Sunset—odd, how the conditioning worked. Was it conditioning? Or were the old wives' tales not so absurd, after all? But he could go out in the sunlight—had done it many times. His tan proved it. He touched silver and cold iron countless times each day, crossed running water—and he'd gone to church every Sunday, until he was twelve. No, there was a core of truth under the fantastically complex shell of nonsense, but the old limitations were not part of it. He shrugged. Neither were most of the powers.
Still, he liked to sleep in the daytime. His schedule seemed to gain an hour at night, lose one in the morning, until, almost unnoticeably, it had slipped around the clock.
He went into the bathroom while the worn tubes in the radio warmed up slowly, and washed his face, brushed his teeth, shaved. He combed his hair, then paused thoughtfully. Wouldn't do any harm. No full moon in here, either, he thought, looking up at the circular fluorescent tube in the ceiling, but he noticed no impediment as he coalesced, dropped to all fours, and ran his pelt against the curry-combs he had screwed to the bathroom door. He did a thorough job, enjoying it, and, after he had realigned, walked out of the bathroom in time to hear the Giants making their final, fruitless out of the first game. Five-Zero, Cincinnati, and he grimaced in disgust. Four shut-outs in the last five games.
He laughed at himself, then, for actually being annoyed. Still and all, it wasn't the first time a man became emotionally involved in a mirage.
Was it a mirage? True, there weren't really any such things as the San Francisco Giants—but a man could certainly be expected to forget that, occasionally, if he were part of the same illusion at least half the time. And certainly, such stuff as dreams are made of is solid enough when you are yourself a dream.
He went out in the kitchen and started coffee, then came back and sat down next to the radio, hardly listening to the recap of the game.
Odd, how it had all started. Being suddenly marooned on this planet, forced to survive, somehow, through the long years while waiting for rescue. How many years had it been, now? Some five hundred thousand, in the subjective reference for this particular universe. He knew the formula for conversion into objective time—it all worked out to the equivalent of about six months—but that wasn't what mattered, as long as they'd all had to survive in this universe.
Sleep—suspended animation, if you wanted to call it that—had been the only answer. And they couldn't do that, directly. They'd had to resort to chrysalids.
He smiled to himself, got up, and turned down the fire under the pot until the coffee was percolating softly.