesi's Variable. 11. Dien-cephalon and Di-Gamma--Unconscionable
Thoughts about Consciousness. 12. Inverse Squares and the Quintesimal
Radicals. 13. The Chain of Error in the Lineal B Translation. 14.
Skepticism--the Humor of the Humorless. 15. Ogive and Volute--Thoughts
on Celestial Curviture. 16. Conic Sections--Small Pieces of Infinity.
17. Eschatology--Medium Thoughts about the End. 18. Hypo-polarity and
Cosmic Hysteresis. 19. The Invisible Quadratic, or This is All Simpler
than You Think.
You will immediately see the beauty of this skeleton, and yet to flesh
it would not be the work of an ordinary man.
He glanced over it with the sure smile of complete confidence. Then he
spoke softly to the master of ceremonies in a whisper with a rumble
that could be heard throughout the hall.
"I am here. I will begin. There is no need for any further
introduction."
For the next three and a half hours he held that intelligent audience
completely spellbound, enchanted. They followed, or seemed to follow,
his lightning flashes of metaphor illumining the craggy chasms of his
vasty subjects.
They thrilled to the magnetic power of his voice, urbane yet untamed,
with its polyglot phrasing and its bare touch of accent so strange as
to be baffling; ancient, surely, and yet from a land beyond the Pale.
And they quivered with interior pleasure at the glorious unfolding in
climax after climax of these before only half-glimpsed vistas.
Here was a world of mystery revealed in all its wildness, and it obeyed
and stood still, and he named its name. The nebula and the conch lay
down together, and the ultra-galaxies equated themselves with the zeta
mesons. Like a rich householder, he brought from his store treasures
old and new, and nothing like them had ever been seen or heard before.
* * * * *
At one point Professor Timiryaseff cried out in bafflement and
incomprehension, and Doctor Ergodic Eimer buried his face in his hands,
for even these most erudite men could not glimpse all the shattering
profundity revealed by the fantastic speaker.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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