Once I saw a mouse in my office at MIT. It ran along the wall between my desk and a file cabinet. To my surprise, the mouse appeared to run in the manner of Disney’s cartoon characters: the caricature of stealth, it bounced high on tiptoe, its back hunched. I could almost hear the soundtrack with pizzicato accompaniment of the mouse’s dash.

Addendum (December 24, 1991)

At the time I was giving an interview to an Italian journalist about my work in space architecture. In fact, it was she who spotted the mouse first. We laughed and resumed talking about human settlements in the Asteroid Belt. The old mice will figure out how to follow us there, too.