Titans of Chaos

"Vanity? Hello...?"

All the bright, noisy cars moving from light to light along the street now slowed and halted. Radiomusic banging from the nearer cars squawked and stopped.

The pedestrians, wherever they were, beneath the neon signs at the bus stops, in the middle of thecrosswalk, on the sidewalks, fell, or slumped, or keeled over.

Blackness rushed across the cityscape as lights from the building across the way went out. Thestreetlamps turned dark. A thousand teeny tiny machine noises, radios, the hissing of the portablepopcorn popper of a late-night street vendor, the whirr of distant automatic doors opening andclosing, the hum from refrigerators, elevators, other motors... all muttered and fell into a deep,tomblike hush.

The clock on the bell tower of the bank across the street from my position emitted one last peal,and then stopped, its second hand frozen. The electronic sign turned all white as all the bulbs litup, and then went black.

I felt a pressure in the sleep centers of my brain, activity in my pons attempting to triggernarcolepsy, changes in my medulla oblongata trying to switch my brain-wave pattern fromalpha-beta consciousness to delta-wave dream state.

If my brain continued to obey the laws of nature, I would have to sleep, and immediately.

I jumped into another dimension.

I was through and "past" the stone surface of the building in front of me in a moment. I saw thecubicles and interior spaces of the building, the pipes beneath the street, the interstices betweenthe walls, all laid out like a flat blueprint. I saw the various textures of internal natures: greedybillboards, generous water pipes, frowning walls, ambitious electrical generators, patient powerlines.

At this point I was some nine hundred feet above the street, and about forty feet or so in the

"blue" direction of overspace, not so far away from the plane of Earth's home continuum that Icould not see it, albeit everything was now made soft and mysterious by a haze of blue, a Dopplershift created by the curving metric.

Through the blue haze, I could see other planes of other continua around me, to my left and right,up and down, before me, behind me, and blue and red of me. Only then did I notice what was oddabout this four-space. Unlike the street level, it was lit. It was much brighter here than theanalogous four-space "above" England. I was seeing farther than I ever had before.

I looked "above" and "behind" me for the source of the light.