99 Classic Science-Fiction Short Stories. Айзек Азимов

haze."

      "The infra-red and the ultra-violet!" he exclaimed exultantly. "Look at me! Do you see anything unusual?"

      I turned my eyes upon him. To my astonishment, all around his body and limbs was a faint penumbra of cloudy red—a sort of sanguinary phosphorescence that was most pronounced around his armpits, neck and face. When he spoke there would be a rush of this redness from his mouth, although his entire body exuded a sort of a visible warmth. I glanced at the dog. The same phenomenon was visible although in a much greater degree, for the mastiff stood in a haze of redness, so to speak, which poured like steam from his mouth and nostrils at each breath. Around the fireplace there was a cloud of red which streamed out into the room and eddied round it, and a mist of red held over and around the lamp.

      Migraine eyed me curiously.

      "You do see it, don't you?" he inquired.

      "See it? Of course I see it!" I cried, working my jaws to make sure they were really free at last. "But what is the confounded thing?"

      "The infra-red, I told you!" he replied.

      "By George!" I exclaimed. "I wish you'd let me out of this. I've had enough, I tell you! I don't like it!"

      Migraine shook his head.

      "Be still!" he growled.

      Just then Saki entered, wearing a huge pair of broad-rimmed spectacles and an embroidered black skullcap. Somehow, he didn't seem to have as much heat about him as the others, but his weazened face bore a peculiarly malevolent expression. He had a pair of silver calipers in his hand like the claws of a crab, and he grinned and chattered at Migraine like a crazy ape. I was beginning to feel frightened.

      "By the way," said Migraine, "in order that you may understand the experiment let me explain to you that you don't really see these colors now; you only think you see them." He made a swift pass at me. "Now you don't see them!"

      Sure enough, I didn't.

      "But," he continued, "the moment your senses are really intensified you'll really see, hear, smell. taste and feel the whole business. Saki, find the place!"

      I shuddered as the Jap came toward me and felt along my skull with his fingers. Just over my left ear he stopped and began measuring with the calipers. Then he placed his forefinger on a certain point and nodded to Migraine. The doctor took a small round ball of glass from a drawer in the table, polished it upon his sleeve and then passed round and behind me.

      Suddenly, I saw a blinding flash of light and coincidently felt a sharp and rather painful blow upon the side of my head. For an instant I was dazed. Through it all came a pounding almost deafening and a shrill roar at regular intervals. The fire and lamps blazed with light. I heard some one striking rhythmically upon a piece of hollow wood with a hammer. A disgusting stench filled my nostrils. My clothes weighed upon me like chain armor and scratched my body as if lined with bristles. Clouds of red poured from the fireplace and circled toward the ceiling, and the mastiff reeked with it. I felt sick and sensitive, as if I had just had a fever. I tried to collect myself. Migraine and the Jap had disappeared. Only the dog remained, rigidly glaring at me—a sort of red devil of a dog. I looked at my hands and found that they were surrounded by the same red haze. I tried to screen my eyes from the light with my hand. To my astonishment, I could see the bones through the flesh, glowing white and distinct. I glanced quickly again at the dog; I saw his skeleton. It was true, then! I could see even as Migraine had prophesied—as with the X-ray.

      The pounding in my ears continued, and it suddenly came to me that it was the beating of my heart; that the whistling roar was my breath; the striking with the hammer the ticking of the clock. But the light of the lamp beating down upon my eyes blinded and pained me, and the smell of the mastiff was odious. I staggered to my feet and felt for the door. The weight of my clothes caused the sweat to pour from my body; the rumbling in my ears was indescribably confusing, like the crash of heavy drays upon cobbled streets. Panting, my brain awhirl, I fumbled my way dizzily down the dusty stairs—I remember the dust on the banisters felt like the clinkers of burned-out range coal—and scuttled out into the soft, warm night.

      Did I say night? I clung to the brownstone balustrade, trying to adjust myself to the scene about me. It was quite bright, with a soft light as of early morning, and the stars blazed in a burning roof across the sky. like a ceiling studded with a myriad electric lights. The heavens were a seething mass of constellations in which the moon rode like a huge, slightly-dimmed sun. An unearthly uproar filled the air—a bellowing and shrieking as of a thousand contending monsters. a reverberating roar as of oncoming trains. the piercing whistles of factories, a pandemonium of hideous sound. I pressed my hands to my ears and felt them huge and callous like fists of mail or the horned hoofs of a beast. An indescribably-strange combination of odors pierced my nostrils. The stench of offal, the harsh reek of tobacco, wild and delirious perfumes mingled with the smell of smoke and of cooking, half suffocated and sickened me. But what horrifified me beyond measure was the fact that the air was filled with great clouds of variously-colored swarms of motes and insects, that settled here and there like mist, only to swirl away in streams and currents like dust storms sweeping across a desert. They poured down upon me like sand. striking against my face and eyeballs; I breathed them in and felt them in my nose and lungs. And all around me I saw red—red eddying from doors and windows, rising like smoke from the pavement and gathering in clouds around the manholes in the street. I saw a policeman slowly pacing along the opposite sidewalk, enveloped in a blur of red and peering at me through the slowly-descending blanket of motes. I felt that I must inevitably choke, but I continued to breathe with surprising ease. A terrible fear came upon me that I was going mad or that I was overborne by some rapid form of death and that my dissolution was taking place. To this horror was added a dread that Migraine might find and play some other dreadful trick upon me. I started stealthily to run and found that I could do so in spite of the apparent weight of my clothes.

      Presently I reached the avenue that bounds Central Park upon the west. The theaters were just out and the street was filled with motors and carriages wheeling northward. The din here was beyond words, like the roar of an iron foundry. I paused, still holding my hands to my ears. And now I noticed a curious thing. The wheels of the automobiles seemed hardly to be moving, and yet the vehicles passed with all their usual velocity. I could see each separate spoke go slowly round and round. The legs of fast-galloping horses moved with similar deliberation and the pedestrians seemed only sauntering, although their attitudes betokened haste and energy. As I stood for a moment wondering what this could mean I became conscious of a continuous rattling, like that of a million castanets, which rose and fell in an overwhelming volume of sound. It came from the park. Could it be the rustling of the leaves? The demon wail of an automobile horn drove thought from my mind, piercing my head with an agony of pain. The lights, also, along the park wall burned with so fierce a glare that I had to close my eyes. I longed for darkness, for quiet; I would have given my immortal soul for only five minutes of entire peace—for an instant's cessation of this overwhelming din. I staggered across the street, shielding my eyes as best I could from the electric lights, and sheltered myself in the shadow of the trees. I had always rather fancied the idea that many apparently inanimate objects possessed life, and now, as I leaned against an elm by the park wall and felt its tremors, the giant stretching of its huge arms and the metallic clash of its foliage, I knew it to be endowed with superhuman power. There was something overwhelmingly terrifying in the constant groaning that went on inside the trunk and the vibrating crashes among its branches. I crept back to the street again. Oh, for an instant's peace in a world of diabolic noise and overpowering confusion! I knew that I was acting like a maniac, and every instant expected to find myself in the custody of some minion of the law, yet the mere thought of being touched by a human hand in my supersensitive condition was enough to fill me with horror.

      Across the way a motor slowly approached and stopped in front of a handsome private house. Even at the distance of a hundred yards the fumes of its gases sickened me. Yet the hurlyburly of the city night was such that my one idea was escape—escape from the uproar about me, the blaze of the light, the constant sifting upon me of the particles that filled the air, the stenches that almost dazed me, so overpowering were they. A man jumped down from the driver's seat and, leaving the machine still throbbing at the curb, darted into the house. An instant resolve came to me—here was my