Now is a sufficient tomorrow for all my yesterdays—if I will see to the circumstance in person.
This summary was a current that carried away the incubus of that early morning and left me sound asleep on the divan.
When I woke up I saw by my watch—which slid on its gold band when I moved my thin, saturate wrist—that it had passed nine o'clock. I budged and yawned and swam up into the room. I felt better—the other side of age having somewhat returned during the nap.
Paul still lay on his back, mouthing and snoring and sweating.
Room service brought cold orange juice and good, hot coffee with a civilized cup to drink from.
I needed assistance—which is to say, Paul needed it. A friend. An attorney. I could hardly spend the whole day with him unless there was no alternative. Yet certainly he should not be alone with his callow impetuosity. And certainly his young colleagues would be too inept for a proper handling of all the potential dilemmas. He needed a Danaos—he had always needed one, a wise older slave to manage his love affairs—a shrewd promoter. Lacking such a companion he had invested the meaningless savings of youth's passion in one whore. Profligate, comical, and a disaster.
I considered Johann Brink.
Women, he would say, do not exist in the laboratory.
When you switch on the cyclotron, you switch off She.
It was too damned bad they hadn't taken women along in there with the atoms—flame inspiratrice, man's soul. They might have discovered more concerning the nature of the velocity of light and the behavior of particles and even the essence of packing fractions than they'd learned by the castrate inspection of their micros and macros and milles.