leed anywhere. It turns the big
parts of you inside out, but not the blood tubes. All your skin--your
eyes, ears, nose, toes, all of it--becoming the lining of a little hole
that's half-filled with your hair.

"Meantime, your insides are exposed for whatever the healer wants to do
to them. You live for a while on the air inside the hole. First the
healer gives you an air that makes you sleep, or you go mad in about
fifty heartbeats. We'll see what ten heartbeats do to you without the
sleepy air. Now will you talk?"

* * * * *

I hadn't been listening to her, though, not the real me, or I'd have
gone mad without getting the treatment. I once heard Doc say your liver
is more mysterious and farther away from you than the stars, because
although you live with your liver all your life, you never see it or
learn to point to it instinctively, and the thought of someone messing
around with that intimate yet unknown part of you is just too awful.

I knew I had to do something quick. Hell, at the first hint of
Introversion, before Kaby had even named it, Illy had winced so that his
tentacles were all drawn up like fat feather-sausages. Erich had looked
at him questioningly, but that lousy Looney had un-endeared himself to
me by squeaking, "Don't mind me, I'm just sensitive. Get on with the
girl. Make her tell."

Yes, I knew I had to do something, and here on the floor that meant
thinking hard and in high gear about something else. The screwball
sculpture Erich had tried to smash was a foot from my nose and I saw a
faint trail of white stuff where it had skidded. I reached out and
touched the trail; it was finely gritty, like powdered glass. I tipped
up the sculpture and the part on which it had skidded wasn't marred at
all, not even dulled; the gray spheres were as glisteningly bright as
ever. So I knew the trail was diamond dust rubbed off the diamonds in
the floor by something even harder.

That told me the sculpture was something special and maybe Doc had had a
real idea in his pickled brain when he'd been pushing the thing at all
of us and trying to tell us something. He hadn't managed to say anything
then, but he had earlier when he'd been going to tell us what to do
about the bomb, and maybe there was a connection.

I twisted my memory hard and let it spring back and I got "Inversh ...
bosh ..." Bosh, indeed! Bosh and inverse bosh to all boozers, Russki or
otherwise.

So I quick trie