the blank ceiling as a vast cloud of atoms, he felt a fantasy with the musculature of a conviction. He imagined that Carl's body of photons had not only collapsed through a ghost hole but had expanded through that same hole into another universe. And not an entirely random universe. Whatever had collapsed Carl had used its own inertia to guide Carl's light through the ghost hole to itself.
This hypermetric entity Zeke called an urg, because it sounded like erg, which was the quality that this thing had turned Carl's 150-pound mass into. E = mc2, eh? Then, 69-kilo Carl became 61.2
million billion billion ergs. Enough energy to vaporize Manhattan if he hadn't collapsed into the urg.
And for what purpose? Zeke felt that there could be only one purpose for a complexly organized polydimensional being like an urg to snatch a scrawny, bald bartender. Carl was food.
Food to a metaspatial being was bound to be something like and quite unlike food to a human. Something like, in that nutrition would be extracted from the process. But what would an nth-dimensional being's nutritional needs be?
Zeke figured an urg needed more than energy, because what people defined as food energy was not photons themselves but the timebound process of releasing photons. And a hungry urg, with the resources to reach outside of its own time and implode a man to light, could certainly satisfy its energic needs locally.
Eventually, Zeke reasoned it was Carl's inertia, the sumful potency of his wee mass within the cosmic mass of the universe, that the urg wanted. Inertia, as light, was timefree and could be transported through ghost holes to the urg's hypermetric locus where no human mind could reason its digestion.
One grand consequence of this trance-found theory
was that Carl, who had inertia but was not as a mind any particular inertia, would survive. Zeke's hyperbolic mentations assured him that it was unlikely that Carl had been harmed at all. As Carl's inertia was extracted, the alien's equivalent inertia was excreted=and because the basic conservation laws of the universe insisted on equivalency, the alien's inertia was excreted as -another, identical Carl-identical but for his inertia.
Insights like that inspired Zeke's science fiction novel Shards of Time. And the writing of the book inspired more inspelling and more insights. The syndrome was devastating to Zeke's life in society, since he spent most of his time communing inwardly in states of mind that looked to others like coma.
But he didn't care. He was happy only when he was inspelling, which, now that he had arrived at the asylum, was almost continually.
Chad left the newspapers near Zeke's mesh door, and he was surprised when he came back to see the old man reading them.
'So you're Out,' Chad chirped. 'What galactic insights do you have for me today Zeke?'
'Hmm.' Zeke was leaning against his gate, reading what he could see of both papers simultaneously. 'Have you read the lead story?'
'The raygun killer?' Chad asked with a chuckle. 'Yeah, that is wild. Seven witnesses and a video clip. from the murder in the bank. Check out those photos.' Chad opened the folded newspapers and revealed the front-page photographs of a human-shaped glare, a security guard, and a man in a three-piece suit. In one of the shots, the bank manager was furry with tufts of light, his horrified face twisting with the force of a blow while the man-shaped glare pointed at him with a wand.
When Chad looked at Zeke for his response, the old man wasn't looking at the paper anymore. His ducal face was staring through the rose trellis and into some subtle reality. 'I think it's time I gave you a big winner,' he said in a voice iffy as fog. He was inspelling, touching his will to the torrent of power sluicing through his deepest cells- and the sparks flew in his mental eye, flaring off his willful image of a big purse at a racetrack, until the name of the track, the horse, the jockey, and the race sparkled their brief instants in his mind.
'Put it all on Blue Karma in the second race at Aqueduct tomorrow. Hidalgo will be riding. Got that?'
'Yeah, Zeke,' Chad answered in a quiet tone. 'But why'
re you giving me a big winner? I mean, I'm happy with a small purse, long as it's regular.'
'You guessed right, Chad,' Zeke responded, his slim, black eyes focusing again. 'Our game won't be regular anymore.
In fact, this is your last chance for a sure win. I'll be leaving here pretty soon.'
'Where're you going?' Chad asked anxiously.
'I don't know, yet. But I'll be gone before the week's out.'
'How can you say that?'
'You see that newspaper?' Zeke nudged his jaw toward the splayed photos of the bank murder. 'That man is on his way here to take me out. That, my friend, is Alfred Omega.'
'Your cartoon character?' Chad was incredulous. 'Man, you've amazed me too many times for me to disagree with you. But if you call this one right, you ain't human.'
'Oh, I'm human, all right. And so is he,' he answered, looking at the news photos of the raygun killer. 'But I don't think those three he put away were. I figure they must have been spider people or this wouldn't have happened.'
'Spider people?' Chad folded up the newspapers.
'You mean, like in your novel? Spider people from Timesend?'
'Uh-huh.'
'You really think everything you've written is true.'
'Not everything, Chad. Just Shards of Time. I didn't actually write it. It was written through me by the inspelling.
Somehow I'm connected with another world-I think inertially, but not in the physical sense that we usually mean when we use the word inertia.'
