Bill was afraid. He was an adult. He didn't have the answer. And he was very afraid. He knew how to distinguish the qualities of fear. There was the fear of not getting caught by your mom after a small mischief. The fear of not being found out that you copied on the test. The fear of failure. The fear of being rejected by your group (thus the fear of being alone). The fear of bees. The fear of the dentist. All these varieties of fear he knew well, he had repeatedly faced them in the past, sometimes with relative success, sometimes not.

But this here was something else, deeper, more primitive. Yet not entirely unknown.