They would fail. We would always fail. We weren’t built to do anything but fail. We had the wrong kind of… — Clifford D. Simak

We feel much sorrow for you, the elm tree had said. But what kind of sorrow—a real and sincere sorrow, or the superficial and pedantic sorrow of the immortal for a frail and flickering creature that was about to die?

What strange circumstances, or what odd combination of many circumstances, must occur, I wondered, to make it possible for a man to step from one world to another.

“They’re just ordinary people,” Nancy said. “You can’t expect too much of them.”