IT WAS AS THOUGH TEN thousand fiery demons tore at his body with claws of flame. A weight, massive, imponderable, kicked the breath out of his lungs, forced it from his gaping mouth and flared nostrils into the helmet he wore. He gulped and strangled, fighting to draw into a shrunken chest a breach of fleeing life. One hand moved—or tried to—to his throat in an instinctive gesture of distress. The hand moved a half inch from his knee, flung itself back into his stomach like a leaden weight.
The quick burst of nausea saved his life, because tortured ductless glands released a stream of adrenalin into his churning blood-stream, the miraculously adaptable body of Man rose once again above its normal limitations. Air crept into his lungs, his heart’s tumultuous pounding no longer throbbed a t
