Mendoza, however, claimed that if a thing were sufficiently artificial, it became absolutely equivalent to the genuine. His mind puffed out ideas like the dandelion seed-head his chevelure so much resembled but we did not take any of his ideas seriously, not one of us, not any of them. Yet Hoffman refined Mendoza’s initially crude hypotheses of fissile time and synthetic authenticity and wove them together to form another mode of consciousness altogether. But we did not know that. We were content to laugh at Mendoza. We laughed uproariously.
