We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

The time would not pass. Somebody was playing with the clocks, and not only with the electric clocks, but the wind up kind too. The second hand on my watch would twitch once, and a year would pass, then it would twitch again. There was nothing I could do about it. As an earthling, I had to believe whatever clocks said, and calendars.

He slept well that night, out in the piney woods near Sunset Crater, twenty miles to the northeast, snug in his broad shouldered mummy bag, his goosedown sack, light as a feather, warm as the womb. Under the diamond blaze of Orion, the shimmer of the Seven Sisters, while shooting stars trailed languid flames through the troposphere. The sweetness of it. The satisfaction of a job well done. He dreamt of home. Wherever that is. Of silken thighs. Wherever they may lead. Of a tree greener than thought in a canyon red as iron.

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.