Shadowfires

off from data crucial to the production of the immortality serum.
    Evidently, after stumbling out of the bathroom, he had gone down
to the basement, had opened the safe, and had brought the file up
here for perusal. What had he been seeking? An explanation for what
was happening to him? A way to undo the changes that had occurred-
that were still occurring-in him?
    That was pointless. These monstrous developments had been
unanticipated. Nothing in the file would refer to the possibility of
runaway growth or point the way to salvation. He must have been
seized by delirium, for only in such a state would he have bothered
to pursue a magic cure in this pile of Xeroxes.
    He knelt in the scattered papers for a minute or two, preoccupied
by the strange though painless burning sensation that filled his
body, trying to understand its source and meaning. In some places-
along his spine, across the top of his head, at the base of his
throat, in his testicles-the heat was accompanied by an eerie tingle.
He almost felt as if a billion fire ants had made their home within
him and were moving by the millions through his veins and arteries
and through a maze of tunnels they had burrowed in his flesh and
bone.
    Finally he got to his feet, and a fierce anger rose in him for no
specific reason, and with no particular target. He kicked out
furiously, stirring up a briefly airborne, noisy cloud of papers.
    A frightening rage seethed under the surface of the mindswamp, and
he was just perceptive enough to realize that it was in some way
quite different from the previous rages to which he had succumbed.
This one was… even more primal, less focused, less of a human rage, more like the irrationally churning fury of an animal. He
felt as if some deeply buried racial memory were asserting itself,
something crawling up out of the genetic pit, up from ten million
years ago, up from the faraway time when men were only apes, or from
a time even farther removed than that, from an unthinkably ancient
age when men were as yet only amphibian creatures crawling painfully
onto a volcanic shore and breathing air for the first time. It was a
cold rage instead of hot like the ones before it, as cold-as the
heart of the Arctic, a billion years of coldness… reptilian. Yes,
that was the feel of it, an icy reptilian rage, and when he began to
grasp its nature, he recoiled from further consideration of it and
desperately hoped that he would be able to keep it under control.
    The mirror.
    He was certain that changes had taken place in him while he had
been unconscious on the living-room floor, and he knew he should go
into the bathroom and look at himself in the mirror. But suddenly he
was shaken anew by fear of what he was becoming, and he could not
find the courage to take even one step in that direction.
    Instead, he decided to employ the Braille approach by which he had
previously discovered the first alterations in his face. Feeling the
differences before seeing them would prepare him somewhat for the
shock of his appearance. Hesitantly he raised his hands to explore
his face but did not get that far because he saw that his hands were changing, and he was arrested by the sight of them.
    They were not radically different hands from what they had been,
but they were unquestionably not his hands anymore, not the hands he
had used all his life. The fingers were longer and thinner, perhaps a
whole inch longer, with fleshier pads at the tips. The nails were
different, too: thicker, harder, yellowish, more pointed than
ordinary fingernails. They were nascent claws, damned if they weren't, and if the metamorphosis continued, they would probably develop into even more pointed, hooked, and razor-sharp talons. His knuckles were changing, too-larger, bonier, almost like arthritic knuckles.
    He expected to find his hands stiff and less usable than they had
been, but to his surprise the altered knuckles worked easily,
fluidly, and proved superior to the knuckles out of which they had
grown. He worked his hands experimentally and discovered that he was
incredibly dexterous; his elongated fingers possessed a new
suppleness and startling flexibility.
    And he sensed that the changes were continuing unchecked, though
not fast enough for him to actually see the bones growing and the
flesh remaking itself. But by tomorrow his hands would surely be far
more radically changed than they were now.
    This was electrifyingly