"He's strong," gasped Rodion. He had barely finished this observation when my consciousness of Jatayu, its stresses and strains, its rapidly changing analyses of potential weak spots in the enemy craft and scrolling strategies as to how to damage the darting, swooping form of the shasa craft were submerged and wiped from my mind by a howling voice.

Rodion! Rodion! Alexander! Oh God help me, help me. He isn't, he has me and I cannot move. He changes shape and form, and oh God I can't even struggle because he is everywhere he is inside me and all I can taste of smell is his awful lust Rodion help me he is the devil he is the devil...

On the outskirts of the sleepy city there huddled a dormant volcano.  Its lavas and pyroclastic rivers had hardened over the long years of the twentieth century into a university.  Molten claws of orange grasping for cooler temperatures had slowed and then crystallised into oblong buildings full of classrooms and laboratories.  Hot trenches had filled with sharpened boulders to form residences, a theatre and a conference centre.  A curling river of lava had, as an afterthought, solidified into tarmac in its route from the once fiery caldera down the flank of the mountain towards the city and hot rocks along its edges had been weathered into a mall, car parks and a library.  As the place cooled and aged, people had come here and trees had grown; cars had purred up the macadam towards the summit and eased exhausted onto striped terraces to discharge professors, students and technicians at their places of occupation.  In the sixties, in a terminal acidic hiccup, a six-story block had been heaved from the fires beneath to stand prominent at the summit as a thick flagless umbilical.  When humanity climbed here, they established a physics department in this seventy-foot folly.  Much later a man called Professor Joachim Streamwell had established his Department for Deep Cosmology on the top two floors.  Shortly after this a black aluminium and steel telescope had been plucked from another place in space and time and placed on top of this DCD to stand guard over the dead volcano and to watch over the sleepy city.  Now, after having seen to the center of creation and spanned the cosmos with his mind, the professor has crossed oceans and strode over half the world to come here in order to die.  He sits there now, in his hot office, surrounded by flowers and his tea still warm by his arm.  At the summit of the cold volcano, at the top of his concrete mast and beneath the rusting scope casting its shadow over a thousand fluttering lives, sits the professor, dead. 

As dead as the professor can be, that is.