THAT WAS THE OTHER moment when sanity might have gone. He closed his eyes. (Sixteen eyes! No wonder the total perception!) And, after a while, he opened them again.
The hands were there. All sixteen of them.
Cautiously, Tropile selected a finger that seemed familiar in his memory. After a moment’s thought, he flexed it. It bent. He selected another. Another—on a different hand this time.
He could use any or all of the sixteen hands. They were all his, all sixteen of them.
I appear, thought Tropile crazily, to be a sort of eight-branched snowflake. Each of my branches is a human body.
He stirred, and added another datum: I appear also to be in a tank of fluid and yet I do not drown.
There were certain deductions to be made from that. Either someone—the Pyramids?—had done something to
