Without warning, the lobster lurches forward and rises up on its rear legs. It reaches out with huge claws, chellipeds coated with spiny hairs, and grabs Glashwiecz by his arms. “Hey!”

Glashwiecz tries to turn away, but the lobster is already looming over him, maxillipeds and maxillae reaching out from its head. There's a sickening crunch as one of his elbow joints crumbles, humerus shattered by the closing jaws of a chelliped. He draws breath to scream, then the four small maxillae grip his head and draw it down toward the churning mandibles.

Pierre scurries sideways, trying to find a line of fire on the lobster that doesn't pass through the lawyer's body. The lobster isn't cooperating. It turns on the spot, clutching Glashwiecz's convulsing body to itself. There's a stench of shit, and blood is squirting from its mouthparts. Something is very wrong with the biophysics model here, the realism turned up way higher than normal.

“Merde,” whispers Pierre. He fumbles with the bulky trigger, and there's a faint whirring sound but no explosion. More wet crunching sounds follow as the lobster demolishes the lawyer's face and swallows convulsively, sucking his head and shoulders all the way into its gastric mill.

She was trying to say something: “Dan, I don't know what you're thinking. If you think I was, if you think he—let me go. Let me go!” or some such. I kissed, I corked up her words and her breath with my mouth. Her eyes, so huge and close, were big enough for me and a dozen like me to tumble into and drown; I tumbled, I drowned.

LRC [LewRockwell.com] is a damned ugly sight and they do indeed preach to the choir—but I find it similar to enjoying a hideously fat woman belt out some of my favorite operas.

With a deep and quiet joy I recognized the beginnings of my own climax, and here again it was new, new. For usually it was rush upward toward the final explosion, with perhaps a split-second pause of almost unbearable sensitivity before the ejaculation—and that was a short series of electric thumps and a complete fall from whatever heights to the ever-present here-and-now. Thinking of the way it used to be, a phrase occurs to me: “I never left home.” But now…

Now I rode no rockets to a quick burst of color and a cinder-fall. They say that when a three-hundred-foot tidal wave struck somewhere in the Pacific, fishermen eleven miles were unaware of its passage, so gently and massively were they raised and let down. This is the way I was carried up to a height I had never before known; it was that all-but-unbearable point of sensitivity that I had flicked past so many times before; but this time I rested there forever, while time stopped. It was from this altitude that my joybursts were launched—not the abrupt sequence of little gouts of relief, but long sibilant syllables arcing up and out into a universe I had never known existed. Four, five of them, another, and then an interminable rest on that summit, and then one more, and then the last.

I had always been silent before; now, I shouted.

[…]

Then the great wave let me down, let me down peacefully and easily into the presence of my wife and my world and a sunshowered here and now.

At last I looked at her; I took her elbows and looked down into her face, her dear face. Liza is one of those women who is the envy and despair of all the other women her age; she always, always would look younger than she was and younger than all of them. It wasn't only the small, slender, firm body and the smooth skin and clear eyes; it was the way she carried herself, the way, when she moved or spoke, she released energy rather than stoking it up and eking it out like the rest of us. She kept her masses of blue-fired black hair rolled and folded up into a gleaming dark helmet and her eyes were not green, as they seemed to be, but an illuminated blue full of so many flecks of gold that they seemed to be green.