But the long process of disintegration was now almost at an end; he could reshape his thought-patterns only with the greatest pain and difficulty, and branching out was out of the question. He realized this, and slowly prepared himself for the final pattern to come; the pattern of death. As his faint, blue shape of line-impulse reformed within itself, however, he became conscious of a weak, almost nonexistent impulse beating against the outer fringe of his pattern. He stopped his reforming process and, summoning all the power he could, glided toward the impulse. When he did this, the impulse became definitely stronger; slowly his delicate, crystalloid form became more and more conscious of it; its power rose and rose, until it reached an almost unbearable intensity. Waves of hunger beat against Rahll, as they had for centuries; but here, here at last, was satisfaction. His jagged cannibal's pattern roused itself, waiting for the new impulse to come within striking distance. And then.... It stopped. It had been there for only a moment, and now it was gone. Rahll desperately sent out tendrils of a length he had thought he would never attain again in search of the huge impulse, and found.... Another. This one was smaller, although still one hundred times as powerful as Rahll's; and, oddly, it was channelled into five separate spokes of impulse which functioned around a large central hub-impulse. The impulses in the five channels were exactly alike, but they were interpreted differently by the central hub due to the different channels through which they came. Rahll sorted and distinguished these five interpretations, his pattern weaving into one of curiosity and vague dismay as he did. One channel of impulse was evidently devoted to the sensing of forms and colors, something which Rahll found unnecessary; a second was one which sensed vibrations in--in something, a substance Rahll was unfamiliar with, one with more substance than the void he lived in and yet unsolid enough to carry vibrations easily; a third existed to sense odors in this unsolid substance; a fourth to sense some things which Rahll did not recognize, bitter, salt, sweet, and sour; and a fifth to sense heat and cold. All these impulses transmitted their sensings to the central hub, which seemed to be a completely flexible mass of unpatterned, vari-frequencied electrical impulses that was almost overpoweringly strong. Yes, these were food for Rahll; but two factors held him from consuming all six branches of impulse together. * * * * * The first was that he was so weak that any more than one of the spoke-impulses absorbed at a time would have shattered his frail form.