Titans of Chaos

Then I brushed up against a monad that did not belong to Quentin. The gas cloud had a singledriving purpose behind it, one set of molecular instructions that had been repeated by atime-stutter technique onto all the separate cells of Quentin's lungs. The poisonous gas wascarbon monoxide, created directly out of the carbon dioxide waste of his exhalations, with anunhealthy seasoning of ozone thrown in for good measure.

I tried to orient my manipulators so as to consider all the monads of the traitor-monoxide as onemonad, and negate its purpose. But I did not know what I was doing. Victor's paradigm was onethat had been used here, the matter-control of the cyclopes. Had I more time, I could have figuredit out.

So I managed to scoop some of the monoxide out of the lungs merely by tilting Quentin in thefourth dimension and bending gravity to make it pour out. When I folded Quentin back into thethree-dimensional space, I left a bubble in the lung area, so that the "distance" between any pointinside his lungs and the actual walls in his lungs was greatly increased. Any given particle of theswallowed gas cloud now had farther to go to reach the lung wall; the effect was to decrease thedensity of the monoxide.

It decreased the distance to the oxygen, too. Quentin still could not breathe.

This will sound gross. I put my four-dimensional face inside his three-dimensional lungs andbreathed out. I was giving him mouth-to-mouth. Sort of. The wall tissue of the lungs was aroundme to each side, as if I had put my head in a wet bag, and they were red and blistered from thechemical reactions Trismegistus had created here. Part of the damage had been to turn the cellmatter in the lungs into poison.

I unfolded my lungs into the fourth dimension, so that the volume they contained was muchgreater than any three-dimensional lung. Out I blew, a little Headmaster Boggin of my very own.

It did not seem gross to me, when I saw the utility light up through Quentin's damaged lung.

I reached out with my hand and massaged his heart to make it start again. I felt the unbeatingheart jump to life. No, it was not gross at all.

When his heart moved, I saw, outside, that the walking stick Quentin had been carrying nowjumped up from where it lay on the deck and struck Quentin.