Soft come the dragons

dropping to hers. And slowly, forever and for always, he turned to stone, crying: "From another perspective you might be love and not hatred."
    "Yes," she said, smiling.
    Waking, sweating, he knew the answer. It was just crazy enough to work. But he could not say anything. Marshall would see his effort as an attempt to gain power. It would, of necessity, be a secret project.
    He turned on the bed lamp, forced himself totally awake, and set to dismantling his dressing mirror.
     
    He was the last down the stairway at the dragon warning.
    "Did you hear?" Twain asked.
    "Hear what?"
    "Menchen died during the night."
    "Now there might be your only truth. Death."
    "What?"
    "It is indisputable, inevitable, and impossible of misinterpretation."
    He walked away from Twain and secreted himself in a, corner hoping to blend into oblivion. It was a corner near a stairwell. Roll was called, and all were found to be present. An hour into the warning, he rose, meandered through a clot of men to the edge of the stairs. Suddenly, like a tired apparition, he was gone.
    At the head of the stairs, he unsealed the door, stepped into the corridor, closed the porfal behind. Carefully, he removed the delicate, makeshift spectacles from his pocket. They were diamond-like, circus-prop spectacles of glittering looking glass and golden wire. They worked roughly like a periscope so that the wearer saw a mirror reflection of what was in front of him.
    Sucking in his breath, he swung open the outside door and stepped onto the black soil.
    The humming of giant wings sung above him.
    Slowly, he turned his head to the skies.
    The far-darting beams of the spirit, the un'loos'd dreams, he thought.
    They were spirits and fairies above him. They were orange and magenta and coffee brown and crayon brown and pecan brown. They were white and chrome yellow and peach yellow and pear yellow.
    They were thin, and in spots, through their silken wings, he glimpsed the sun. "Daedalus, your labyrinth was no more mystifying than a single wing of these creatures. And Icarus, turn from beside the sun, beauty is not up there. Look down and see."
    They were dragons of the wind.
    And with his lenses, their eyes did not burn him.
    He walked forth, his mouth gaping. Other lines from Whitman's "Passage to India" entered his mind.
    I mark from on deck the strange landscape, the pure sky, the level sand in the distance . . .
    Truly, there was something about the alien landscape that seemed fresh. In the sunlight filtered through gossamer wings, he seemed to see more detail. The strange way the chlorophyll was formed as a crystalline substance within the yellow-green leaves; the patterns in the sand that he had once considered only chance happenings. He looked around. There were patterns to everything. The sky was delicately shaded in a soft-hued, artistic effect. There was a tasteful blending of all nature—something he had never seen before.
    He could almost see the rays of sun like individual golden rivers, beaming into everything, showering back when reflected, soaking in and disappearing when refracted. The world was more real . . .
    The gigantic dredging machines ...
    He saw the mining shafts and cranes, recognizing them as dredgers that sucked the scum of a planet, sent the base ores in gross tanker ships to run large, smoky factories on an over-populated Earth where some lived in poverty and some in plenty. And they were no longer just mining fools . . .
    I hear the echoes reverberate through the grandest scenery in the world . . .
    From the air, vibrating the molecules of his body so that he heard with his eyes and ears and mouth and nose. So that he tasted the notes, 'the pitched wailings of melancholy and joy. So that joy was sweet and melancholy bittersweet. The dragons flocked above him and sang.
    The music was soundless and all sound. It was the trumpets of the marching dead and the flutes of the living angels. They were strange songs.
    Crossing the great desert, the alkaline plains, I behold the enchanting mirages of waters and meadows . . .
    He stumbled over the sand, heedless of destination. Everything was new to him. A thousand times before had he looked at it. Never had he seen it.
    The dragons sang of it, the why of it. The why.
    Careening drunkenly to the mirages, he dipped his hands in cool water and there was no mirage. The meadows smelled fresh and grassy. They were real.
    A spark within his mind was relighted; his search had ended.
    Stumbling,