There was no reason for him to check it again; they could not possibly have come loose. Not as far as he would know.
Carfax groaned inside the tape. Fisk was looking at the rear of the machine.
"Now how the hell did that happen?" Fisk muttered.
He leaned over and looked at the loose wire.
"Wet!"
He looked at Carfax and said, grinning, "You wily sneaky son of a bitch!"
Fisk plugged the end of the wire back in and returned to the front of the machine. This time, the indicator light did not come on.
And Carfax was sightless, earless, tongueless, deprived of all senses except thought. And the silent scream of horror which seemed to reverberate through nothing and back from nothing.
Fisk was right. There were no words to describe what it was like being a semb.
He was an undescribable something in nothingness.
And then he was a familiar something.
He could see, hear, taste, and feel again.
Mrs. Webster, across the table from him, was screaming, and the others were yelling or jumping up.
He looked down. His bare breasts were large and round and the thumbtip-sized nipples were painted yellow. His skirt was bell-shaped NeoCretan.
"It went into you, Szegeti!" a man howled.
Carfax wasn't too numb to understand what had happened.
Mrs. Webster was right. The walls had been weakened, and he had flashed straight toward the psychical configuration of her seance, the mental analog of MEDIUM. Like a current of electrons, he had taken the path of least resistance; a voltage hole, he had been tunneled into her presence; he had made the quantum jump from his world to embu and back to his world.
Mrs. Webster had quit screaming and was now standing up and staring at him.
"You looked familiar," she said. "Are you an evil spirit?"
"No more than any man," he said. "Bring me a phone, and put me through to Senator Langer."
Farmer, Philip José - Traitor to the Living Page 21