Ice Tubing Quotes

A lot of the nonsense was the innocent result of playfulness on the part of the founding fathers of the nation of Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout. The founders were aristocrats, and they wished to show off their useless eduction, which consisted of the study of hocus-pocus from ancient times. They were bum poets as well. But some of the nonsense was evil, since it concealed great crime. For example, teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy: 1492 The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them. Here was another piece of nonsense which children were taught: that the sea pirates eventually created a government which became a beacon of freedom of human beings everywhere else. There were pictures and statues of this supposed imaginary beacon for children to see. It was sort of ice-cream cone on fire. It looked like this: [image] Actually, the sea pirates who had the most to do with the creation of the new government owned human slaves. They used human beings for machinery, and, even after slavery was eliminated, because it was so embarrassing, they and their descendants continued to think of ordinary human beings as machines. The sea pirates were white. The people who were already on the continent when the pirates arrived were copper-colored. When slavery was introduced onto the continent, the slaves were black. Color was everything. Here is how the pirates were able to take whatever they wanted from anybody else: they had the best boats in the world, and they were meaner than anybody else, and they had gunpowder, which is a mixture of potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulphur. They touched the seemingly listless powder with fire, and it turned violently into gas. This gas blew projectiles out of metal tubes at terrific velocities. The projectiles cut through meat and bone very easily; so the pirates could wreck the wiring or the bellows or the plumbing of a stubborn human being, even when he was far, far away. The chief weapon of the sea pirates, however, was their capacity to astonish. Nobody else could believe, until it was much too late, how heartless and greedy they were.

I’m going that way too. I live in Crouch End. Do you want to share a black cab?’ Black cabs were an extravagance that Neve couldn’t afford, not this far away from payday, but that wasn’t the reason why she declined. ‘No, thank you. I’m perfectly all right with catching the tube.’ ‘OK, tube it is,’ Max agreed, because he was quite obviously emotionally tone deaf and couldn’t sense the huge ‘kindly bugger off’ vibes that Neve was sure she was emitting. ‘You’re still mad at me, aren’t you?’ ‘You apologised, why would I still be mad at you?’ ‘One day we’ll laugh about this. When little Tommy asks how we met, I’ll say, “Well, son, I threw an ice cube at your mother, then slapped her arse, and we’ve been inseparable ever since.

I dreamed about the crow again last night. The one with three eyes. He flew into my bedchamber and told me to come with him, so I did. We went down to the crypts. Father was there, and we talked. He was sad.” “And why was that?” Luwin peered through his tube. “It was something to do about Jon, I think.” The dream had been deeply disturbing, more so than any of the other crow dreams.

Lola’s was not exactly a bar. It was a small beer-and-soda joint. There was a Coca-Cola box full of beer and soda and ice at the left of the door as you came in. A counter with tube-metal stools covered in yellow glazed leather ran down one side of the room as far as the jukebox. Tables were lined along the wall opposite the counter. The stools had long since lost the rubber caps for the legs and made horrible screeching noises when the maid pushed them around to sweep. There was a kitchen in back, where a slovenly cook fried everything in rancid fat. There was neither past nor future in Lola’s. The place was a waiting room, where certain people checked in at certain times.

— If love wants you; if you’ve been melted down to stars, you will love with lungs and gills, with warm blood and cold. With feathers and scales. Under the hot gloom of the forest canopy you’ll want to breathe with the spiral calls of birds, while your lashing tail still gropes for the waes. You’ll try to haul your weight from simple sea to gravity of land. Caught by the tide, in the snail-slip of your own path, for moments suffocating in both water and air. If love wants you, suddently your past is obsolete science. Old maps, disproved theories, a diorama. The moment our bodies are set to spring open. The immanence that reassembles matter passes through us then disperses into time and place: the spasm of fur stroked upright; shocked electrons. The mother who hears her child crying upstairs and suddenly feels her dress wet with milk. Among black branches, oyster-coloured fog tongues every corner of loneliness we never knew before we were loved there, the places left fallow when we’re born, waiting for experience to find its way into us. The night crossing, on deck in the dark car. On the beach wehre night reshaped your face. In the lava fields, carbon turned to carpet, moss like velvet spread over splintered forms. The instant spray freezes in air above the falls, a gasp of ice. We rise, hearing our names called home through salmon-blue dusk, the royal moon an escutcheon on the shield of sky. The current that passes through us, radio waves, electric lick. The billions of photons that pass through film emulsion every second, the single submicroscopic crystal struck that becomes the phograph. We look and suddenly the world looks back. A jagged tube of ions pins us to the sky. — But if, like starlings, we continue to navigate by the rear-view mirror of the moon; if we continue to reach both for salt and for the sweet white nibs of grass growing closest to earth; if, in the autumn bog red with sedge we’re also driving through the canyon at night, all around us the hidden glow of limestone erased by darkness; if still we sish we’d waited for morning, we will know ourselves nowhere. Not in the mirrors of waves or in the corrading stream, not in the wavering glass of an apartment building, not in the looming light of night lobbies or on the rainy deck. Not in the autumn kitchen or in the motel where we watched meteors from our bed while your slow film, the shutter open, turned stars to rain. We will become indigestible. Afraid of choking on fur and armour, animals will refuse the divided longings in our foreing blue flesh. — In your hands, all you’ve lost, all you’ve touched. In the angle of your head, every vow and broken vow. In your skin, every time you were disregarded, every time you were received. Sundered, drowsed. A seeded field, mossy cleft, tidal pool, milky stem. The branch that’s released when the bird lifts or lands. In a summer kitchen. On a white winter morning, sunlight across the bed.

The years were never an element, because my parents didn’t age, they simply sickened. My father was mean and cocky like Cagney all the way to the dump. Flat on his back, his bones poking this way and that like the corpses in the camps, he still had a fiery eye, as though, but for those two coals, the grate held ash. There’s no easy way out of this life, and I do not look forward to the day they put those tubes up my nose, and a catheter shows my pee the way out like some well-trained servant. I saw how my father’s body broke his spirit like a match; and I saw how my mother’s broken spirit took her body under the way a ship stinks after being disemboweled by an errant bag of ice.

The four men still chopped and hacked into the cold-brittled ice. A sloping, step-nicked tube grew down into the ice, the solid blue of the stuff began to scintillate with blinding, intense azures, pure rays of sapphire, the chips became huge wealths of discarded emeralds, sapphires and rubies. The sun’s slanting rays were piercing down, heatless, through nearly twenty feet of crystalline ice. Still the magnetic needle pointed straight downward.

Ivy passed by the same location a few moments later, slowed for a moment, and glanced down the length of the tube. It was possible to see straight down its length, across the spherical Pod, and through its windows to the Earth. Normally this meant the blue light of the oceans and the white light of clouds and ice caps. Sometimes, a lot of green when they were passing over well-watered parts of the world, or some yellow when over the Sahara. Right now the light was orange because the Earth was on fire. People

I don’t care,” she says curtly. “I don’t know what you’re trying to do here, but we want no part of it. Actually, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.” She probably doesn’t have the right to kick me out. I’m not causing a public disturbance; I haven’t done anything illegal. All I did was make casual conversation with a waiter. I consider standing my ground, enforcing my rights as a customer, insisting that they call the police if they want to remove me. But I’d rather not go viral for yet another reason. I can imagine the YouTube title: “Chinatown Karen Insists She’s Not ICE.

Everything felt wrong. She needed to go home, to her dad’s small lab in the basement, to curl up on one of the tables like she used to. It had been a long time since she’d last brought a quilt down and made a nest for herself among the books, tubes, and wires—a million years or however long it took light to travel. She’d rest her cheek on the table and listen to her dad talk about space. She’d been little when he’d told her about the beginning of the universe and how the solar system was born. How the sun was like an island, and the planets were ships sailing around it. He’d said, “Pluto is our far star sailor,” the way other people said Once upon a time. His words opened a door inside her. She wished she’d brought her NASA book, with six full pages on the “Thirty-Five New Guys,” the Astronaut Class of 1978, NASA’s first new group of astronauts since 1969. On Sally Ride, on Challenger—which she realized was gone now—on Judy Resnik, mission specialist, the second American woman in space. Who Nedda wanted to be. Who was gone now too. They were gas and carbon—and what else? They had to be something else. She wanted her stupid little-kid pony, but it was in the classroom. She wanted to go fishing with Denny, even if it was too cold. She wanted to smell her mother’s perfume until she was sick from it. She wanted to eat all the icing roses off that stupid cake until Betheen yelled.

Doctor controlled his anger. “Tom,” he said, “Tom, boy. Pull yourself together. Go back and lay cold cloths—cold as you can get them. I don’t suppose you have any ice. Well, keep changing the cloths. I’ll be out as fast as I can. Do you hear me? Tom, do you hear me?” He hung the receiver up and dressed. In angry weariness he opened the wall cabinet and collected scalpels and clamps, sponges and tubes of sutures, to put in his bag. He shook his gasoline pressure lantern to make sure it was full and arranged ether can and mask beside it on his bureau. His wife in boudoir cap and nightgown looked in. Dr. Tilson said, “I’m walking over to the garage. Call Will Hamilton. Tell him I want him to drive me to his father’s place. If he argues tell him his sister is—dying.

Josh, you saw him," Tally says, "What did he look like? Did he look nice?" "He looked like a person," Josh grunts. "Don't be a spoilsport," Tally says, and Caid hears her smack Josh on the arm. "Shortish, blondish, thinish," Josh says. "Thank you, Josh," Caid says, "Your way with words astounds me yet again." "Well, whatever," Tally says. "What did you guys talk about? You said he's nice?" "We talked about a lot of things. And yeah, he's—I mean, we traded numbers, so hopefully he'll call." "I hope so, too," Tally says. "I'm glad you have somebody to hang out with now." "Because I was such horrible company?" Josh says, voice thick and deep like he's got a mouthful of ice cream. "I wouldn't say horrible," Caid says. "Unbearable, maybe. Like one of those YouTube videos that never loads." And with that, he shoots a shit-eating grin in Josh's direction, and shovels a spoonful of ice cream into his mouth.

What did you just call him?” “Rufus is a stupid name,” she says with a shrug. I choke on air. “Excuse me?” “You heard me. What even is a Rufus anyway?” “A name,” I answer. “A manly name for a manly dog.” “He looks like vanilla ice cream with chocolate sprinkles. It had to be changed.” “You can’t just change a dog’s name. He’s eight months old. He likes his name. He knows it.” “Does he?” she asks, arching a brow. Jesus, she looks so much like her mother right now it’s almost scary. “Rufus.” I whistle. “Come here boy.” He lets out a whimper, but stays rooted in place, his eyes trained on the girl with the snacks. “Sprinkles, come.” Priss points to the floor. That traitor rises to all fours, looking more regal than Queen Elizabeth herself as he marches to her side. Man’s best friend, my ass. “Good boy,” she says, stuffing another treat into his mouth. “Sprinkles, sit.” He sits. “Shake,” she says, holding out her hand for his paw. “You taught him all of that in less than two hours?” “Uh-huh. Wasn’t hard. I watched some dog training videos.” “Let me guess, YouTube?” She grins. “Well, it worked.” “I see that.” “So…Sprinkles?” She steeples her hands in front of her face, poking out her lip for added drama. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the story of how my beast of a dog became a pansy.

You look pretty, Mommy.” “Thank you, sweetheart,” I say, gazing at her in the reflection of the mirror as she watches me, her expression curious. I pat the counter beside the sink, inviting her to join me, and she climbs up to sit on it as I grab a tube of lip-gloss, strawberry flavored. She puckers up, and I put some on her, smiling as I do it. “You know I love you, right, pretty girl? I love you more than everything. More than the trees and the birds and the sky. More than even pepperoni pizza and Harlequin novels.” “What’s a Harley-Quinn novel?” “Nothing you’ll need to know about for a long, long time,” I say, putting the lip-gloss away. “Just know that I don’t love them nearly as much as I love you.” She kicks her feet, grinning. “I love you, too.” “More than chocolate ice cream and Saturday mornings?” “Uh-huh,” she says. “More than colors and money!” “No way.” “And the Yoo-Hoo drinks and Happy Meal toys.” “Whoa.” “And even more than Breezeo!” Eyes wide, I look at her. That’s some serious commitment coming from my superhero-loving girl. “You know, you can love us the same.” “Nuh-uh,” she says, shaking her head. “You’re my mommy, so I love you more.” I press my pointer finger to the tip of her nose. “Well, I sure appreciate it, but remember that it’s okay if you ever do.

I love a mysterious underground and have exploited this in many of my books: the ice tunnels of Greenland, the volcanic tubes of Iceland, the mysterious passageways beneath an ancient African hillside or a Buddhist monastery in central China. And of course, London's famous tube system, setting for my book LONDON UNDERGROUND. It's a funny sort of fixation, especially given my mother's claustrophobia, which I saw her deal with on many occasions. We once lined up to take a tour into the Lascaux Caverns in France to see the ancient cave paintings. My mother didn't make it past the first quirky turn into the depths, and she sent me on by myself. Given her interest in history and archaeology, which she used as the basis for a series of mysteries she published and which inspired my own writing, it always surprised me she still loved to write about places she could never visit.

He was silent a moment; then he said, "I want a drink of water." She almost laughed aloud, because it was such a mundane request that could have been made of anyone, but then she saw the tension in his jaw and lips and realized that, again, he was checking out his condition, and he wanted her with him. She turned to the small Styrofoam pitcher that was kept full of crushed ice, which she used to keep his lips moist. The ice had melted enough that she was able to pour the glass half full of water. She stuck a straw into it and held it to his lips. Gingerly he sucked the liquid into his mouth and held it for a moment, as if letting it soak into his membranes. Then, slowly, he swallowed, and after a minute he relaxed. "Thank God," he muttered hoarsely. "My throat still feel swollen. I wasn't sure I could swallow, and I sure as hell didn't want that damned tube back." Behind Jay, Frank turned a smothered laugh into a cough. "Anything else?" she asked. "Yes. Kiss me.

But, you know what, babies? I’d have to pass, because Beau Starr is as fuckable as a bowl of sugar-free vanilla ice cream in the looks department, and the preachy ‘use protection, kids’ shtick is so played out. The day I try to ride someone who thinks propagating the belief that all us gays are disease spreaders who need to be reminded daily to wrap up our dangerous dicks is the day I delete my YouTube channel.” I

No sooner was she twenty-three years old than she was twenty-eight; no sooner twenty-eight than thirty-one; time is speeding past her while she examines her existence with a cold, deadly gaze that takes aim at the different areas of her life, one by one-the damp studio crawling with roaches, mold growing in the grout between tiles; the bank loan swallowing all her spare cash; close, intense friendships marginalized by newborn babies, polarized by screaming sweetness that leaves her cold; stress-soaked days and canceled girls’ nights out, but, legs perfectly waxed, ending up jabbering in dreary wine bars with a bevy or available women, shrieking with forced laughter, and always joining in, out of cowardice, opportunism; occasional sexual adventures on crappy mattresses, or against greasy, sooty garage doors, with guys who are clumsy, rushed, stingy, unloving; an excess of alcohol to make all this shine; and the only encounter that makes her heart beat faster is with a guy who pushes back a strand of her hair to light her cigarette, his fingers brushing her temple and the lobe of her ear, who has mastered the art of the sudden appearance, whenever, wherever, his movements impossible to predict, as if he spent his life hiding behind a post, coming out to surprise her in the golden light of a late afternoon, calling her at night in a nearby cafe, walking toward her one morning from a street corner, and always stealing away just as suddenly when it’s over, like a magician, before returning … That deadly gaze strips away everything, even her face, even her body, no matter how well she takes care of it-fitness magazines, tubes of slimming cream, and one hour of floor barre in a freezing hall in Docks Vauban. She is alone and disappointed, in a sate of disgrace, stamping her feet as her teeth chatter and disillusionment invades her territories and her hinterland, darkening faces, ruining gestures, diverting intentions; it swells, this disillusionment, it multiplies, polluting the rivers and forests inside her, contaminating the deserts, infecting the groundwater, tearing the petals from flowers and dulling the luster in animals’ fur; it stains the ice floe beyond the polar circle and soils the Greek dawn, it smears the most beautiful poems with mournful misfortune, it destroys the planet and all its inhabitants from the Big Bang to the rockets of the future, and fucks up the whole world- this hollow, disenchanted world.

Block said. “I mean, he’s a professor emeritus. He’s never watched a football game in my conscious memory. The whole picture—it wasn’t the guy I thought I knew.” But the conversation proved critical, because after surgery he developed bleeding in the spinal cord. The surgeons told her that in order to save his life they would need to go back in. But the bleeding had already made him nearly quadriplegic, and he would remain severely disabled for many months and likely forever. What did she want to do? “I had three minutes to make this decision, and I realized, he had already made the decision.” She asked the surgeons whether, if her father survived, he would still be able to eat chocolate ice cream and watch football on TV. Yes, they said. She gave the okay to take him back to the operating room. “If I had not had that conversation with him,” she told me, “my instinct would have been to let him go at that moment because it just seemed so awful. And I would have beaten myself up. Did I let him go too soon?” Or she might have gone ahead and sent him to surgery, only to find—as occurred—that he was faced with a year of “very horrible rehab” and disability. “I would have felt so guilty that I condemned him to that,” she said. “But there was no decision for me to make.” He had decided. During the next two years, he regained the ability to walk short distances. He required caregivers to bathe and dress him. He had difficulty swallowing and eating. But his mind was intact and he had partial use of his hands—enough to write two books and more than a dozen scientific articles. He lived for ten years after the operation. Eventually, however, his difficulties with swallowing advanced to the point where he could not eat without aspirating food particles, and he cycled between hospital and rehabilitation facilities with the pneumonias that resulted. He didn’t want a feeding tube. And it became evident that the battle for the dwindling chance of a miraculous recovery was going to leave him unable ever to go home again. So, just a few months before I’d spoken with Block, her father decided to stop the battle and go home. “We started him on hospice care,” Block said. “We treated his choking and kept him comfortable. Eventually, he stopped eating and drinking. He died about five days later.

As I pondered street parking on roads covered with snow drifts, and getting four kids into rental ice skates, and figuring out what we would do with our stuff, the whole thing felt like a lot of trouble. Why not just pour myself a glass of wine and read a magazine? I follow a great many minimalist-focused Instagram accounts that would recommend such an evening as restorative self-care. My house was nice and warm. Everyone would have been content to watch YouTube all evening. But I knew that was my present, experiencing self talking. The “self,” as we think of the

As soon as we emerge from the tube and walk through the limestone archway on Borough High Street, we are bombarded by purveyors of everything from fresh vegetables and buttery pastries to goat's milk ice cream and soft, eggy strands of pasta. Hugh lets me wander up and down the aisles, and I stop to watch one vendor stir a three-foot-wide paella pan, offering up piping hot bowls of tender prawns and rice to a throng of hungry customers.

I did my best to stay away from Pierce, even if ignoring him completely was impossible. It wasn't enough that he was popular at school and the local ice arenas, but a few news outlets had grabbed a hold of his YouTube channel, mostly his greatest hockey hits and the video equivalent of selfies, and turned him into a web celeb.

of the reward circuitry leads to a localized rebellion. If DeltaFosB is the gas pedal for bingeing, the molecule CREB functions as the brakes. CREB dampens our pleasure response.[134] It inhibits dopamine. CREB is trying to take the joy out of bingeing so that you give it a rest. Oddly enough, high levels of dopamine stimulate the production of both CREB and DeltaFosB. Our bodies are equipped with countless feedback mechanisms to keep us alive and functioning well. It makes perfect sense for mammals also to have evolved a braking system for bingeing on food or sex. There comes a time to move on and take care of the kids or maybe hunt and gather. But the glitch in the CREB/DeltaFosB balancing act is that it evolved long before humans were exposed to powerful reinforcers such as whiskey, cocaine, ice cream, or porn tube sites. All have the potential to override evolved satiation mechanisms, including CREB’s brakes. Put simply, CREB doesn’t stand much chance in the era of supernormal stimuli and widely available prescription and illicit drugs. What’s CREB to do in face of a Big Mac, fries and milkshake dinner, followed by 3-hour Mountain Dew-fuelled Call of Duty session, and two hours of surfing PornHub while smoking a joint? What array of enticements did a 19-year old hunter-gatherer encounter to goose his dopamine? Perhaps a second helping of overcooked rabbit meat or watching the four girls he’d known since birth tan hides.

These devices, the ancestors of modern refrigerators, used steam power to pump liquid ether through a coil of tubes that enclosed a chamber containing water. This turned into ice as the ether in the coil evaporated.

I take it you've seen the video on YouTube." "About ten times now," John said, grinning. "I don't think it's ever going to get old." "I found the cinematography visually stunning as well as suspenseful," Gil said with a straight face. "The way you held the perp down while you discussed the menu with Alec. Priceless.

I remember once in the Arctic, when we were attempting to cross the frozen North Atlantic in a small, open rigid inflatable boat (RIB), that I heard that voice very clearly. We had been caught out in a monster, sub-zero, gale-force 8 storm, 400 miles off the coast of Greenland - and we were struggling. We were reduced to a crawl as we battled up and down huge, freezing waves and crashing white water. It felt like only a matter of time before we would be capsized to our deaths in the black and icy sea during this longest of nights. Each time one of us handed over the control of the little boat to another crew member to do their shift at the wheel, we had an especially frightening few minutes as the new helmsman fought to become accustomed to the pitch and character of those freak waves. If ever we were going to be capsized, it was during these change-over times. We got lucky once. We were all thrown off our seats after the RIB had been tossed up and landed on the side of her tubes, only to topple back, by luck, the right way up. We then got lucky a second time in a similar incident. Instinct told me we wouldn’t get so lucky a third time. ‘No more mistakes. Helm this yourself,’ I felt the voice saying to me. As I prepared to hand over to Mick, my old buddy, something deep inside me kept repeating, ‘Just keep helming for a bit longer - see this team through the storm yourself.’ But we had a rota and I also knew we should stick to it. That was the rule. Yet the voice persisted. Eventually I shouted over the wind and spray to Mick that I was going to keep helming. ‘Trust me,’ I told him. Mick then helped me all through that night, pouring Red Bull down my throat as we got thrown left and right, fighting to cling on to the wheel and our seats. By dawn, the seas were easing and by the next evening we could see the distant coast of Iceland ahead. Finally. Afterwards, two of the crew said to me quietly that they had been so terrified to helm that they were praying someone else would do it. I had been exhausted, and logic had said to hand over, but instinct had told me I should keep steering. Deep down I knew that I had been beginning to master how to control the small boat in the chaos of the waves and ice - and that voice told me we might not get a third lucky escape. It was the right call - not an easy one, but a right one. Instinct doesn’t always tell us to choose the easier path, but it will guide you towards the right one.

Kit feels a kink in his heart. His girl is in the shower, soaping her every inch of skin. He cannot see the maze of tubes and cavities inside her body. He cannot know what is pumping right and what is pumping wrong, how each of those slippery organs is tucked against its neighbor and whether something bad is truly blooming there. Whether, even if her body is perfect, a truck will lose its brakes, tumble off the road where Summer is walking. There are storms beginning to twist in the warm oceans to the south, and maybe they will whip this way, tearing the houses like paper. The ferry could sink beneath them; poisoned gases could leak into the air at any time. The melted ice caps are washing toward them. They’re both dying- everyone is. The schedule of death is not made public. Love’s job is to make a safe place. Not to deny that the spiny forest exists, but to live hidden inside it, tunneled into the soft undergrass

Apparently, it was all Ithan needed to see by as he launched himself over the rail and aimed for the male’s iced-over tub. He landed gracefully, balancing his feet on either side. A pound of his fist had the ice cracking. The male was convulsing, no doubt drowning without a functioning respirator. Ithan hauled him up, ripping the mask from his face. A long feeding tube followed. The male gagged and spasmed, but Ithan propped him over the rim, lest he slide back under. Leaping with that athletic grace, Ithan reached the tub in the middle, freeing the mystic within. Then on to the female in the third. The Astronomer was shrieking, but it seemed Ithan barely heard the words. The three mystics shook, soft cries trembling from their blue mouths. Bryce shook with them, and Tharion put a hand on her back. Something groaned below, and the lights sputtered back on. Metal whined. The floor began to rise, pulling toward the tubs again. The sun fixture descended from the ceiling as the Astronomer hobbled down the walkway, cursing. “You had no right to pull them out, no right—” “They would have drowned!” Bryce launched into motion, storming after the male. Tharion stalked a step behind her. The female stirred as the slate floor locked into place around the tubs. On reed-thin arms, she raised up her chest, blinking blearily at Ithan, then the room. “Back,” the mystic wheezed, her voice broken and raspy. Unused for years. Her dark eyes filled with pleading. “Send me back.” “The Prince of the Ravine was about to rip apart your friend’s soul,” Ithan said, kneeling before her. “Send me back!” she screamed, the words barely more than a hoarse screech. “Back!” Not to Hel, Bryce knew—not to the Prince of the Ravine. But into the watery, weightless existence. Ithan got to his feet, inching away.

Now he saw that Hell was the one truth and pain the one fact which nullified all others. Sufficient health was like thin ice on an infinite sea of pain. Love, work, art, science and law were dangerous games played on the ice; all homes and cities were built on it. The ice was frail. A tiny shrinkage of the bronchial tubes could put him under it and a single split atom could sink a city. All religions existed to justify Hell and all clergymen were ministers of it. How could they walk about with such bland social faces pretending to belong to the surface of life?