nerve cables turned radiant as neon lights. It was like seeing
Berlin from the air after a big firebomb attack. It was like racing in a
car through forest fires. It was like lava pouring in a thousand winding
streams down a volcano cone. It was all this and more, but transferred
into some other dimension where all things are transparent or light has
an x-ray quality.

Through the plastic walls of lobes and convolutions they saw the
liana-networks of the nerve cables like bloodstreams radiant with purple
light. Shrouded in columns of whirling smoke they seemed alive. Like
tropical rains from a jungle roof, lignin dripped from the vaults, and
in falling, burst into flames. Cable connections were molten at the
branching points and then the luminous nets writhed, and severed ends
bent down spilling their fiery blood over the mushroom formations of
nerve cell groups.

The scenes raced much too fast; the glideway's continuous curvings,
steep ascents and power dives were like stunt flying through an ack-ack
barrage. No human eye could catch more than a fraction of the inferno's
majesty. Yet there were brief visions so breathtaking as to obliterate
all sense of danger and to become indelibly implanted upon the retina. A
main nerve stem burst asunder and the lignin poured from its cracked
plastic walls like crude oil from a burning gusher, rushing over acres
of electronic tubes, branding against banks of radioactive pyramidal
cells, swamping them as a wave. And at one point the glideways circled a
convolution which was a fiery lake dotted with thousands of
fractional-horsepower motors, still running, but showering sparks as
their insulation was consumed.

The air conditioning was working full blast; that probably saved their
lives because heat blasts alternated with spouts and currents of cold
air. Even so there were stretches where the glideway's rubber flooring
smouldered as it shot over nerve-bridges and through narrow tunnels
lined with nerve cables on all sides. From thousands of jets the carbon
dioxide of the automatic fire-fighting system hissed against the flames,
but it was drowned in the hollow roar of the conflagration shooting
through nerve paths where no gas could reach.

Endless it seemed, this mad wild flight through hell, but actually it
took only minutes before they reached the median section and went into
the steep descent between the hemispheres. The whirling reddish glow
receded overhead and white smoke