1963. Franklin had just stepped out of his Chevy and onto the sidewalk when he was suddenly somewhere else entirely. Gone was the orange of the New York City sunset, the bustling of the city streets, and pedestrian commotion. Instead, the sky was not a sky but the gridded, glass interior of a helmet flecked with perspiration. His ears devoured the sound of droning machinery and muffled clanking. Franklin, aloof, could nonetheless identify what encased him, and it did not ease the sense of panic that had begun to provoke his neural trails. Now, there was no hiding that he was inside a suit, a tin can, a metal claustrophobia machine—but more specifically, an atmospheric deep-sea observation suit, an Iron Man.
A fire lit somewhere in Franklin’s mind, and through the layer of perspiration on the glass, he observed the chaos of an ocean underneath him. Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, he did not know—there was only that blue and white froth of the waves below. A moving portrait of an unknown and vastly unexplored sea. So utterly grand but small from where he dangled.
Men in green uniforms observed from the limited safety of guardrails, a special few noting every swing and wrench Franklin attempted in his stubborn futility on clipboards. They were spread out along two platforms, both connecting back to what he imagined was an oil rig.
Panic again, and with every waking sliver of consciousness, it expanded like an impermeable fungus. Quickly, every fraction of the submersible became clear to him, maimed by the soft, immoral glow of its interior lamps; the curling, abstract nature of the aluminum-cast patterns, pressed into his skin, wedging him tight as a copper statue. The incandescent little squares came and went in a crimson wane that laughed at the racing drum of his heart, a beating he could feel in his eyes and hear in his temples. Two rounded white limbs stuck out before him, where his arms were, but no matter his struggle, they remained ever-fixed in a forward position. He was the most vulnerable he’d ever felt, the most like a damned pig roast for the American warmongers that observed with their tiny binoculars, smirking and lighting one another's Marlboros.
Franklin could not remember who he was beyond his name and that he drove a red Chevrolet Impala, but he felt a rage in his heart toward those men on the platforms. He could distinctly recognize them as present throughout most of his life. He could not see a face, only the blurred, remote outlines of smiles and curious eyes. Then, suddenly, a shift in his position, and the rasping of the chains nearly deafened him. He tried to scream, but the sound only made it worse. Speaker static crackled, and a rough old Transatlantic broke through.
“—Franklin, when you see it, make sure to look it in the eye. We would prefer this not be more tedious than it needs to be.”
What in the Hell were they talking about? he wondered helplessly. Franklin’s thoughts began like a train. How had he gotten into this position? Had he ever worked on an oil rig before? What were those men talking about? What did he have to look in the eye?! But those questions, and their answers, were dashed as the suit of armor suddenly dropped, piercing the epipelagic and submerging violently for several hundred feet, the pressure pulling the air out of his lungs. The train of thought crashed through the trailing tumult that followed him down, and down.
The darkness swam past the spherical visor, bubbles and darkened rays of congested blues. Franklin’s hackles rose into his gut with a dizzying stab. Then came the violent standstill of the Iron Man, which stalled in the soundless, burbling shadow region beneath the oil rig. His teeth soured and vertigo consumed him, as his brain caught back into the security of its bone shell.
The unlucky, amnesia-burdened diver fought for a breath, attempting to gather together whatever sanity he could, closing his eyes and then opening them again to his surroundings. On the visor he saw the outline of his reflection, the sharp curve of his cheeks, growing stubble, and a pair of sunken funereal eyes divided by the rusted metal grill protecting the glass. Franklin couldn’t recognize the man staring back at him, but he felt he could trust him some, almost as though he wasn’t entirely alone in his own company. Perhaps Franklin was once charismatic, or maybe even trustworthy! He just about chuckled at the idea. Chuckled? Such a reaction left him wondering if he’d really been there to begin with, inside of his head as well as this bizarre and unfortunate situation. There was no humor in it.
A light went on outside the Iron Man, a white beam lunging into the ocean, deeper into the black, operated from someplace on that rig. Those who’d designed the submersible must not have had the trust in Franklin to do it himself, and he figured their judgment correct; if it had been up to him, he would have likely kept the light off until they reeled him back to the surface. Regardless, there was not much to see outside the ring of clouded light. Particulates and slimy fish disorganized, and an embracing cold blackness like tar painted itself over and around the lowly Iron Man.
The spotlight pivoted left and then right. With each tug of the spotlight, the armor followed with it, dragging that unbearable dizziness back into Franklin. He closed his eyes again, as the armor continued the motion for over a minute. The succumbence of isolating black, a darkness heavier than that of life. Then it stopped, and there was a rushing sound of water, like a current, breaking overhead. He slowly opened his eyes as a cacophonous metallic rasp swung him forward a few feet, and he held tightly to the grips inside the submersible's arms, trying his damnedest to keep the bile from rising up out of his stomach. And as he returned to his position, for a moment, he saw a shape descend in front of him. It was quick, but a blurred flash of dark color was caught in the ring of light for just under five seconds. His heart stopped only after it had happened; the damn thing took up the entirety of the spotlight's beam. It had to have been fifteen feet long.
Something had stopped him from moving. That mild movement against the ocean’s many hands was eradicated, for there was now one hand in particular wrapped around the Iron Man. A feeling of numbness came over Franklin as this creature shifted the submersible stomach-down, and the flashlight caught its face without warning.
The skin was like cow leather, stretched and bolted to its bones, a brownish, reddish tinge, and the eyes were holes darker than the ocean around them both. The mouth was teeth inside of teeth inside of teeth, yellow, twisted, garbled, and imprecise to the laws of natural life. Franklin thought he’d understood horror after waking inside the suit and being dropped hundreds of feet below the ocean’s surface; now he knew the horror lay inside the eyes of the thing that had found him.
This entire time, he’d felt a great confusion troubling him, the immensity of more questions than answers, but now none of it mattered. The answer had been made quite clear. He was bait, the entire time he had been bait, and now he had finally met his predator.
Through the pathways of time, Franklin shifted. A parallax to those on the oil rig, a parallax in the ocean that spun the water into incomprehensible crystals. Crystals that shot, fired, and grew into arctic glaciers, and then those glaciers melted into water again, and there was nothing at all to be seen. The men with the clipboards all died from heart attacks; the only survivors watched through the frozen camera lens; a grayscale portrait of the creature in distorted framing sent a taste like copper into the mouths of the photographers on the rig. It was years after the documents were forwarded that said photographers took their own lives, of course. Something about guilt or a heavy depression, contended the morgue records.
The entire event lasted close to five hours, from the moment the creature appeared to the moment the water surrounding it returned to whatever the human mind could comprehend: a layer of ocean atop other layers that dropped in a fusillade of striking currents and waves.
Franklin continued to shift, and time was a distortion. Time wasn’t a clock, a watch, a number on a digital screen; time was a physical mass that wound into the fetal period of itself. A flesh lump of soil, rock, water, and emotive expression like a plain of colorless existence. That was what he felt now, ripped from the world, descending in a rearward fashion, descending and falling into a downpour of unknowing, of tumult until suddenly—the feeling of air on his skin.
He remembered then that he had a wife and two children. A boy and a girl. He would go to Central Park with the two of them every Saturday. They would watch the geese along the ponds. He wondered how they were doing.
He had met Angela, his wife, in high school. They had run up together in government ranks and made something of their lives in the Big Apple. They’d begun to argue in the past year. Something about his work had brought turmoil to the marriage, but Franklin couldn’t remember what it was. He remembered anger, discomfort, that something was wrong, something corrupt.
The air around Franklin was generous. The sky above he could see in its entirety. Gone was the grid and visor, the patterns and shapes jailing him to that godawful suit of ocean armor. The sky was purple, pink, and orange, an awe-inspiring dawn. The warm, earthen sun rose quietly. He heard a strange buzzing around him. The trees were twenty feet long and sparsely coated, the green and the bark appearing almost natural, but not quite. Other trees were thick and double the size of the more common ones, overrun by swaths of green flora and abnormal flying creatures. It was the look of these creatures that sat him up. They were like large dragonflies, moving at a frightening speed and with such precision that even from as far out as he was, they brought forth a sensation of unease. There was an entire nest to his north, weaving around the trunk of the largest tree.
Franklin sat in the middle of a verdant field that emulated an African savanna, as the sun slowly bled out of the circular clouds and onto the orange shrubbery. Splotches of shadow gloomed between the spaces of glaring sun, a cast shadow of elusive doom. Around him, the rounded trees clawed. A howling wind drove a chill up his spine, past his ears, and off to somewhere far away. Closer to him, there was a lengthy amphibian eating the corpse of another of its kind; at first glance, Franklin mistook the creature for a large rock. He hadn’t thought it would notice him, as it looked quite dumb.
Dressing Franklin was a white rubber compression suit, straps banding his chest and limbs. There were burn marks under his collarbone and at the top of each limb; on his arms, the burns were at his wrists, and on his legs, at the side of each ankle. The burns were irritating, but he didn’t like the idea of stripping down, especially not knowing, not understanding where he was. Though he recognized some of what he saw as earthly, the fauna was so alien, so removed from what he’d grown to understand. Was he dreaming? Waking, caught in a delusion? Was this Death, an afterlife of sorts?
He breathed in deep, almost too much, and coughed. Then, he laid down and continued watching the strange sky expand with its glorious, inexplicable beauty. The sky and the grass were what told him that this was Earth. Everything else was wrong. Farther from his station, from where he’d awoken, he thought he could even see large fungi teetering taller than some of the trees.
Franklin could now remember his entire life, from the beginning, right up to the moment he’d stepped out of his Impala. What had happened between then and the dive remained a concussive blur. He remembered he was born in June of 1933, and that his father had died in the war. That he had broken his arm during a baseball game at the age of seven. That he had found out Angela was pregnant on the same day as his graduation… Where was all of this during the dive? He asked the universe, thumbing his forehead. No answer but the wind blowing loudly over him.
The dive. What had happened underneath that ocean, what had brought him there, and now left him in some poor imitation of Africa? That creature under the water, he could barely remember the thing; he only remembered the factory smell of plastic it carried, and how empty its eyes had been. Empty but full of something that filled the lack of content, space to fill the space that held nothing at all. What was that, then? What was nothing? Dejected dark matter from some begotten corner of the universe? The questions all could rush out of him in a current if they wanted to, and some did in grunts and troubled curses.
Franklin’s wrist suddenly began to sting. He rose his hand, blocking the sun. The dark, smudged burn was beginning to itch, and as he picked at it, he unplugged the drain—a mashing of rotted skin. Cotton unplugging a wound. A white substance dripped out from his wrist and onto his face; for some godawful reason, his mind told him that it resembled semen, and in disgust, he threw himself back away from it and spun up onto his feet. He took his wrist, and the strange substance began to bubble and spit.
It was surging, and a bad feeling came with it, reaching up his arm and into his neck. A twisted nerve, tugging out. He stared at the burn with frenzied eyes. He stepped, tripped, rolled, and the substance spat, coughed, and leapt out of him over the grass into a small pond. The fish drank, swallowed, and Franklin watched them writhe in a vile ecstasy.
Curses ran inside his brain. His skull throbbed. A rash of confusion, of primal furor, overtook him like the clouds now overtaking the isolated savanna. He had pissed himself, crouched over the pond, his wrist hawking up the last of its milk, a string of drool feeding the clouded water. His reflection stared up at him shamefully. Franklin kneeled, and then the pond sucked down into the earth. The pudgy fish wriggled and seized. They had eyes like those of his children. Big, white, a sparkling soul hidden behind the dilation of the pupils, a coursing of memory and thought. Tendrils reached out of the soil to drag them away. Franklin began to run.
He had never run so fast. He thought his legs would give out at the speed with which he tore through the horse-tails and knee-high shrubs. The wrist began to drool again, and he couldn’t handle the perverse tugging inside any longer. Franklin suddenly slammed into one of the large trees. Falling back onto his hind, he crawled against the bark. He eyed the hand, a jittering five-fingered jumble of spasming muscles, bone, and skin wetted by the dense goo.
Loss of consciousness, a drunkard’s daily relinquishment to the influence. His stamina left him, and consciousness fled with it.
He was at the park with Angela. As they discussed his work, the children interrupted them, shouting over who got to keep which beetle.
“Neither of you are going to be keeping those things,” Angela laughed, “They’re insects, not pets.”
“I don’t know, Angie, beetles can be pets,” Franklin chimed, and the children nearly blew over with glee. Always undermining me, he read in Angela’s expression. He stopped himself, “—no beetles. Come to think of it, I wouldn't like the thought of them flying about the house either.”
And a big cry from the two children. Angela got them to quit their howling with a promise of Sal’s Ice Cream on the way back to the house.
The beetles were wonderful; beautifully molded shells, easy on the eye, friendly. But Angela had a phobia. He should have thought about that before speaking.
“You know, this job, don’t you feel it’s weighing on us?”
“How could it? It has nothing to do with us.”
“The nature of it, Franklin.”
He knew what she meant, just didn’t want to face it directly. The guilt ate at him as an amoeba would to some poor primate.. “Ever since they promoted you and you began on these things, you have not been the Franklin I married.”
“What does that mean? That you’ve fallen out of love with me?”
“Playing the victim again? You know I feel sorry for you, right? I don’t need you to rave on now about how I’ve fallen out of love.”
“Didn’t answer the question, Angie,” he said, sitting back against the thick, warm oak tree. An extension of the earth shrouding them and the children, who went on with the bugs and toys.
“Of course I love you. I’m just,” she shrugged, “I’m just worried.”
“There isn’t anything to worry about. The world is fine. Everything is fine. I’m fine. We need this money, for us and them and my mother.”
Their son began to scream. He’d accidentally squashed the beetle, bringing about an explosion of hysteria from his sister. Again, Franklin and Angela dove to the rescue, pulling them both out for an early trip to Sal’s.
It was dark, the stars in the sky bright and quiet. He did not know when it had become so, for a blink ago, the sun had just risen. Then, a serpent with the face of a little man brought with it a torch of bright, waving fire. It started from about a mile away, an approaching orb, and then it got closer. Franklin’s vision focused on the thing, and then there it was in front of him. The face was like a gnome’s, defined by puffed red cheeks and a glassy stare. Bald, not a hair on it. Its body was long, black, and scaly. Its jaw opened to reveal a set of fangs. Franklin raised his arm to the torch, and the fire began to eat the flesh. A jolt of pain, and it was daytime again. The serpent went, and a seven-inch maggot took its place. The maggot sat right over his hand, and the pain failed to register for a moment after his return to consciousness. It sucked on the tortured face of Franklin’s wrist, an undulating balloon.
Sheer repugnance—then, a second after, total welcome to the suckling larva. He hadn’t the energy to shout or scream any longer; that punch of horror had long seen its retreat to the dust-daubed edges of his brain. The primality severed its connection from the host, the violence diluted, the frenzy rendered ancient. That feeling, that perverse tugging, spayed and removed and gone it was; left in its place was a familiarly human sense of disbelief. Again, he began to reminisce; a memory of the park, of his arguments with Angela and their weeping children. The beetle hadn’t thought itself dead until after his son pressed his fingers together a little too tight. Or maybe it had known the moment it got picked up and locked its eyes with the dumb little boy who’d known no better.
What a strange day, Franklin thought to himself. He looked out and around; the simulated savanna sitting between the oversized trees. They looked artificial, out of a textbook on ancient Earth; perfect in their exposed roots, their inherent greatness. This was the life that reigned before he and his people had pillaged and discharged hellfire. Franklin became confident that he had been sent backward in time by that creature under the water, hundreds of millions of years.
He considered which period he had been sent back into, ironic, given his once-diverted interest in Earth’s history during his study of bacteriology. So much irony, like much of his life. Nonetheless, he estimated himself at the tail-end of the Carboniferous—if he wasn’t trapped in the mind of a malevolent demiurge. Then came the serpent, but Franklin had cast that entire event into the nightmare bin; it helped him catastrophize just a little less. Sure, his situation was preposterous, but not snake-with-a-face preposterous—no, his situation was a mere scientific miscalculation. An error, an underestimation in the power of the unknown, of the unknown that resided in the gorge of every ocean.
If he were 300 million years into the past, would that not signify he was the first of his kind? The first man to walk the earth? Franklin began to weep uncontrollably. Another fit. He beat himself, tore at the grass, and shouted as loud as he could. Or maybe he wasn’t in the past at all! Perhaps he was in a new world—and that ghoul he had seen under the ocean destroyed everything, rendering the landscape a crude mimicry of what had once existed. Maybe he was the last of his kind, left to wander as the final, rotting loiterer of humanity. Each thought was a stab, a no-good slap to the back of the head, and Franklin continued to sob. He snatched the maggot at once, a little too hard, losing control. It popped in a gruesome splatter of wilted flesh, congealed blood, and pus.
It was his third day by his count, and he was starving. Earlier in the morning he’d run from a carnivore that’d dropped off the nearest tree and started toward him like an automobile. This had led him into a jungle, where he’d fallen down a cliff edge and into a recess of overgrown flora. The insects were all about the size of his hand, all made him itch and squirm. For once, he understood his wife’s phobia. An hour later, he had managed back to another stretch of grassland, and again he was walking erratically, haunted by hunger.
That white substance that had come out of his wrist, he’d thought heavily on it since the maggot exploded. It was pus. An excessive amount of pus. Coming from pockets left inside of him by what he imagined might have been an insect, or that creature under the ocean. The burns on his ankles and what remained in his wrist began to leak the day before. He’d let them ooze until they were done. Not as violently as the first release. The two marks beneath his collarbones remained infertile. What they meant, Franklin did not know, but the pulsating they brought left him erratic in his own skin.
Franklin gaped at the maggot-gnawed skin that dressed his hand. The hand that had proposed to Angela. Greeted his mother on Christmas. Held his children. It was dark, sticky, torn, and traced in strange vein patterns. After a half hour, the burns began to leak anew, and once they had finished, he was famished like never before. Perhaps the hunger was rooted in that substance, relying on his dietary intake to regenerate more of itself. It required his protein, fat, and carbohydrates.
A robust, two-foot invertebrate stalked its prey: a small, pitiful lizard minding its way through a brush of dank greenery to its nest. The invertebrate was a dark color and resembled, in shape and in its intimidation, a modern-day scorpion. It was the wolf to the woolly careless pig of a lizard, which wobbled and swayed, evidently incompetent in survival. Once the lizard made it home, the scorpion struck, and in a bloody twenty-four seconds, the entire nest was eaten. There had been four of the reptiles, freshly hatched.
Then came the sharp rock into the prosoma of the scorpion. Franklin snatched the tail and barbarically tore it off, his foot placed onto the base of its body for leverage. His eyes were sunken and wild as he used the rock to jaggedly cut the creature open, shoveling its black entrails into his mouth. It had been one whole week.
This was the first time he’d managed any reasonable sustenance, as in the days before, he’d tried to feed on the vegetation, but his body refused. There was no guarantee he would keep anything down; he was in a world not designed for him.
An hour after he was vomiting, clasping his stomach tight in the fetal position in between some curious stalks of vegetation. He tried to cry, but instead found himself smacking his head onto the ground over and over until he knocked himself out. He had hiked miles, seen the large fungi at the periphery of the land, and walked a low-tide sandbar of the clearest water he’d ever seen. Gawked at the size of the spine trees with the rounded leaves, feared the predators and other unknowns that stalked around him, and each night asked for a new cave or hole to sleep in. But there was, Franklin felt, a severe absence of humanity, a severe exposure to the barbarity of nature. It was an exposure that left him numb, bewildered, mortified, and broken in more ways than one.
All Franklin knew with certainty was that he missed his wife, he missed his children, his family, his damned car, and most importantly, his fucking life.
What sick, twisted animal of a God had sent him here, had destined him to such languishing torture? He opened his eyes, still at the same burrow where he’d vomited. The same fetal position. He might as well have been dead then; he didn’t think it could have felt much different. A sound like a choir, a beautiful blend of alto, soprano, tenor, and a perfectly tuned piano—off to his left, and there, between shadows, a large fourteen-foot sculpture. A marble sculpture of nigh-divine precision. It was unfamiliar, not the making of Michelangelo or Auguste Rodin, but it came close to resembling their craftwork.
Disbelief invaded Franklin through every imaginable sense. A light parted through the clouds, befalling the muscles of the Man with a holy beam of benevolent radiation. He was nude, imposing on the ragged ground encircling him.
Dazed, Franklin rose, swayed, and started toward the structure.
The sky was a lavender hue, the body of the sacrosanct sculpture a shadow. He saw that the man was made of asimilar kind of marble that crafted David. The curve of every muscle, the slenderness of what looked to be a scarred body, with a head that reflected up at the painted clouds. A gloss on it with the uttermost flawless sheen, as it glistened like a shimmering summertime river, caught by the sun. Odd for the material was matte, and that sheen nearly seemed to levitate off from it in flakes of energy.
Franklin was on his knees, admiring the beauty and perfection of the statue. The build was stoic, still, even in the eye of the sun, the face was mostly obscured by its direction.
He began to pray, to repent, to confess his sins, to do whatever it took! But nothing, not for a moment. Silence, crashing waves, the sound began to die. Then, at the peak of that silence, a low croak of twisting rubber, and the head of the man was now staring down at him with smudged eyes. Eyes that saw through Franklin.
The primordial Darwinists halted their plunder; the strange scorpions, the bright green amphibians with oddly shaped bodies, the scuttling millipede ancestors, each and every single one had stopped, had regressed into a status of dumbfounded curiosity. They all watched, and the wind was gone save for the wind that blew through the marble hair of the Man, who remained focused on the kneeling survivor of the future, a homo sapien in white, malnourished, and beaten. Afraid.
The lips of the statue did not move, but the words reached Franklin in a tongue that he could understand. Perfect, modern English.
“A man out of time, not meant for this space. A lost soul in a sea of stars, anchoring at such a time before me. You wondered and probed why. Why did I get sent here to this place not intended? Why am I faced with such agony, barbarity, confusion, and trouble? Were you not asking what terrible God could have done this?”
Franklin stared blankly. Sweating, enigmatically locked.
“—humanity is One. A trial of attempts at achieving what we seek to achieve. You, Franklin, are the tributary of a failed endeavour, a loophole in the creation of the One. The last of a disappointment.”
The white substance finally spat from under Franklin’s collarbones and onto the rocks under him. He hooked forward in pain, gagged, and tried to scream.
“Beyond you, they stand, they who allow us a path. Because of you. But it must be you to command them, and for that, I must demonstrate to you my grievance.”
Franklin, only after spilling himself out again, turned over and saw at least a hundred of them. Monkey-men fastened in white robes. They stood upright, they held blades, their muscles bulging, and their bodies lean. The eyes an uncanny beyond the scaffolding of whatever his mind could have ever wanted to comprehend—big, dark like primates’, but indubitably intelligent—so strangely and perversely so that their united stare left him in a tremble. The white substance spilled into their crowd and expanded it, maturing the army. It was then that the sky went red.
The swell of blood, the raping of land and those belonging to it, the destruction and plagues and slavery and bigotry and genocidal war-mongering. The chaff of nuclear arsenals and the flesh of their teeming targets sizzling over black concrete. Crimson-scarred bodies flung into boiling oceans, ego-throttled dictators pressing on the control switch of concussive genocides—innocent flesh splayed, the conflicts of useless wars fought, abuse of those below. Children caught on spears, in flame. The bodies were there in the sky, and Franklin saw them all. The mushroom cloud of Nagasaki, a loud tumult behind him, and the soil was thrown to the stratosphere; it rained in teeth. The planet bled dry, the soul bled drier, the seed of mankind an empty vessel for chaos. Then a third mushroom cloud, and he saw the horrors of it all, continuing, unrelenting.
The Man drooled, and the ocean ran violent. A pair of black wings, beautiful and unutterably stygian, wider than the sky, appeared behind the sculpture.
Franklin gawked, trading depression for hope, hope for utter disbelief, for dread. He remembered his problem then, the terrible dilemma Angela had with his studies for the agency. He palmed his skull, tore his hair out, and shouted, but not a sound came out. A skinny, roughly dressed boy stood in front of him with an empty pot in the cold of his arms. The child stared.
“Do you command your children to annihilate when the time does come, Franklin? They are your seed. They shall only listen to their true Father.”
Franklin turned to the army, who all appeared much more like him now than they had before. Some wore military outfits, others business suits or cultish garb; some were nude, but all held rifles, all held a weapon of some sort. He remembered the deep-sea diving armor, the ‘Iron Man’, the smiles on the faces of the men on the platforms. Smoking and snickering. He remembered the pain he had endured since his encounter with that thing in the ocean. He rose to his feet, the boy frozen, an explosive cloud of unholy radioactive death behind him.
“Kill them,” Franklin decreed, and a gust of ashen wind blew him into the ocean of death behind the Man.
Franklin fell, the ebony soaring past, consuming. He was back in the diving suit, plunging into the ocean, the bubbles swimming past the lens of his helmet. The statue was far now, the light of the red sky bleeding into a star in the tar-black of his new atmosphere. He fell, and it grew hotter, hotter, and hotter, the skin on his body melting.
By God, what had he just done?