His death wish surpassed that of any mortal. And yet it bestowed upon him-and only him-the power of flight between the stars.

He was Virgil Grissom Kinney, and he was insane beyond hope.

Caged and bound in a madhouse he festered like a scorned, feared animal. In an age when madmen were almost unknown, he was a ranting exception. Sometimes he raged against his restraints with muscle-tearing fury. Other times he retreated into catatonic silence, conducting a silent, internal war.

Drugs, nutrition, therapies from Freud to Szasz to Bhodhota all proved useless.

Virgil Grissom Kinney wanted only one thing from life.

Death.

At a time when people left one another alone to do as they pleased, no one would have cared or interfered if Virgil wanted only to kill himself, yet in an era without police or prisons, Virgil Grissom Kinney lay locked behind padded walls, screaming without sound, tortured without pain.

“You’ve never seen a bad paraschiz, have you?” the MentTech asked.

The woman walking beside him adjusted the white labcoat thrown hastily over her shoulders.

“Only in history scrims,” she said.

“Then listen carefully. Treat him exactly as you would a feral genesplice you might encounter in an alley. You don’t have any way of knowing who he thinks you are or why he suspects you’re speaking to him, so never start up a casual conversation. If he thinks you’re the Horned God, you could be talking about the weather and he’d read hidden meanings into it. Never stare him in the eye. Never touch him. And most important-”

“Yes?” The woman’s face lost any color it had.

“If and when he speaks, you listen.”

She nodded gravely. The corridor they walked down radiated a soothing, cool blue glow. The woman drew no calm from the psychological color cue. She strode toward an appointment with the destiny of the human race and saw little pleasure and even less comfort in the knowledge that Earth’s best hope was entombed in an asylum.

“One more thing,” the huge orderly added. “If he frightens you, tell him so. Be firm and polite and exceedingly honest.”

“Straight,” she said in agreement.

He touched his scan finger to the lockscrim. “And never turn your back on him.”

She swallowed. Her throat scraped like sandpaper against brick.

He had spent so many years in the same creme-white room that he thought he could detect sounds through the soundproof padding.

The familiar footsteps of the orderly intermingled with another lighter set.

Two sets of footsteps, Virgil thought. Mad images and personalized symbols trickled through his fragmented thoughts like rain through desert sands.

Marsface is coming here. He still favors the right leg I bit so long ago. He clumps and slides beside a pair of feet that move lightly and quickly.

He twisted about to face the door. Wrapped more than snugly in gauze bandages that restrained him from head to toe, Virgil Grissom Kinney squirmed on the floor with all the grace of an arthritic caterpillar. His psychotic mind picked through an alien host of archetypes in a frenzied effort to make sense of his narrow world.

The other walks on soft, quick feet. Sent by Master Snoop. Master Snoop knows I’ve figured the way out. The machinery inside the ceiling is up there watching me. Master Snoop never slumbers. The wires in my head spy for him.

Kinney rolled about to stare at the blank wall. Indirect lighting bathed the room in a soft, soothing golden glow. A slender trapezoidal shadow suddenly cut across the surface of the padding. Silently, the room’s only door opened inward.

Mental Health Technician William Bearclaw entered, scrimboard in hand. His short black hair crested in a delta-sweep cut that was three years out of style. Tall and husky, he ducked his head to clear the lintel of the thickly padded doorway.

Virgil had no knowledge of styles, fads, or even dates. He only saw madness and tried to make sense of it.

Marsface. I knew it, didn’t I? Same Marsface-head like a red planet with its ridges and craters and mole-mountains, a nose like Olympus Mons.

Virgil stared at the other visitor, puzzled.

Though tall, she stood a head shorter than Bearclaw; high heels plus long black hair piled up Grecian style failed to bring her up to his height. A single thick rope of hair extended from the plaits to wrap once around her neck. The roughsects hair-style had grown in popularity from its origin in a small sado-masochistic sex cult to its fashionable apex in polite society. The roughsects, seeing their style embraced by outsiders, had long since abandoned it for new coifs, which were also working their way up the fashion escalator in competition with other bizarre looks.

Kinney peered at the woman, his impressions filtered through the dark glass of insanity.

Death Angel doesn’t look the way he’s supposed to. Where is the scythe? Death Angel disguises as a woman. Master Snoop’s trying to screw me up. It won’t work. I know how to get out and I don’t need them.

He listened to them as carefully as he could, weighing every nuance.

They’re speaking in their Language again. Got to concentrate and break their code.

Bearclaw, though he used the proper term of address required by devoir, spoke to her with casual authority. “Yes, tovar Trine, you can see the lengths we had to go through to restrain him. A man can kill himself against a padded wall if he keeps pounding it continually. Dies of exhaustion and dehydration.”

Delia Trine observed the form wrapped from head to toe in gauze that had once been white. Two tubes, mercilessly transparent, extended from the overlays of cloth around his crotch. The wastes they carried away both displayed sickeningly unhealthy colors.

The woman took a deep breath, tried to calm her stomach’s reaction to the sight. The vaguely rotten odor from the bandages did not help.

“What is his specific class?”

Bearclaw did not need to scroll through the scrimsheet in his hand. “Psychotic. Paranoid-schizophrenic. With a good dose of manic depressive, though I’ve never seen him manic in this place.”

“Any record of treatment with Duodrugs?” She knelt down to take a closer look at the prisoner’s face, to gaze coolly into Kinney’s green eyes, practically the only part of him not wrapped in restraining sheets.

Bearclaw cleared his throat loudly.

She realized that she was staring, and stood quickly. A shudder raced through her.

She had never seen eyes that glared with such furious intensity.

The MentTech shook his head. “Duodrugs have no effect on him. The Pharmaceutics are mystified, but I think Virgil here has a highly compartmentalized multiple personality. We can drug one or two of them, but he always has one that surfaces unaffected.” His expression grew concerned. “Don’t tell anyone that, though. He’s never displayed any symptoms of that. Drugs are supposed to affect the physical brain, anyway, not the mind.”

Kinney lay near the center of the room-on his side-looking like the huge, stained cocoon of some mysterious creature that might suddenly break free to attack with terrible fury and unfathomable insect logic.

His gaze returned hers, sharp and startlingly alert. A curl of sweaty, greasy blonde hair looped out from under his bandages to hang over one eyebrow. Kneeling again and trying not to stare, Delia tucked the stray hairs back under the wraps with her long, blood-red fingernails.