Chapter Five
Rigger’s besieged mind played tricks on him. At times, he imagined the tentacles of his disease reached slimy fingers into a synapse of his brain circuitry and tapped out some coded message to disrupt and bewilder his engineer’s logical sense of reason. Occasionally, these episodes would deliver a brilliant and painful burst of lightning. At other times, his mind would fill with boiling, silent thunderheads. Today, it was nothing more than a thick gray mist, echoing a persistent ringing. No matter what the mental weather, his intellect swung from near-genius to something either side of imbecile and back again.
Finally, he struggled to his feet to answer the ringing doorbell. An apple, wet-cherry red and glowing with a juicy crunch of promise, seemed to float of its own accor
