Stop the car until the knot in his head unravels,

until he can see the greenery of the trees once more. It comes as a 2 AM tree green at 50 kilometers an hour under the blaring blue-white of the expressway streetlamps. Things would look more vibrant under sodium lamps he thinks, which leads him to a remembrance of the Palomar observatory and the argument they had with the town below over the changes in street lighting . .

His head knots again, this time stuck on the gears of the telescope as a white-haired scientist in a black, leather-backed chair connected to the apparatus reaches with crooked fingers to turn the gears. Telescope . . telescope . . it is a telescope, but it presses him to think of it as a microscope . . . As a white-haired scientist in a black, leather-backed chair connected to the apparatus reaches with crooked fingers to turn the gears of the microscope. He is strapped in his chair by ropey metallic restraints, permitting only the movement of his forearm to turn the gears and dials on the sides of . . . the microtelevision. Two probes spin rapidly above his head, ready to penetrate the unwary calvarium from oblique angles above the ears. He changes the dials, each channel projecting a different blast of color from the visible spectrum. Just what is he watching? The mechanism to swing around and view the man from behind seems to have frozen. Periodic bouts of static fuzz the clarity of his finger's actions. Long ago the probes passed through his skull. They still turn, drilling ever deeper, though never to emerge from the other side. To drill to China, one might never emerge, even if the probe were long enough.

A passage through the earth .. How would that affect the tides? How would that affect the coriolis? A windswept plain in turbulent array of spinning dust devils .. What if dust were not dust? Devils not devils?

The mechanism to spin demons from consciousness has frozen.

Long ago his head knotted from the rust on the gears.

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lynn@pharmdec.wustl.edu