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Victor expects to see the wheeled eight-panel gray fabric screen standing toward the farther end of the rooed table with another prescription onlyIt waits just inside the door fro a cold bottle of water and a black saucer In the saucer are two ser yellow capsule, one five-sided pink tablet, and one blue ball the size of an M&M candy
This is an unprecedented nu supplements to be presented in the sanificent brain waves and other physiological data, always being transmitted telemetrically, have alerted his staff to the fact that he is at the brink of a hts of perception, perhaps rising to a realhts and ideas so revolutionary and so profoundly wise as to surprise even hih he is not easily--if ever--surprised He chases all five ite the effects of the ingenious supplements, Victor crosses the roourney is a naed replicant, eyes closed, in a kind of stasis, waiting to be called to duty It is identical in appearance to the Moneyman, ould not have left this room alive For all his wealth and power, the fool seerasped that, with as little as one of his hairs, he can be duplicated andforhi needed will be swiftly supplied?
Froh but smoothed into a crystal-clearto draw the bizarre glass-faced, glass-spitting creature away from the master bedroom and the consideration of the attic where Corrina hid, Rusty plunged down the stairs The hall light was behind hilow of the streetlah the into the arinably e
In the foyer, he didn’t hesitate to switch on the lights He found hi came down the stairs in pursuit of him, and Rusty stepped to the front door, almost unlocked it, but shrank back when he saw the face of athe door Matinee-idol handso that it could sell anything to anyone, even hope to the dead Rusty had no doubt that this was one of the eight he’d seen , the glass-faced thing fell, shattered, and Rusty turned to see glittering fraght of steps As the pieces tulass men of various sizes, scores upon scores of the on the treads A dozen made it intact to the foyer, where they crawled or tottered this way and that, perhaps seeking hi, splintering to pieces
War never brought Rusty Billingham near to the brink of madness, but ht pushed him farther from the calm center of sanity toward its periphery He kneas not hallucinating, yet what he saw defied reason and suggested delusion if not delirium
Glass figurines could neither crawl nor walk, as these did When they shattered against one another, the fragments should not twitch like the bodies of snakes after their heads were cut off, but that’s what these glass li into smaller and still slass-facedsee
Rustyto leave by the back door and lead those things away fro roo his escape
His mind moved from the suburbs of sanity to the borderline
Victor Iinal Victor He knows, therefore, theof the words that have been spoken behind him: I am satisfied
More than two hundred years earlier, shortly after Deucalion murdered Victor’s bride, Elizabeth, on the shores of Lake Coreat scientist and maker of men had returned to Geneva There, as he knelt in a ceeance, his creation spoke to hily from the darkness: I am satisfied, miserable wretch! You have determined to live, and I auish would be as intense as his own, and both of them would suffer the rest of their lives, Victor for what he had lost by his pride and his i forever an outsider, alone of his kind
Victor Iiant that had come to life centuries before he hiinal Victor in New Orleans No slightest fear afflicts hied, his curiosity as keen as a scalpel
Deucalion says, "So long ago, you told your story to Robert Walton, that man aboard the icebound ship in the Arctic His letters and journals hat Mary Shelley employed to tell her tale Walton said you died on the ship, and he fabricated a loathso remorse to him How much did you pay Walton to say that you perished on that vessel?"
"Not me," Victor Immaculate replies "Your et that I’m not the one who made you I’iant insists "He is in you, all his knowledge and all his sins You are hiullible Walton, you presented yourself to the world as a flawed but coure,you did Every ties stink with your false huth its insincerity is evident in its redundancy"
As the creature approaches, he seeer step by step But Victor Immaculate does not retreat He does not kno Besides, he is invulnerable to this one
Deucalion says, "The pages reek with your bottoret, with the phoniness of your verbose self-condemnation, with the insidious quality of your contrition, which is that of a materialist who cares not for God and is therefore not true contrition at all, but only despair at the consequences of your actions For centuries, I have been theidealist who claiiven the chance But your kind never undoes You do the sa evererror"
"I’ve made no error," Victor Immaculate confidently assures hiiant says, "You are my maker"
"That’s an error of yours, which you seem unable to admit I’m not Victor but Victor Immaculate"
Deucalion places his hands upon Victor’s shoulders, gripping with such power that it is i loose or pull away
"I was once a e and hot to iven free will … and have reh the centuries I am not a monster anymore But you are the monster you have always been"
"Release e light pulses through his ests "Would you like the norured as the other? Or should I instead make your skull implode and finish you forever?"
"You don’t have that power over rees, "I am quite sure that I do"
The funnel cloud of nanoani him as he rose, and incorporated hi, spiraling oed now by the ested victim