Philip Jose Farmer by The Other Log of Phileas Fogg Read Free Book Online Page A

he’d suffer derailments, cerebral wrecks. The pain and the brain damage would be terrible. He had been assured of this by that old Eridanean, Sir Heraclitus Fogg, the being who had raised him. Sir Heraclitus knew that would happen from personal experience and from having observed other Eridaneans.
    The baronet, long involved in a particularly sticky situation, had blocked off his anxieties and many of his passions. And one day, just after he had killed two Capelleans in the Paris sewers, he had been struck down from within. The pain had lasted for days, and he had been half-blind and paralyzed on his right side for a year. Fortunately, Eridaneans, not humans, had found him. If the latter had come along, and he had been carried off to a hospital and given an examination, he might have been exposed as a nonterrestrial. This had happened a few times before, but the Eridaneans, or the Capelleans, had heard of it and managed to hush it up.
    Fogg had been only ten at the time. He still remembered his grief and terror when his foster-father was brought home late at night in a van driven by two Eridaneans. The baronet was the only parent he had, the only one he deeply loved. His mother had died when he was four, slain, according to Sir Heraclitus, by Capelleans. His real father, he knew, had wanted nothing to do with him and so Phileas hated him.
    Not long after his mother’s death, the baronet had begun to drop hints, to tell little stories of far-off places and distant times. Gradually, Phileas had been shown the truth. And so he had grown up, Earthling by heredity but Eridanean by education, conditioning, and love. He had not known how much by love until his foster-father was brought home from Paris. The thought that he might die or remain paralyzed shocked Phileas. Yet, a few minutes later, he was acting as if nothing ever upset him. He had blocked off the trauma. And he was still paying for it. Sir Heraclitus, when well enough to understand what had happened to his foster-son, had almost had a relapse. Quickly, he described to Phileas the results if he did not start releasing the trauma. It would build up as other anxieties and shocks were added to it. One day, the suppressed hurts would flash forth in a devastating neural current.
    What young Phileas had to do was to construct the mental equivalent of a trickle capacitor in his circuits. Thus, he could discharge the load slowly. This would hurt, but it would not be ruinous.
    Phileas knew what a capacitor was. He had learned about it in the laboratory in the cellar of the manor. It was far advanced over the Leyden jar or condenser of the time, and he had been sworn to secrecy concerning it.
    Phileas did as directed, though not always with one hundred percent control. Unfortunately, he had set up in his neural configurations a regenerative feedback. As fast as he bled off the traumas, these bred new energy. Sir Heraclitus was puzzled by this and finally called in Andrew Stuart. This was when Phileas was twelve, after the blood-sharing ceremony which made him a full-fledged Eridanean. It had also made him a sick one for a while, since the elder Fogg’s and Stuart’s corpuscles used vanadium, not iron, for oxygen-carriers.
    Stuart had said that Phileas’ traumas were feeding off early, and as yet unapproachable, traumas. These had been caused by the desertion of his real father and his mother’s death. He had blocked these off through natural, though not desirable, means. And a natural block had, in a sense, to be tunneled to.
    Meanwhile, Phileas was suffering the daily uneasiness, shocks, and hurts that all flesh, terrestrial or not, was heir to. Storing and discharging these occupied much of his time, and so he had never caught up with the main task. Though he had kept to a strict exterior or physical schedule these last four years, he was far behind on his interior, or psychic, timetable.
    From twelve until twenty-one, he had been busy with his education. This was gotten