Brian had often recalled those months in the meeting room as a sort of island in time, like the first hour of discovering that he could play Beethoven; or like the curiously cherished, more than life-size half-hour back there in Newburg, in 2071, when he had briefly met and spoken with an incredibly old man, Abraham Brown, President of the Western Federation at the time of the Civil War. Brown, with a loved world in almost total ruin around him, had spoken pleasantly of small things--of chrysanthemums that would soon be blooming in the front yard of the house where he lived with friends, of a piano recital by Van Anda at Ithaca, in 2067, which the old man remembered with warm enthusiasm. Yes, the Museum Directors had died easily, and now the old innocent bodies would be quite decent. There were no vermin in the Museum. The doorways and floors were tight, the upper windows unbroken. One of the white-haired men had a Ming vase on his desk. He had not dropped from his chair, but looked as if he had fallen comfortably asleep in front of the vase with his head on his arms. Brian had left the vase untouched, but had taken one other thing, moved by some stirring of his own never-certain philosophy and knowing that he would not return to this room, ever. Another Director had been opening a wall cabinet when he fell; the small key lay near his fingers. Plainly their discussion had not been concerned only with war, perhaps not at all with war--after all, there were other topics. The Ming vase would have had a part in it. Brian wished he could know what the old man had meant to choose from the cabinet. Sometimes, even now, he dreamed of conversations with that man, in which the Director told him the whole truth about that and other matters; but what was certainty in sleep was in the morning gone like childhood. For himself, Brian had taken a little image of rock-hard clay, blackened, two-faced, male and female. Prehistoric, or at any rate wholly primitive, unsophisticated, meaningful like the blameless motion of an animal in sunlight, Brian had said: "With your permission, gentlemen." He had closed the cabinet and then, softly, the outer door. "I'm old," Brian said to the red evening. "Old, a little foolish, talk aloud to myself. I'll have some Mozart before supper." * * * * * He transferred the fresh venison from the canoe to a small raft hitched inside the window. He had selected only choice pieces, as much as he could cook and eat in the few days before it spoiled, leaving the rest for the wolves or any other forest scavengers who might need it. There was a rope strung from the window to the marble steps that led to the next floor--home.