As if in a dream, Selby unlatched the cages and took out two rabbits, one a buck, the other a doe heavy with young. He put them under his arms, warm and quivering. He got into the pickup with them and drove northward, past the fields of corn, until he reached the edge of the cultivated land. He walked through the undergrowth to a clearing where tender shoots grew. He put the rabbits down. They snuffed around suspiciously. One hopped, then the other. Presently they were out of sight.
Selby felt as if his blood were fizzing; he was elated and horrified all at once. He drove the pickup to the highway and parked it just outside town. Now he was frozen and did not feel anything at all.
From the hotel he made arrangements for his departure. Miss Sonnstein accompanied him to the jump terminal. “Good-bye, Mr. Selby. I hope you have had a pleasant visit.”
“It has been most enlightening, thank you.”
“Please,” she said.
It was raining in Houston, where Selby bought, for sentimental reasons, a bottle of Old Space Ranger. The shuttle was crowded and smelly; three people were coughing as if their lungs would burst. Black snow was falling in Toronto. Selby let himself into his apartment, feeling as if he had never been away. He got the bottle out of his luggage, filled a glass, and sat for a while looking at it. His notes and the copies of Petryk’s papers were in his suitcase, monuments to a book that he now knew would never be written. The doggerel of “XC” ran through his head. Two lines of it, actually, were not so bad: