"You don't know that!" I said.
He smiled, showing all his teeth, and I knew he knew it.
"A swirl in the stream of time. A temporary gathering of bits, a few random dust specks, so to speak--pure metaphor, you understand--then by chance a vast floating cloud of dustspecks, an expanding universe--"
He shrugged. "Complexities: green dust as well as the regular kind. Purple dust. Gold. Additional refinements: sensitive dust, copulating dust, WORSHIPFUL DUST!" He laughed, hollow as the cavern around him.
"New laws for each form, of course. New lines of potential. Complexity beyond complexity, accident on accident, until--" His leer was like icy wind.
"Go on," I said.
He closed his eyes, still smiling.
"Pick an apocalypse, any apocalypse. A sea of black oil and dead things. No wind. No light. Nothing stirring, not even an ant, a spider. A silent universe. Such is the end of the flicker of time, the brief hot fuse of events and ideas set off, accidentally, and snuffed out, accidentally, by man. Not a real ending of course, nor even a beginning. Mere ripple in Time's stream."
I squinted. "That could really happen?"
"It has happened," he said--and smiled as if it pleased him--"in the future. I am the witness."
I thought about it for a while, remembering the harp, then shook my head. "I don't believe you."
"It will come."
I went on squinting at him, hand on my mouth. He could lie. He was evil enough.
He shook his ponderous head. "Ah, man's cunning mind!" he said, and cackled. "Merely a new complexity, a new event, a new set of nonce-rules generating further nonce-rules, down and down and down. Things lock on, you know, The Devonian fish, the juxtaposed thumb, the fontanel, technology--click click, click click..."
"I think you're lying," I said, confused again, aswirl in words.
"I noticed that. You'll never know. It must be very frustrating to be caged like a Chinaman's cricket in a limited mind." His cackle lacked spirit this time. He was growing very weary of my presence.
"You said `Fiddlesticks'," I said. "Why is it fiddlesticks if I stop giving people heart attacks over nothing? Why souldn't one change one's ways, improve one's character?" I must have been an interesting sight, that instant, big shaggy monster intense and earnest, bent like a priest at his prayers.
He shrugged. "Whatever you like. Do as you think best."
"But why?"
"`Why? Why?' Ridiculous question! Why anything? My advice to you--"
I clenched my fists, though it was absurd, of course. One does not swing at dragons.
"NO, WHY?"