ting into each other. In looking back, as in looking back upon
dreams, I seem to recall only a few isolated periods clearly; and it
seems that my imagination must have filled in the swift movement between
episodes. I think now, of necessity, in terms of centuries and
millenniums, rather than days and months.... The snow blows terribly
about my little fire, and I know it will soon gather courage to quench
us both ...

* * * * *

Years passed, at first with a sort of clear wonder. I watched things
that took place everywhere in the world. I studied. The other students
were much amazed to see me, a man of thirty odd, coming back to college.

"But Judas, Dennell, you've already got your Ph.D! What more do you
want?" So they would all ask me. And I would reply;

"I want an M.D. and an F.R.C.S." I didn't tell them that I wanted
degrees in Law, too, and in Biology and Chemistry, in Architecture and
Engineering, in Psychology and Philosophy. Even so, I believe they
thought me mad. But poor fools! I would think. They can hardly realize
that I have all of eternity before me to study.

I went to school for many decades. I would pass from University to
University, leisurely gathering all the fruits of every subject I took
up, revelling in study as no student revelled ever before. There was no
need of hurry in my life, no fear of death too soon. There was a
magnificence of vigor in my body, and a magnificence of vision and
clarity in my brain. I felt myself a super-man. I had only to go on
storing up wisdom until the day should come when all knowledge of the
world was mine, and then I could command the world. I had no need for
hurry. O vast life! How I gloried in my eternity! And how little good it
has ever done me, by the irony of God.

For several centuries, changing my name and passing from place to place,
I continued my studies. I had no consciousness of monotony, for, to the
intellect, monotony cannot exist: it was one of those emotions I had
left behind. One day, however, in the year 2132, a great discovery was
made by a man called Zarentzov. It had to do with the curvature of
space, quite changing the conceptions that we had all followed since
Einstein. I had long ago mastered the last detail of Einstein's theory,
as had, in time, the rest of the world. I threw myself immediately into
the study of this new, epoch-making conception.

To my amazement, it all seemed to me curiously dim and el