Dawn of the DemigodsGallun, Raymond Z. (Raymond Zinke)
Science
Dawn of the Demigods
Gallun, Raymond Z. (Raymond Zinke)
Science fiction
"Scharber! Bowhart!" I yelled. It was a thin wheeze. I wished that they
knew more about Doc's work so they could help us. My final awareness
was of the rush of their footsteps.
Time became timeless. Then I had a sense of struggling upward toward
light. The effort was mental. A minute might have passed, or a year. I
had a body which seemed to turn lightly on a mattress of coarse sticks.
I felt like myself, clothed in real flesh. The light around me might
have been diffused sunshine, and I saw colors, the familiar ones, plus
what might be the indescribable paleness of ultra-violet, unknown to
man as himself, and another nameless hue that perhaps was the sensory
effect of electronic vision.
I didn't fully guess all this at once; but its ghost was in the back of
my mind, and at the edge of panic.
I had sat up easily. I realized that I was still in the region of
The Small. Once experiencing that environment denies any failure to
recognize it later. Oh, there was the roughness of the glassy walls of
the room, pleasingly decorated with geometric patterns like those of
old tiles brought back to Earth from the asteroid belt. But I refer
more to the insecure sense of buoyancy, of ease with which one might
float in the air or recline upon it, after a tiny push at the floor.
It is a feeling quite apart from the weightlessness experienced in
space; and though there was certainly very little gravity here, too,
the difference remained palpable. And now I even felt a tingling in my
skin--the impact of molecules, perhaps, as they tried to lift and carry
me away.
My body seemed to conform to such a dimensional plane. It was me with
some details blurred or omitted. I was clad in stiff imitations of the
slacks and shirt I had worn inside my space armor. My hands, rough
in texture, lacked the fine hairs, as if they had been left out in a
process of transformation. Was the stiff, wirelike hair on my head
still black? I fumbled at my face. The nose, large jaw, and brow,
seemed the same, except for a certain shortness and roundness, as in
a doll-like simulacra. Corresponding to this was the length of lashes
around my eyes--or had electronic sense-organs been added, necessary
here for close vision?
Again I looked around the room. One wall was absent. But the square
left for ventilation was crossed by interwoven diagonals--bars which
must have been incredibly fine wire from another viewpoint.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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