The Lost Perception Read Online Free PDF Page B

terrifying, agonizing. It was as though a flimsy barrier had been viciously torn aside to expose him to the brutal onslaught.
    Sagging to his knees, fighting desperately to ward off the attack, he realized at last that he was shrieking out his anguish. And he was remotely aware of his own hands fumbling at the flap of his self-injection kit. Somehow he managed to withdraw the bulky hypodermic syringe.
    But he almost dropped the instrument as a new wave of fire washed over bis senses, almost obscuring his consciousness, sending great rivers of lava coursing in angry, gushing torrents through his brain.
    But he couldn’t go Screamie! He had to hang on. For if he surrendered to the attack, he felt certain, it would be bis very last act of volition.
    Slowly, the fires abated. Then, as though he had somehow found means of restoring the barrier between himself and torturous insanity, the seizure was over and he sat in the dirt of the alley, uncontrollably sobbing off the final effects of the attack.
    Briefly, he hid his despair behind the glowing hope that perhaps the Screamies could be rejected, could be resisted by the sheer strength of indomitable will power. Could he continue to hold out—indefinitely?
    Then, remembering the Valorian, he rose and started forward on legs almost incapable of bearing his weight.
    To the right of the mound of debris, off in the darkened, narrow recess between the two buildings, he found the cringing Valorian. But he drew up warily.
    What tactics would he encounter? What racially-evolved faculties of attack and defense? How could there be any way of anticipating the alien’s assault potential, his limitations? How did you go about challenging someone whose strength, prowess and reflexes you couldn’t begin to evaluate?
    Momentarily, they stared uncertainly at each other while Gregson berated himself for having been caught unarmed in such a predicament. Then he remembered the hypodermic syringe that was still in his hand. But would the injection be effective on a Valorian?
    Impulsively, he charged, wielding the needle like a rapier.
    But the Valorian stepped nimbly aside and the hypodermic slipped harmlessly past his shoulder.
    Gregson recovered his balance, drew back again and drove the needle forward once more. But, again, the alien was entirely prepared for the thrust and readily eluded it.
    Annoyance finally overcoming caution, Gregson hurled himself upon the alien and caught his head in the grip of an arm.
    As though having foreseen the move, however, the latter fleeted out of what would have been a viselike headlock. At the same time his hand came up to seize Gregson’s other arm and impel it on in the swinging arc it had already begun.
    That motion was originally to have jabbed the needle into the Valorian’s neck. The man’s head being no longer in his grip, however, Gregson winced as the syringe pierced his own left biceps instead.
    The siren went off instantly and the alien stepped back to let Gregson sag forward into unconsciousness.
*  *  *
    As though from the infinite reaches of space came Manuel’s resonant but soundless voice. Trembling in their incoherence, the words strove to convey strange, compelling concepts. But they were concepts that could not be put into words. Thus, the flow was not one of unspoken language at all, but rather of inchoate ideas, terrifying in the very emptiness of their meaning.
    It was not the first time Arthur Gregson had experienced an ephemeral flash of empathy—with his twin. There had been the Nina’s trial run to Pluto before her cosmic transmitter was installed. The ionic accelerators had slipped out of phase. In that moment of impending disaster, he had somehow known of Manuel’s peril.
    This time, Gregson sensed, it was a different kind of emotion Manuel was undergoing—something so utterly alien that it could not be categorized in the framework of human experience. Indescribable reflections of the other’s sensations came as though