Chapter 6
723 Words
9
OUT ON THE EDGE
table, I suppose, but you’re not talking about flying saucers, are you? Nobody on Earth has believed in flying saucers for a long time.”
“People always experience strangeness at the periphery of their world. When the edge of the dark forest was as far as anyone dared go, that is where the mystery and danger were. When the sky was the limit for most people, they saw things in the sky. Here, at the very edge, beyond which, as you rightly say, mankind shall never venture very far, apparitions might appear.”
He refilled my glass again. I drank up. But I was not so zonked that I had forgotten to curl the third finger of my left hand just so, so that a light beneath my skin blinked to tell me that the recorder was turned on, and I was getting all this. It was not entirely clear who was interviewing whom, but this was good stuff. This weird guy who runs the Moose a*s Pub on Pluto believed in flying saucers. Wow.
Actually, he never said flying saucers. He said apparitions.
I placed my left hand carefully in the armrest between our two chairs, and say, “Do continue.”
“Somewhere, out there, some other spe-cies may have reached their limit, and they too stared into the darkness at the unreach-able stars, and thought the same things that humans have. Or at least the more sensitive humans, such as yourself, Mr. Weston.”
He filled my glass again.
“My God, I’d really like to know. Even if we can never meet or talk to them. I’d really like to know.”
Now you’re probably beginning to sus-pect that my professional detachment in the sampling of the particular liquid offerings of the Moose Whatever Pub was starting to lose some of its detachment. But I also noted that Mr. X was not tapping my hand with his finger to charge me for these drinks. They were on the house. Generous of him. He must like my company, I had to conclude. I resolved to give him and his establishment a good review.
“Consider, too,” he said, “that if you could communicate with these others, you would be talking across time as well as space. If you just radio Earth, how many hours does it take before the message gets there?”
At the moment, I didn’t really know. I could look it up later. Certainly it would be a much interrupted conversation.
“Let’s just suppose that some other spe-cies could project their message across space in some manner, and it comes from so very great distance, a hundred light-years.”
“It would be like reading somebody else’s mail,” I said, drinking more.
“Or even further out, a thousand.”
“Addressed to the Middle Ages. ‘Dear King Arthur, watch out for the dragon –’”
“Or much, much farther.”
“‘Regards to T-Rex. How’s evolution coming?”
“Billions of galaxies. Billions of years.”
“You’d never get an answer,” I said. “Why bother? By the time anybody got your message, you’d be long gone, very likely ex-tinct.”
“Or else evolved unrecognizably into something else. But there is a reason, Mr. Weston. It is the same reason that kings back on your Earth built pyramids. It is to defy eternity. It is to say, to those who have the sensitivity to understand, this is who we were. There is a certain satisfaction in the knowledge or at least the hope that someone will know who you were.”
Somehow my tongue had become too large or didn’t do what I wanted it to do. I could only think, he’s put something in the booze. Or else he’s given me the whammy. Hypnosis, telepathy. Like that.
But it was still good stuff. I mean the journalism. I was getting all this, even if I might have been, let us say, not entirely in command of my senses.
I could hear him clearly as he said, “The message doesn’t have to be a series of beeps and dashes. It could be a full projection of sounds and images. It might account for ap-paritions, even materializations. Mr. Weston,
- Writer
