The thing stood below him trying to continue the deception. It was seething. What appeared to be a man looked up and smiled. Its eyes were nonseeing but looked right through him. The hair on its head faded away, and it was bald. Its face and hands began to darken from caucasian to black. A beard sprouted on its face along with an afro.
    Dan gripped the edge of the balcony. He was repulsed but entranced by the transformations taking place two stories beneath him. He wanted to move away, move as far away as possible, but he knew that the edge of the balcony was the safest place. Hanging out by the state line, here on the verge of solid and gas. The surface of the planet meeting the expanse of sky leading to space and the void.
    And the liquid thing below him. Its head and hands were bulbous blobs. Still, it wore an incessant three piece suit and somehow smiled.
    "Imagine the power of it," Dan thought. "One equation, simple sophmoronic calculus. The universe in black and white, depending on what color ink one used. Everything generated out of nothing, conformity from chaos, and vice versa...."
    "So what do you see?" the creature taunted.
    Dan grinned back, but could feel the repulsion and fear in his own eyes. He was about to reply when the thing sprouted a third leg from its groin. The new appendage reached the ground sheathed in a pant leg as if the suit were tailored for the tripodal carriage. Dan suspended any reaction; a curious smell began to reach his nostrils. He looked around at the humanoids gathered on the ground. They all seemed rather normal, just an absence of details; there was no distinct definition of differentness.
    "You know what I see... you programmed it," Dan half growled, half shouted back to the being as a third arm began to grow from its chest. Sweating furiously, Dan noticed a cerain fuzziness to all the lines of the buildings around the lot. An certain ethereal mist in various colors seemed to float around. Everthing kind of flickered once or twice.
    "You know the deal," he added, then thinking to himself: "That smell, like brimstone... just how close am I? Boy, is it hot." Then yelling:
    "I have the key and if you don't want it lost for all ages... if you don't want it splattered all over the pavement down there...."
    Solid. The lot was as lucid as his own hands before his face. The caucasian below him had strong Aryan features and uniforms on the men around the perimeter of the lot were those of nazis. The east was growing lighter, obscured by clouds.
    "So what are you waiting for," the blond man called up.
    "I'm waiting for the sun."
    "Sun's up," without consulting the sky.
    "I see clouds on the horizon," Dan observed, and there were.
    "What's that supposed to mean?"
    "Come on," Dan sneered back. "Get your act together; let's put this show on the road."
    And that they did, for at that moment, six burly men appeared on the balcony. Dan could only think of them as gorillas, for they communicated in monosyllabic grunts, grabbed him and placed him in manacles. They carried him down four flights of stairs, across the street and into a large building. And though the name of the street was Grace, he was treated the respect of a bunch of bananas cleaved from a tree.