Time is still the great mystery to us. It is no more than a concept; we don't know if it even exists... - Clifford D. Simak

That was the way with Man; it had always been that way. He had carried terror with him. And the thing he was afraid of had always been himself.

The alien stood in shadow and he looked, Enoch thought, more than ever like the cruel clown. His lithe, flowing body had the look of smoked, tanned buckskin. The patchwork color of his hide seemed to shine with a faint luminescence and the sharp, hard angles of his face, the smooth baldness of his head, the flat, pointed ears pasted tight against the skull lent him a vicious fearsomeness. If one did not know him for the gentle character that he was, Enoch told himself, he would be enough to scare a man out of seven years of growth.

Accident, he wondered, or a way of hiding? Trapped or planned? He had no way of knowing and further speculation was ridiculous, based as it necessarily must be upon earlier assumptions that were entirely without support.