usive. I could
not quite grasp what Zarentzov was trying to formulate.

"Why," I cried, "the thing is a monstrous fraud!" I went to the
professor of Physics in the University I then attended, and I told him
it was a fraud, a huge book of mere nonsense. He looked at me rather
pityingly.

"I am afraid, Modevski," he said, addressing me by the name I was at the
time using, "I am afraid you do not understand it, that is all. When
your mind has broadened, you will. You should apply yourself more
carefully to your Physics." But that angered me, for I had mastered my
Physics before he was ever born. I challenged him to explain the theory.
And he did! He put it, obviously, in the clearest language he could. Yet
I understood nothing. I stared at him dumbly, until he shook his head
impatiently, saying that it was useless, that if I could not grasp it I
would simply have to keep on studying. I was stunned. I wandered away in
a daze.

For do you see what happened? During all those years I had studied
ceaselessly, and my mind had been clear and quick as the day I first had
left the hospital. But all that time I had been able only to remain what
I was--an extraordinarily intelligent man of the twentieth century. And
the rest of the race had been progressing! It had been swiftly gathering
knowledge and power and ability all that time, faster and faster, while
I had been only remaining still. And now here was Zarentzov and the
teachers of the Universities, and, probably, a hundred intelligent men,
who had all outstripped me! I was being left behind.

And that is what happened. I need not dilate further upon it. By the end
of that century I had been left behind by all the students of the world,
and I never did understand Zarentzov. Other men came with other
theories, and these theories were accepted by the world. But I could not
understand them. My intellectual life was at an end. I had nothing more
to understand. I knew everything I was capable of knowing, and,
thenceforth, I could only play wearily with the old ideas.

* * * * *

Many things happened in the world. A time came when the East and West,
two mighty unified hemispheres, rose up in arms: the civil war of a
planet. I recall only chaotic visions of fire and thunder and hell. It
was all incomprehensible to me: like a bizarre dream, things happened,
people rushed about, but I never knew what they were doing. I lurked
during all that time in