Avon Fantasy Reader No. 13 — page 128: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

This room, he knew, would stay the longest. And when the rest of the room was gone, this corner with his favorite chair would remain. For this was the spot where he had lived for twenty years. The bedroom was for sleeping, the kitchen for eating. This room was for living. This was his last stand. These were the walls and floors and prints and lamps that had soaked up his will to make them walls and prints and lamps. He looked out the window into a blank world. His neighbors’ houses already were gone. They had not lived with them as he had lived with this room. Their interests had been divided, thinly spread; their thoughts had not been concentrated as his upon an area four blocks by three, or a room fourteen by twelve. 2 Staring through the window, he saw it again. The same vision he had looked upon before and yet different in an indescribable way. There was the city illumined in the sky. There were the elliptical towers and turrets, the cube-shaped domes and battlements. He could see with stereoscopi¢ clarity the aerial bridges, the gleaming avenues sweeping on into infinitude. The vision was nearer this time, but the depth and proportion had changed, as if he were viewing it from two concentric angles at the same time. And the face, the face of magnitude, of power of cosmic craft and evil... Mr. Chambers turned his eyes back into the room. The clock was tick- ing slowly, steadily. The grayness was stealing into the room. The table and radio were the first to go. ee simply faded away and with them went one corner of the room. Now as he sat there it did not seem queer to be without the table or the radio. It was as if it were something quite normal. Something one could expect to happen. Perhaps, if he thought hard enough, he could bring them back. But, after all, what was the use? One man, alone, could. not stand off the irresistible march of nothingness. One man, all alone, simply could not. He wondered what the elephant ash tray looked like in that other dimen- sion. It certainly would not be an elephant ash tray, nor would the radio be a radio, for perhaps they did not have ash rays or radios or elephants in the in- _ wade dimension. He wondered, as a matter of fact, what he himself would look like when he finally slipped into the unknown. For he was matter, too, just as the ash tray and radio were matter. He wondered if he would retain his individuality, if he still would be a person. Or would he merely be a thing? There was one answer to all of that. He simply didn’t know. Nothingness advanced upon him, ate its way across the room, stalking him as he sat in the chair underneath the lamp. He waited for it. The room, or what was left of it, plunged into dreadful silence. Mr. Chambers started. The clock had stopped. Funny ... the first time in twenty years. ' He leaped from his chair and then sat down again. The clock hadn’t stopped. It wasn’t there. There was a tingling sensation in his feet. Tue Enp 126 Eomichbooks..co mM 3