At the sight of the familiar questing tendril, a panic eighteen years old engulfed and nauseated him.
It’s going to hurt inside, his mind wept, twisting and turning and dodging in his brain. The thoughts are going to be rubbed against each other so that the skin comes off them and they hurt and hurt and hurt…
The tendril came to a stop before his face and the tip curved interrogatively. Mardin squirmed back against the metal chair back.
I wont! This time I don’t have to! You can’t make me—this time you re our prisoner—you can’t make me—you can’t make me—
“Mardin!” Billingsley’s voice bellowed in his headphones. “Put the damn thing on and let’s get going! Move, man, move!”
And almost before he knew he had done it, as automatically as he had learned to go rigid at the sound of attenshun! Mardin’s hand reached out for the tendril and placed the tip of it against the old scar on his forehead.
There was that anciently familiar sensation of inmost rapport, of new-found completeness, of belonging to a higher order of being. There were the strange double memories; a river of green fire arching off a jet-black trembling cliff hundreds of miles high, somehow blending in with the feel of delighted shock as Dave Weiner’s baseball hit the catcher’s mitt you’d gotten two hours ago for a birthday present; a picture of a very lovely and very intent young female physicist explaining to you just how somebody named Albert Fermi Vannevar derived E=mc2, getting all confused with the time to begin the many-scented dance to the surface because of the myriad of wonderful soft spots you could feel calling to each other on your back.
But, Mardin realized with amazement in some recess of autonomy still left in his mind, this time there was a difference.