The sum of all these sensations—the flickering lights, the monotonous drone—was a harmless prelude, a trifle, compared to what came next.

Anyone who has ever had his hand or arm fall asleep when the blood supply has been temporarily cut off knows how wooden it seems to the touch. Uncomfortable as it is, the condition is usually short-lived. The deadening numbness affects only a few fingers, or a hand, momentarily turning it into a lifeless appendage on an otherwise normal, sensate body. But Pirx was deprived of all sensation—save that of terror.

He was disintegrating not into different personalities but into a manifold terror. Of what he didn’t know. He was residing neither in reality (how could he without a body to perceive it?) nor in a dream (he was too conscious of where he was, of his own responses, to be dreaming). No, it was something else, not comparable to anything he’d ever experienced, not even to an alcoholic or narcotic stupor.

He remembered reading about it. He was experiencing what was known as “disorganization of the cortex caused by sensory deprivation of the brain.”

It sounded innocent enough. The real thing was something else again.

He felt scattered, diffused. Up, down, right, and left no longer meant anything to him. Where was the ceiling? He couldn’t remember. How could he? Without a body, without eyes, he had lost all sense of direction.

Wait a sec, he thought. Let’s get this straight. Space has three dimensions…

Words without meaning. He tried to summon up some sense of time, kept repeating the word “time”… It was like munching on a wad of paper. Time was a senseless glob. It was not he who was repeating the word, but someone else, some intruder who had wormed his way inside him.