"He was millions of years younger now.

It was spring in the city. Small white clouds scudded overhead and the breeze reached down between buildings. Newspapers rambled past. Their shadows bounced beneath them, chasing them into the street and under the wheels of cars. He watched, entranced. The rush of traffic dazzled him. The sky's bright blue made him shiver. Every time he looked up, he felt his eyes startled wide and a small nervequake tremble down his back. He dared the sensations as he waited for his bus. He kept glancing from the street to the sky, triggering that dilation, that blossoming of color and spring. From time to time, he thought he caught the faint dusty odor of herd animals, but he dismissed the sensation. It was just the crowded city.

He felt older. He felt like he was losing time. Something had better happen. He felt something was going to happen. Someone would contact him or he would figure out something important. Was that just a feeling of spring? The dust swirled up around him and he held his breath until the air cleared. He had always had trouble with dust.

He let the buses roll past, missing his own more than once. Shoppers stood beside him - smiled, scowled, sniffed, ignored him - and then disappeared with groans of gears and clouds of blue exhaust. Seen through a quiver of hot gases, a girl across the street seemed to be on the point of disappearing. Her image shimmered in the waves of diffractive heat. He squinted and watched for her, too, to vanish, but her atoms remembered their places. Like a mirage becoming real, she pulled herself together, checked a price in a Macy's window display, and disappeared through a revolving doorway rather than blurring herself into oblivion. He blinked twice and let her go."