The stars began to move.

They moved in a land of viscous dance, as if caught in a web. As if trapped and tangled in a quivering spider-web with moony spokes of light radiating from the hidden center. I felt sorry for the stars. God is the Great Night Spider.

Cassiopeia was a silver blue firefly snared alive in the quilted folds of the cobweb sky. The stars were points of light shining through pinholes in that rumpled mass. (Oh ho, I thought, so the ancients were right all along. Thales, Anaximander, Anaxagoras, those boys.)

I didn’t like this jellyfish world. Worth visiting once, maybe, but I don’t want to live here. An intellectual nausea rose in my soul. When do we get out of here? How do we get out of here? Panic gripped me for a moment. It passed.

Taking great care, I got to my feet and cautiously walked away from the fire, the bones in my pelvis grinding on one another like splintered glass. My body was a foreign object, a gigantic robot; I was the tiny pilot behind the eyesockets high in the bridge of the skull.

I noted the extravagant, excessive clarity of everything about me and within me, as if I were wandering through a grade B 3-D movie. What am I doing here?

What I meant to do, feeling my way around in the Valley of Death, was take an ordinary bourgeois piss. But when I started taking that weird thing out of the fly of my jeans—shall I describe that? that way it kept unreeling, like a firehose?—I discovered I couldn’t. Because I knew, knew with absolute conviction, that if I urinated I would be urinating blood. So I stuffed it back inside, carefully, which took about an hour.

Terry still sat by the fire, motionless, the beatific grin on his saintly, silly, obnoxious face, enjoying his metaphysical picnic. His brains turning soft as Camembert in the acid bath. Well, he had the proper set, the correct predisposition. The power of faith. Miracles come to those who need them. I envied and hated him.

“Look at that swine,” I said loudly, addressing the Great Spider in the Sky. “Look at him sitting there grinning at me like a diabolical Fu Manchu, like a sinister Svengali son of a bitch.” The firelight gleamed on his prescription spectacles; all I could see of his nearsighted eyes were two opaque, mirrorlike disks. His balding dome. His groovy mustache.

“Say something,” I roared. No reply. I roared again.

Nothing moved him. He merely sat there staring at me, smiling.

I knew by now that nothing more was going to happen. The peak had passed. Whatever might happen to others, it was not going to happen in me. And I didn’t care; I was happy, pleased with what I considered my power and strength. By God, no lousy little 350 mikes of LSD was going to blow my brains to the moon. My sense of self was too strong to be dissolved in mere chemicals.