He saw the crowd and thought of the waves moving through
them, breaking into white, swallowing foam. The small figures
dimly sensed the eddies of the waves as paradox, as riddle,
and heard the tick of time without knowing what they sensed,
and clung to their linear illusions of past and future, of
progression, of their opening births and yawning deaths to
come... And he thought of Markham and his mother and all
these uncountable people, never loosening their grip on their
hopes, and their strange human sense, their last illusion,
that no matter how the days moved through them, there always
remained the pulse of things coming, the sense that even now
there was yet still time.
-- Gregory Benford, Timescape
