"Well?  Are you going to help me beach this thing?"

And at that moment everything changed.  I still am unable to fully describe just how it changed.  The beach was the same.  The sunlight streamed down just as it had before.  The waves never missed a beat.  My heart continued to meter out the seconds of my life.  But I knew something fundamental and important was no longer as it had been before.

There are hundreds of words describing paranormal phenomena.  I've examined and considered most of them, and none fits what happened when the Admiral spoke.  There are many words for odd states of mind, for moods, for emotions and things seen and not-seen, things glimpsed, things incompletely understood or remembered, for degrees of memory.  Things that go bump in the night.  None of them were adequate.  We're going to have to come up with some new words-which was precisely the CC's point in letting me experience this.

I went into the water up to my knees and helped the old man pull the boat onto the shore.  It was quite heavy; we didn't get it far.  He produced a rope and tied the boat to a palm tree.

"I could use a drink," he said.  "The whole point of this was so I could have a drink with you.  Like a human being."

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak yet.  He followed me up the path to my Robinson Family tree house, stood admiring it for a moment, and then followed me up the stairs and onto the lower veranda.  He paused to admire the workmanship of my wheel-and-pulley waterworks, which used the power of the nearby stream to provide me with drinking and washing water high up in the tree.  I showed him to my best rattan chair and went to the sideboard, where I poured us both glasses of the very last of my best whiskey.  I paused to wind up the Victrola and put on one of my three scratchy cylinders:  The Blue Danube.  Then I handed him his drink, took mine, and sat down facing him.

"To indolence," he said, raising his glass.

"I'm too lazy to drink to that.  To industry."  We drank, and he looked around again.  I must have glowed with pride.  It was quite a place, though I say it myself.  A lot of work and ingenuity had gone into it, from the dense-woven mats on the floor, to the slate fireplace, to the tallow candles in sconces arrayed around the walls.  Stairs led off in two directions, to the bedroom, and the crow's nest.  My desk was open and cluttered with the pages of the novel I'd recently resumed.  I was bursting to tell him of the difficulties I'd had producing usable paper and ink.  Try it sometime, when you've got a few spare months.

"It must have taken a lot of industry to produce all this," he said.

"A year's worth.  As you know."