Chapter 33 Section 31

Do you remember: (1) Do you have to write a check to the Waveform Dynamics cable company? (2) Do you want to write your account number on the check? (3) Do you want to sign the check? (4) Do I need to send all the money? - We do not accept partial payments; (5) Do checks in envelopes have to be originals and not copies? (6) When the check is loaded, should the recipient's address appear on the envelope window? (7) Tear off the green portion of the check along the dotted line for your own records? (8) Do you want to provide your own correct address and zip code? (9) Do you want to tell us at least three weeks before you plan to move? (10) Should the envelope tongue be glued? (11) Should stamps be affixed on the envelope? — The post office will not deliver without postage; (12) Do you want to mail the envelope three days before the date specified in the blue box?

WIRED Health WIRED Weather WIRED News WIRED Nature No one wanted to cook that night.We all got into the car and went to the commercial area in the uninhabited area outside the city.Endless neon lights.I parked at a place that specializes in chicken nuggets and brownie biscuits.We decided to eat in the car.Cars are sufficient for our needs.What we want is to eat, not to watch others.What we want is to fill our stomachs and complete a meal.We don't need light and space.Surely we don't have to eat face to face across the table, building a delicate and complex network of signals and code interactions.We are content to face the same direction while eating, looking only a few inches in front of our hands.There is a seriousness to it.Denise brought food to the car and handed out paper napkins.We all sat down to eat.We ate well dressed, hats and heavy clothes, and in silence we tore the chicken pieces with our hands and teeth.Everyone concentrates and their thoughts are concentrated on a single obsessive thought.I was surprised that I was so hungry.I chewed and ate, looking only inches in front of my hands.That's how hunger shrinks the world.This is the edge of the visible range of the food.Steffi peeled off the crispy skin from the chicken breast and gave it to Heinrich.She never eats chicken skin.Babette sucks the marrow of a bone.Heinrich and Denise exchange chicken wings, big for small.He thought the small wings tasted better.Everyone gave the bones to Babette to chew clean and suck the marrow.I tried desperately to dispel the image of Mr. Gray, naked, lolling on a motel bed, an image with blurred edges.We sent Denise to get some more food, and everyone waited for her in silence.Then we started eating again, and we were a little surprised at the intense pleasure we got from satisfying our appetites.

Steffi said quietly, "How do astronauts levitate?" There was a moment of silence, as if the "tick" of a clock was missing from the eternity of time. Denise stopped eating, saying, "They're lighter than air." We all stopped eating.A sad silence followed. "There is no air," said Heinrich at last, "and they cannot be lighter than nothing. Space is nothing but a vacuum except for the heavy molecules." "I think space is cold," Babette said. "If there is no air in space, how can it be cold? What warms or cools? Air, I think so. If there is no air, there is no There may be a cold, like a day that says nothing."

"How can there be nothing?" Denise said. "There must be something." "There's something there," said Heinrich exasperatedly, "and there's heavy molecules." "'Should I wear a sweater' kind of day," Babette said. There was another silence.We'll wait to see if this conversation is over.Then we started eating again.We silently swap pieces of chicken we don't want to eat, reaching into cartons of wrinkled-skinned chicken nuggets.Wilder liked blanched, soft nuggets, and they were picked out for him.Denise handed out ketchup in little soggy bags.The car smelled of animal grease and meat.We swapped chicken nuggets and gnawed.

Steffi whispered, "How cold is space?" We all wait again.After a while, Heinrich said, "It depends on how high you go. The higher you go, the colder it gets." "Wait a minute," said Babette, "the higher you go, the closer you get to the sun, so it gets warmer." "What makes you think the sun is high?" "How can the sun be down? You have to look up at the sun." "What about at night?" he said. "It was on the other side of the world. But people were still looking up." "The whole point of Albert Einstein," he said, "is that if you stand on the sun, how can the sun be on it?"

"The sun is a giant ball of lava," she said. "It's impossible to stand on the sun." "He just said 'what if'. Basically, there's no up or down, hot or cold, day or night." "What's there?" "Heavy molecules. The whole point of space is to give heavy molecules a chance to cool off after they've come off the surface of a giant star." "How can molecules cool if there is no heat or cold?" "Hot and cold are just two words. Think of them as words. We have to use words, we can't just hum." "It's called the Sunflower Crown," Denise said to Steffi on the other side of the discussion, "and we saw it on the Weather Network that night."

"I thought 'Corolla' was a car," Steffi said. "Everything can be a car name," Heinrich said. "What you have to understand about superstars is that they have a real nuclear explosion deep in their core. Completely forget about those Russian intercontinental ballistics that are said to be very scary. Missiles. We're talking about explosions that are 100 million times bigger than that." There was a long silence.No one spoke.We resumed eating, but only long enough to take a bite and chew a mouthful of food. "It is presumed that Russian wizards are responsible for this strange weather," Babette said.

"What strange weather?" I said. "Presumably we have wizards, they have wizards. They want to disrupt our crops by influencing the weather," Heinlich said. "The weather has been normal." "It's pretty normal for this time of year," Denise interjected cleverly. Just this week, a police officer saw a man being thrown from a UFO.He was on a routine patrol on the outskirts of Glasstown when the incident happened.The rain-soaked body of the unidentified man was discovered late that night, fully clothed.An autopsy report indicated that the cause of death was multiple fractures and heart disease—probably the result of extreme horror.The policeman, Jerry Tee Walker, hypnotized and fully recreated the bewildering view of the neon-bright object—as it hovered eighty feet above the ground, like a gigantic Spin top.Sergeant Volker, a Vietnam veteran, said the outlandish scene reminded him of helicopter crews throwing Viet Cong suspects over the hatch.When he watched the hatch open and the human body suddenly fell to the ground, it was unbelievable that Walker felt a strange message transmitted from his heart to his brain.The hypnotists at the police department plan to intensify their tests to interpret the messages.

There are people watching all over the area.A mental stream of strong energy, presented as a sinuous serpentine red light, seems to pass from one town to another.It doesn't matter whether you believe these things or not.They are a shock, a wave, a tremor.Some kind of human voice or noise fills the sky, and we will be freed from death.People took the risk of driving to the fringes of town, some made their way home from there, and some decided to venture farther into regions that seemed to exist in magic and divine expectation in days gone by.The air becomes soft and gentle.The neighbor's dog barked in the night sky.

We ate brownie biscuits in the parking lot of the fast food restaurant.Crumbs cling to our palms.We suck the crumbs off, we lick our fingers.As we near the end of our meal, the physical part of consciousness begins to expand.The boundaries of food give way to the wider world.Our vision extends beyond our hands.We watch the cars and lights through the windows.We watched people leave the restaurant, men, women and children leaning forward into the wind with boxes of groceries in hand.A wave of impatience began to flow from the three people in the back seat.They want to be at home, not stuck here.They want to blink and find themselves in their own room, surrounded by their belongings, not in a crowded car parked on windy concrete.The journey home is always a test.I started the car, knowing that within a few seconds the collective restlessness would take on a threatening element.We—Babette and I—feel it emerging.A sullen threat was brewing in the backseat.They will attack us the old way of fighting each other.But what reason is there to attack us?Was it because they couldn't get them home more quickly?Is it because they are older, bigger, and generally more emotionally stable than they are?Are they attacking us because of our status as guardians — guardians that sooner or later they will surely fail to be?Or are they just going to offend everything about us, our voice, our looks, our posture, the way we walk and laugh, the color of our eyes, the color of our hair, the tone of our skin, our chromosomes and cells?

As if to assuage their annoyance, as if she couldn't stand the threat they posed, Babbitt said cheerfully, "Why are these UFOs mostly seen in the remote northern regions? The most clearly seen are in the remote northern regions. Somebody got hijacked and put on a flying saucer. Farmers saw burn marks where the flying saucer landed. A woman had a flying saucer baby, she said so herself. Always far north." "Because there are mountains there," Denise said, "the spaceship can hide from radar or anything." "Why should the mountain be in the far north?" Steffi said. "The mountains are always in the far north," Denise told her, "so that the snow will melt in the spring as planned and flow down the mountains to the reservoirs near the cities. Settled at the southern tip of the state." For a moment I thought she might be right.It creates a strange feeling.Or is it really causing it?Or is it all just crazy?There should be large cities in the north of some states.Or are they just north of the state line, south of those states north of the state?What she said couldn't be true, yet for a moment I couldn't deny it.I cannot name cities and mountains to negate this.There should be mountains in the south of some states.Or do they tend to stay below state lines, in the northern part of those states south of the state?I tried to name some state capitals, governors.How can there be a north under the south?Is this what confuses me?Was this the crux of Denise's mistake?Or somehow, she turned out to be right? The radio said: "Excess of salt, phosphorus, magnesium." Later that night, Babette and I sat drinking cocoa.The dining table is littered with coupons, foot-long supermarket receipts, mail-order catalogs, and a postcard from my oldest child, Mary Alice.She was my baby daughter from my first marriage to Dana Breedlove, the spy, so although she and Steffi were separated by two marriages by ten years, she was really the same father and mother. sisters.Mary Alice is nineteen years old and lives in Hawaii, where she studies whales. Babette picked up a tabloid someone else had left on the table. "The number of rat calls has been determined to be 40,000. Surgeons use high-frequency tapes of rat calls to destroy tumors in the human body. Do you believe this?" "I believe." "I believe too." She put down the newspaper.After a while she said to me eagerly, "How are you feeling, Jack?" "I'm fine, I feel good, it's true. How about you?" "I wish I hadn't told you about my symptoms." "why?" "Then you won't tell me you'll die first. Here are the two things I most wish for in this world: Jack not to die first; and Wilder to be what he is forever."

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