And there he was, packaged as thoroughly as a birthday present. All in all, things were not improving, he decided. Well, at least they seemed disposed to leave him alone now. And as yet they showed no tendency to shove him up on a laboratory shelf along with dusty jars of flefnobe fetuses pickled in alcohol.

The fact that he was probably the first human being in history to make contact with an extraterrestrial race failed to cheer Clyde Manship in the slightest.

First, he reflected, the contact had been on a distinctly minor key—the sort that an oddly colored moth makes with a collector’s bottle rather than a momentous meeting between the proud representatives of two different civilizations.

Second, and much more important, this sort of hands-across-the-cosmos affair was more likely to enthuse an astronomer, a sociologist or even a physicist than an assistant professor of Comparative Literature.

He’d had fantastic daydreams aplenty in his lifetime. But they concerned being present at the premiere of Macbeth, for example, and watching a sweating Shakespeare implore Burbage not to shout out the “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” speech in the last act: “For God’s sake, Dick, your wife just died and you’re about to lose your kingdom and your life—don’t let it sound like Meg at the Mermaid screaming for a dozen of ale. Philosophical, Dick, that’s the idea, slow, mournful and philosophical. And just a little bewildered.”

Or he’d imagined being one of the company at that moment sometime before 700 B.C. when a blind poet rose and intoned for the first time: “Anger, extreme anger, that is my tale…”

Or being a house guest at Yasnaya Polyana when Tolstoy wandered in from the garden with an abstracted look on his face and muttered: “Just got an idea for a terrific yarn about the Napoleonic invasion of Russia. And what a title! War and Peace. Nothing pretentious, nothing complicated. Just simply War and Peace. It’ll knock them dead in St. Petersburg, I tell you. Of course, it’s just a bare little short story at the moment, but I’ll probably think of a couple of incidents to pad it out.”