5-OW -NOX THERE’S A SIGN I ALWAYS WATCH FOR: BEFORE EVERY MAJOR CASE, everything goes quiet in the House by the Bridge. If I find myself dozing for several nights in a row in my armchair, my feet up on the desk, it means that some hullabaloo or other will soon be in full swing. And, in point of fact, I don’t mind. Serving in the Secret Investigative Force isn’t yet just a routine for me. And if everything continues the way it’s going now, it’s unlikely that it ever will be. When urgent matters crop up (and there are more of them than there are agents), my personal time-frame stops coinciding with the pace of the hands on the clock. Sometimes I seem to live through a few years in just one day; but at the end of the day I’m not any older. I like this. I’m hungry for life. Even those several hundred years that are almost guaranteed to every inhabitant of this World seem like a very short allotment of infinity to me. I admit, hand on heart, that I just want to live forever—preferably without becoming too decrepit, though being old doesn’t really frighten me.
