ohnny felt as though he were bodiless,
a naked brain with eyes only hanging in nothingness.

Beneath, Earth rolled over with slow majesty, once every two hours. His
altered course was evident now, passing almost directly over the
geographic poles proper instead of paralleling the twilight zone where
night and day met. Sometimes he caught the faint glow of a big city on
the night side but the sight only stirred the worm of anxiety and he
closed his eyes.

Johnny was beginning to feel very comfortable. He supposed sleepily
that this was the way you were assumed to feel while freezing to death
in a snowbank, or so he'd heard. Air and heat too low perhaps. He should
really turn it up a notch.

On the other hand it was perhaps a solution to the problem of dying--a
gentle sleep while the stomach was still full enough from the last meal
to be reasonably comfortable and the throat yet unparched. Would it be
the act of an unbalanced mind or one of the most supreme sanity?

He dozed and dreamed a bit in fragments and snatches but it was not a
good sleep--there was no peace in it. At one time he seemed to be
standing outside the old fretworked boarding house he lived in--looking
in at the window of the "sitting room" where the ancient, wispy landlady
sat among her antimacassared chairs and the ridiculous tiny seashell
ashtrays that overflowed after two butts. He wanted desperately to get
in and sprawl in the huge bat-winged chair by the fire and stroke the
enormous old gray cat that would leap up and trample and paw his stomach
before settling down to grumble to itself asthmatically for hours.

It was cold and dark out here and he wanted to get in to the
friendliness and the warmth and the peaceful, familiar security, but he
didn't dare go around to the door because he knew if he did the vision
would vanish and he'd never find it again.

He scratched and beat at the window but his fingers made no sound, he
tried to shout but his cries were only strangled whispers and the old
lady sat and rocked and talked to the big gray cat and never turned her
head.

The fire seemed to be flaring up suddenly, it was filling the whole
room--a monstrous furnace; it shouldn't do that he knew, but the old
lady didn't seem to mind sitting there rocking amid the flames--and it
was so nice and warm. The fire kept growing and swelling though--soon it
burst through the window and engulfed him. Too hot. Too hot.

* * * *