The rate at which things are occurring strikes him as marginally alarming, as if he has just been recruited to some unknown cause in which his participation is imminent.

"Being a displaced member of mathematical intelligentsia is not a skillset applicable to keeping a dog," he says.

He stares at it. Thus far it seems to be avoiding doing anything besides snuffling intermittently and neglecting to put up even so much as a token resistance against gravity's slow, grasping, unrelenting pull.

The dog might possibly be growing on him.