PHOENIX

"... he relaxed and gave himself up to the heady luxury of the roaring fire which clothed his body. He basked in flames."

He lived. He was aware. He was everything in his world. He was....

Flames wrapped themselves around his body, pouring sinuously around him. For a few seconds, as he stood in the center of the floor, he writhed; pure reflex; then he relaxed and gave himself up to the heady luxury of the roaring fire which clothed his body. He basked in flames.

His mind was afire, too. It feels like ... like satin ice! No, it's different. It's ... it was something new; his senses were still adjusting themselves to the new reality, and his mind contained no images with which to compare it. He didn't see or hear Fran open the door.

"MAX!"

He shook his flaming body and a few brief cinders fell away in sparks. Then, suddenly, he had snuffed out the aura of flames; he was standing nude on a smoking carpet, grinning tentatively at the girl. He swallowed and said "Hell of a time for you to show up, Fran."

She seemed to stare at him without seeing him, her face taut, without expression. He blinked, slowly coming down or up to reality again. Good God, yes, she thought he'd been burning up. The odor of the carpet—it smelled like scorching hair.

"I forgot about the carpet." He watched her glance down at it. Acrid smoke still curled away from two singed-bare patches where he'd been standing.

Slowly, Fran raised her eyes back to his. She said "Max—!"

She took one faltering step toward him; then she crumpled and swayed forward. He caught her in his arms as she fell, straining her close. The physical contact of their bodies brought him back to the level of reality again, to a complete realization of Fran's plight. He tried to make his grip as firm, as reassuring as he could—to bring her back to a world in which men were not, one minute, cloaked in streaming flame, and the next minute alive and human and—

"Max!" She straightened, "You don't have any clothes on!"

"I know. I lose more pajamas that way," he said, lightly, keeping his voice casual. "Sit down, Fran, and I'll put on a pair of pants, at least."

Her face was chalk-white; the color had drained from her mouth, leaving the lipstick like paint on a corpse. She was rigid with shock. She hardly seemed to hear him, and let him lead her, like a child, to the sofa. Oh, God, why did she have to come in just now?

"Lie down here for a minute, Fran. Here, put your feet up on the arm. Fran, it's all right, I'm all right; take it easy, now. I'll be right back."

He retreated into the bedroom, quietly closed the door behind him, and leaned against it for a moment. His whole body slumped.

The room was quiet, just a third-floor bedroom in an old house, now a converted rooming-house for students, half filled with sunlight. Max heard his own breathing loud in the silence, looked down at his naked body, then at his pants, draped over the bed. He stared at them and closed his eyes. His body grew rigid.

Slowly, the pants began to stir as if with a breeze; but all else was still. Sunlight cut across the stationary dust-motes suspended in mid-air, and the warm summer noon seemed to hold its breath. The pants legs flapped.

Then, suddenly, the room was filled with a timeless density. The silence of the moment before thickened into a tangible, measurable dimension, possessing a reality of its own. He could taste the silence.

He rose three feet into the air, his head clearing the ceiling by inches. As he did so, the tension dissolved from his muscles; he lay loose-flung on the air and watched articles of clothing, first his briefs, then pants, sweatshirt, socks and finally shoes, moving to him and draping themselves over, around, up and onto his body, flowing onto him as if themselves fluid.

The door opened before he reached it. He took a deep breath, set his feet on the floor, and walked into the other room. Fran started upright as he came in, and flinched away.

"Fran, are you afraid of me?"

She nodded, moving her mouth mutely.

Easy, for God's sake, easy, the girl's on the ragged edge of hysterics. Take the light touch.

"Afraid of me? Now that I'm fully clothed again and didn't even attempt felonious rape?"

"Don't laugh," she said, finding her voice. "I know what you're trying to do. But—don't. And don't tell me that I didn't see—what I saw." Her eyes moved quickly, a little rabbit movement, to the charred carpet, and away again.

"Fran." He seated himself beside her and took her face in his hands. "I'm not denying anything. What you saw—it happened, yes—but it wasn't—" he ran out of words.

"I'm not crazy! And it wasn't an illusion!"

"Okay, then! I'm a warlock! I weave dark spells! I've sold my soul to the devil! Do you like that any better?" He flung the words at her, bitterly.

"Are you, Max?" she asked softly, when he had run down.

"I don't know. I don't—Fran!" He fell against her, and felt her arms reach out for him, hold him as he collapsed at her side.

The touch did what words had failed to do; he felt the rigid, frozen fright flow out of her as she held him; hard, clasping his spent body in her arms. With a sigh, she drew his head against the softness of her breast and let him lie there.

This was the best way. It had come to him without words; perhaps there were no words. But what had he done to Fran, to this shy girl who held him now so tightly? He sensed, through the tension of her terror and its release, that she loved him—did he love her? When he had asked himself that, he could not answer—yet now, in his response to her, he sensed his own answer.

Words, more words—what did they mean? Reasoning was a barrier, not a path. He had always felt most apart from her when he had tried to think out their relationship into words. Better to let the words go, better to react.

They lay together unmoving on the sofa for a moment which was, for them, timeless—perhaps fifteen minutes, perhaps two or three hours. They exchanged no words, no gestures, not even a kiss. They simply were, sharing a moment of that meshed, tangible silence in which there was no Max, no Fran; instead a gestalt, a separate emotional entity.

"Tell me about it," she said finally.

It was like surfacing after a deep dive. He blinked. "I don't know what happened."

"How did it begin?"

He turned slightly, snuggling closer to her, his cheek buried against her neck, his shoulder tucked under her arm, her arms warm around his body. He paused, then reached out for words and found that the words were there.

"If you want to be rational about it—that is, if we can be rational about it—I guess it's what you'd call a wild talent."

"Wild is right," she said with a shaky laugh.

"Psi power, I guess you'd call it—I can make things move, or—things happen.

"I had a dream last night. It was a very strange kind of dream—you know how sometimes you have dreams about flying? Like, you're running along on the ground, and sometimes you can jump, and pull your feet into the air, and then you paddle yourself along with your hands—? I dreamed I'd done this and I was floating and weightless, pulling myself around with handholds like an astronaut in a spaceship, only the handholds were the branches of a tree. I was floating, and pulling myself into the tree.

"Things began feeling strange. Like they were happening in double—like the dream was fading out into sleepwalking. And then I woke up.

"Fran, I was holding on to the curtains of the window next to my bed, and I was floating about even with the top of the open window!"

He felt her arms tighten around him, but she neither moved nor interrupted him. Blessing her, he went on;

"It scared me silly, but my first thought was; Migod, I nearly flew out the window—just as matter-of-fact about it as if I'd been sleepwalking and woke up and said, Oh, I almost walked down those stairs. And then I guess I woke up the rest of the way and really realized what was happening, and the next thing I knew, I was lying cross-ways on the bed, with all the breath knocked out of me."

His body had tensed again with the growing excitement in his voice; sensing it, he shivered and moved closer into the warmth of her arms. "Fran, don't let me do anything now!"

Slowly, under the reassurance of her touch, he felt the spasm dissolve, flow into words again.

"When I woke up, I thought it had all been a dream—I mean, I wanted to believe I'd dreamed it, but I knew better. I wandered out here into the living room, and just kind of went through the motions of breakfast, without noticing what I was doing. After a while I—well, located myself sitting at the table, staring at my coffee and realizing it had gone cold. I wasn't thinking, Fran, I wasn't thinking about anything. I was just staring at that coffee and wishing it was good and hot again, and—and then it started steaming.

"Fran, I didn't touch it, I just looked at it. I looked at it, and suddenly I wasn't just looking at a cup-of-coffee any more. I began to see it—really see it. I began to see the relationships of every component in the cup and the coffee, the chemical and molecular—no, that's not what I mean, either—I could see, not really with my eyes, the entire series of relationships between all the overlapping fields of energy—no—" he broke off again, helplessly.

"I can't make sense of it for you. I don't have the words, maybe there aren't any—I could see it, you understand; I didn't try to explain it, even to myself. I can't, now. It's just—everything's motion, and I could reach out and—and speed it up, or slow it down, and I'd heated it up—" he shook his head a little and was silent, clinging to her.

Her voice was levelled when she spoke, a flat surface spread thin over panic; toneless. "I'm not a—a nuclear physicist, but it sounds as if you were trying to put the theory of atoms and force-fields into one word. Like—matter not being solid but just little bits of loose energy whirling around and building up into atoms and the atoms into molecules."

"That—I guess so. As if I'd learned to—oh, to see into them. But how? Why?"

"It takes in a lot of territory," she said, still the flat stretched toneless voice. "Just to wake up and find out you had it, whatever it was."

He hardly heard. He drew himself upright, his hands clasped, tensing, searching for words. "Like—like ice and water and steam are all the same thing, only we see them differently. We just see different aspects of the same thing, and it's all the same, all this—motion. And I could control it! I could control everything!"

"Max—"

"Yes, I know. It's frightening. I'm still afraid, and I think I've been afraid ever since I woke up from that dream. I'm afraid to really try anything—oh, thank God you came, Fran! Thank God! I think I'd have cracked up if you hadn't!"

But the moment of complete and intense rapport was gone; Fran had drawn away from him again, and he felt cold and afraid. He had said too much; she was afraid of him again, and her fear, like her love, communicated itself to him through the impalpable fibres in his very skin. He soaked up her fear and babbled it forth again.

"I've been afraid to really try anything, because that's playing God. I've been doing parlor tricks, Fran, because I haven't really wanted to face the fact that I could do so much more than that!

"Think about it! I turned the air around myself to flames—and burned off my pajamas before I thought to do more than protect my body—because that was sort of wild and weird and ego-inflating. I've wished my clothes on, and levitated, and moved things around—but these are little things! Petty things. But Fran, I could have done so much more—I could wipe out war—there are a thousand ways I could do it. I could feed the starving and house the homeless—Hell, that's minuscule, I could change this whole damn planet, I could change myself, make my body so I could go anywhere, anywhere in the whole physical universe—Fran, I could be God!"

His whole body shook. "I could be God, and I'm playing with burning carpets! Fran—oh, Fran, it's too much for me! I'm not God, I don't want it, I'm too small for it—I wish it was only a dream and now I could really wake up and find it never happened—oh, Fran, Fran, tell me what I am, tell me what to do!"

Aware only of pain and terror, he felt his face wet and did not even know he was sobbing.

"You're Max, Max," Fran wept, "You're Max, and I love you—"

Again the touch calmed him. He clutched at her desperately, clinging to reality, to the wholeness and rightness of her body in his arms, in a sort of senseless terror lest that, too, should dissolve suddenly into a flux of intermingling atoms and force-fields. He was aware only of Fran, close and warm against him, their mingling breath, his own rising hunger and need. He wanted to melt into her, lose himself in her flesh and her reality. The clothes she was wearing separated them, were a senseless intrusion into his longing for contact, for one-ness. He moved. They were gone, her body warm and naked in his arms.

"Fran!"

But she was white and rigid in his arms, thrusting him away, gasping with terror. "What are you doing? Max, no!"

It was an icy shock, a rejection like a flood of ice, thrusting him back into the wild senselessness of his sudden mad universe. He felt only the desolation of being alone. He wept, feeling the tears on his cheek.

Did God cry?

Crying? Clutching desperately at this frigid slip of a girl for salvation, when the whole universe awaited him? He pushed himself up, away from her; he heard her voice as if from a great distance, making words, but he was past words.

Blackness closed in about them; time slowed, the eddies of air swirled to a halt, and lances of fire swirled through his mind. Then, beyond the realm of three dimensions he saw her, clearly.

His mind shattered into a thousand crystals, reflecting prismatically pounding emotions he could not directly face. He looked at Fran, into her, through her, beyond her.

He saw; not the immobilized figure of a frightened woman, her body helpless beneath his own on the sofa. In fact, he saw not even the sofa.

He saw; beyond the immediacy of the fields of motion contained in finite space as his body, he comprehended other patterns of sub-atomic flux. Below him was a geometrically ordered matrix, a precise framework simply constructed. But above it he found an area of disorder. Complexity, confusion, patterns and sub-patterns of a structure so immensely varied and subtly differentiated as to be nearly incomprehensible. The motion! Movement! Life!

It offended him. It was vulgar, teeming, unruly, impossible! He began to reach out to it....

"MAX!"

A body had flung itself at him, kicking, scratching, screaming. He was toppled back and suddenly lying on the floor, back in the narrow confines of a single body again. His head rang and her words were slowly becoming words again.

They hurt his ears, jangling with their ridiculous cadences against the sublime expanse of perception. "No, no! I loved you, but you—you're mad—you're not Max—"

And then she had flung herself through the door and was gone, her running footsteps growing fainter on the stairs.

Slowly, Max surrendered himself to a chair, without any awareness of his human motions. The old chair enveloped him with the old overstuffed cushioned arms and gave him a musty embrace and for a moment he was part of all its enfolding past, the weariness that had come into its unrejecting depths for comfort and rest. His face was still wet with the tears he had shed before, and now they began to swell and flow again, erupting and cascading almost without volition.

Fran was gone.

She was gone, and she had been all he had, all that was ever really real to him. Dimly he sensed, without knowing, that it had been a double failure. Fran had refused, rejected his need—but was it Fran's fault, that he had been unable to reach her? Had he ever been able to reach any human creature? Had he ever wanted to, except in his own selfish desire? He spoke of loving Fran, and yet he had shied away from that answer—until he needed her.

And so his vast paranormal powers were meaningless, because the physical universe itself was without meaning. Ordered, yes. Finely structured. But with no more meaning than an alarm clock. He could be God, and yet the only safety and sanity he had felt was when Fran drew him back from the brink of the bewildering nothingness into the shelter of her breast.

But for all his control of things, he had been unable to achieve that blending that meant power. He had only a meaningless power over things which now, in essence, were only nothingness in various rates of flow....

The sun had set and he had turned none of the lights on. The gloom of dusk settled, blanketing his body with darkness and his mind with despair.

If Fran—If. A meaningless word now. If Fran had only accepted him—if he could control his own emotions as easily as the magic-show flames he had donned! But he had feared to surrender himself to any emotion, he had given too little of himself to Fran—and when the moment of his need came, she had nothing of him that could call him back safe from the borderland of bleak despair.

He wasn't fit. Like a baby given a straight razor, he could not cope with his gift, and the outcome was inevitable. There was only one answer.

Best do it now.

Suddenly the darkness was pierced by flames, a flickering, growing fire which enveloped and covered his body. His clothes vanished in a flare of flame, spreading to and attacking the soft upholstery of the chair.

A small thing to salvage, his ego. But this was the grandiose way, the big way—for the big failure.

He sat for long moments, crowned in golden flames, lost in contemplation of the streams of superheated glowing ions radiated from the burning carbon. Then the chair shifted as cloth burned through, fibre straps released their hold on the metal springs of the seat.

Time.

Deliberately, without emotion, he released his hold on the lines of force which demarcated the limits of his body.

His hair vanished instantly in a shower of sparks and simultaneously a furnace blast beat in on him. Then his skin was blistering and blackening; gone. He collapsed into his funeral pyre, flinging out limbs in reflex spasm and struggle, and he was....

He lived. He was aware. He was everything in his world and still nothing; streams of force, patterns of sub-atomic flux. He was a moment when all fear and all perception had vanished, blending into a gestalt that was more than himself....

In her uneasy sleep, Francine floated five inches above the surface of her bed.

THE END