"The Key" was inspired by my dreams and fantasies of how I might go back to 1416 Hopkins Street and Jenny in 1967-68.


    They worked in a dingy basement near Dupont Circle in Washington. Once they had been respected scientists but now they were just another handful of gray people in a city full of gray people, gray-haired and white-bearded. They were trying to change the world, and sometimes it seemed as if everybody who had lived in the past fifteen years was a key. But they narrowed it down to a hundred very easily and then painstakingly down to ten. Finally they chose one key out of the ten, but their criteria were so ill-defined that they might just as well have chosen one of the ten at random.