There was an intrusion.
Perfection is completed; by adding to it, it is destroyed. _Duality
struck like a thunderbolt. Oneness shattered._
For Glenn Tropile, it seemed as though his wife were screaming at him
to wake up. He tried to.
It was curiously difficult and painful. Timeless poignant sadness, five
years of sorrow over a lost love compressed into a microsecond. It was
always so, Tropile thought drowsily, awakening. It never lasts. What's
the use of worrying over what always happens....
Sudden shock and horror rocked him.
_This_ was no ordinary awakening--no ordinary thing at all--_nothing_
was as it ever had been before!
Tropile opened his mouth and screamed--or thought he did. But there was
only a hoarse, faint flutter in his eardrums.
It was a moment when sanity might have gone. But there was one curious,
mundane fact that saved him. He was holding something in his hands. He
found that he could look at it, and it was a switch. A molded switch,
mounted on a board, and he was holding one in each hand.
It was little to cling to, but it at least was real. If his hands could
be holding something, then there must be some reality somewhere.
Tropile closed his eyes and managed to open them again. Yes, there was
reality, too. He closed his eyes and light stopped. He opened them and
light returned.
Then perhaps he was not dead, as he had thought.
Carefully, stumbling--his mind his only usable tool--he tried to make
an estimate of his surroundings.
He could hardly believe what he found.
Item: he could scarcely move. Somehow he was bound by his feet and his
head. How? He couldn't tell.
Item: he was bent over and he couldn't straighten. Why? Again he
couldn't tell, but it was a fact. The great erecting muscles of his
back answered his command, but his body would not move.
Item: his eyes saw, but only in a small area.
He couldn't move his head, either. Still, he could see a few things.
The switch in his hand, his feet, a sort of display of lights on a
strangely circular board.
The lights flickered and changed their pattern.
* * * * *
Without thinking, he moved a switch. Why? Because it was _right_ to
move that switch. When a certain light flared green, a certain switch
had to be thrown. Why? Well, when a certain light flared green, a
certain switch--
He abandoned that problem. Never mind why; what the devil was going
_on_?
Glenn Tropile squinted about him like a mollusc peering out of its
shell. There was another fact, the oddness of the seeing. What makes it
look so queer, he asked himself.
He found an answer, but it required some time to take it in. He was
seeing in a strange perspective. One looks out of two eyes. Close one
eye and the world is flat. Open it again and there is a stereoscopic
double; the saliencies of the picture leap forward, the background
retreats.
So with the lights on the board--no, not exactly; but something _like_
that, he thought. It was as though--he squinted and strained--well, as
though he had never really _seen_ before. As though for all his life he
had had only one eye, and now he had strangely been given two.
His visual perception of the board was _total_. He could see all of it
at once. It had no "front" or "back." It was in the round. The natural
thinking of it was without orientation. He engulfed and comprehended
it as a unit. It had no secrets of shadow or silhouette.