"They did actually creep, though, those thousands of days. Petty pace, and all that," he continued. "I know this intellectually, though something else is currently denying it. I am aware of it particularly, because I am especially conscious of the difference between that earlier time and this present. It was a cumulative thing, the change. Space travel, cities under the sea, the advances in medicine-even our first contact with the aliens-all of these things occurred at different times and everything else seemed unchanged when they did. Petty pace. Life pretty much the same but for this one new thing. Then another, at another time. Then another. No massive revolution. An incremental process is what it was. Then suddenly a man is ready to retire, and this gives rise to reflection. He looks back, back to Cambridge, where a young man is climbing a building. He sees those stars. He feels the texture of that roof. Everything that follows is a blur, a kaleidoscopic monochrome. He is here and he is there. Everything else is unreal. But they are two different worlds, Fred-two completely different worlds-and he didn't really see it happen, never actually caught either one in the act of going or coming. And that is the feeling that accompanies me tonight."

"Is it a good feeling or a bad one?" I said.

"I don't really know. I haven't worked up an emotion to go with it yet."

"Let me know when you do, will you? You've got me curious." He chuckled. I did, too.

"You know, it's funny," I said, "that you never stopped climbing."

He was silent for a while, then said, "About the climbing, it's rather peculiar ... Of course, it was somewhat in the nature of a tradition where I was a student, though I believe I liked it more than most. I kept at it for several years after I left the university, and then it became a more or less sporadic thing with changes of residence and lack of opportunity. I would get spells, though-compulsions, actually-when I just had to climb. I would take a holiday, then, to someplace where the architecture was congenial. I'd spend my nights scaling the buildings, clambering about rooftops and spires."