Late that night, Moon-Watcher suddenly awoke. In the caves, between spells of fitful dozing and fearful waiting, were being born the nightmares of generations yet to be. The night wore on, cold and clear, without further alarms, and the Moon rose slowly amid equatorial constellations that no human eye would ever see. As they saw him coming they began to dance, shake their arms, and shriek on their side of the stream, and his own people replied in kind. There were about thirty of them, and they could not have been distinguished from the members of MoonWatcher's own tribe. Once outside, he threw the body over his shoulder and stood upright - the only animal in all this world able to do so. Moon-Watcher picked up the shriveled corpse and dragged it after him as he bent under the low overhang of the cave. One of the mothers, defending the infant she could not properly feed, gave him an angry growl in return he lacked the energy even to cuff her for her presumption. The two babies were already whimpering for food, but became silent when Moon-Watcher snarled at them. So for every man who has ever lived, in this Universe there shines a star. Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth. Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.
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