Along with excerpts from recordings of interviews, such entries drive the story forward and provide a counterpoint to the standard third-person narrative.
Powers had a colleague, a biologist called Whitby, who committed suicide, but not before carving an elaborate mandala into the bottom of an empty swimming pool.
Life, and particularly humans, would become simpler as time went by: Five thousand centuries from now, our descendants, instead of being multi-brained star-men, will probably be naked prognathous idiots ... grunting their way through the remains of this Clinic ...Whitby's own research involved using highly tuned X-rays to selectively activate the so-called "silent pair" of genes in animals and plants.
The results are bizarre creatures like a sunflower that can directly "sense time” and pace its metabolism to the geological age of its surroundings, an anemone that can "see" in gamma radiation wavelengths, a spider with neurons in its webs, and so on.
By activating them, Whitby seemed to show that the pair are a last-ditch attempt to jump-start evolution and preserve life on Earth in an environment abnormally high in nuclear radiation.
They include ephemera such as an EEG recording of Albert Einstein and the results of psychological tests of the twelve condemned to death at the Nuremberg trials.
Having performed some procedure on himself, he goes to it one last time, lost in a wash of sound only he can hear, coming from the rocks, the ancient hills, and the very stars themselves.
At the center of the structure, turning toward the great galaxies that broadcast Kaldren's countdowns, he feels a stream of time coming to bear him away, and gives himself up to it.