As I understand the matter, Charles, your friend Harl will show you this letter in the book in which it is reprinted. You will read it and be enraged. You will profanely declare it nonsense. Harl will thereupon show it to your friends Stan and Laki—and of course to Ginny. And they will gang up on you. They will demand clamorously that you see if it is true. Ginny, in particular, will coax you—stamping her foot from time to time—and no descendant of mine—or of hers, if you can possibly grasp the idea—could possibly refuse Ginny anything.

Anyhow, on the morning after somebody named Dorlig wins the Lunar ground-to-ground race (your great-etc.-grandmother has dated it for me that way, Charles) your friends will descend upon you chanting demands for action. Stan will have bet his shirt on Dorlig on the authority of this fiction-tale. He will have won himself a nice piece of change. Harl will have bet more conservatively, but he’ll be feeling pretty good too. Only you will have been too obstinate to wager a single coin on the winning of that race. And Ginny, knowing from the story what is to come next and halfway believing it, will be most especially irresistible. They will arrive in a group, creating a tumult and demanding to be introduced to your fifty-two-times-removed-great-grandfather. And you will growl at them and take them furiously down into the rumpus-room to prove to them that they are half-wits. Which they are not.

I would like to draw a dramatic picture of two concurrent scenes, here, of the events taking place at two so-widely-separated spots. In the physics lab of Collins University, away back in the twentieth century, I sat. Joe had gone plodding over to a hardware store to buy a hank of sash cord. I wouldn’t trust to the string that had sufficed for Norton. I sat in the dusty, hot laboratory, listening to the buzzing of a fly, and Norton, snoring off in the corner, and the gay laughter of bespectacled schoolteachers being charming and girlish out on the campus. All was peace. All was tranquility. I was genuinely thrilled by what had happened to Norton and was about to happen to me, but I didn’t know Ginny was in my immediate future. If I had, I’d have been in a hurry.