It's a thousand pages give or take a few . . .2番

This particular story starts about two thousand years after a small proportion of the world’s population believes a nice Jewish boy got himself nailed up on a rather shabby cross, and concerns, or at least occasionally mentions a certain Thomas D. Milton III. How and why he came by this rather awkward name has been chronicled elsewhere, and frankly I don’t feel like retyping thirty odd, and one or two downright strange, pages just to bring you up to date. Sure I could dig out the old manuscripts, and now that I use a computer I wouldn’t really have to retype them because I could just tell it to print, and there they’d be all ready for another shot at the big time; but there’s only so much rejection one man can go through. I mean why are you even dredging all this up again.


Sorry.

Anyway, it should be noted, that Thomas had dropped the old family name of Wordsworth on the grounds that the first three initials said it all and the Wordsworth was just a tautology. Where the “III” came from was always a mystery to Thomas, but his mother would get this wistful look in her eyes and fidget awkwardly with her handkerchief for a few seconds, and then change the subject whenever he asked her about it.

Over the course of these two millennia the Earth had had a few volcanoes—the geologic equivalent of a mild case of acne—and made a few rather minor adjustments in the position of its continents. Lately, however, it had begun to notice that some of the life infesting its surface had started blowing stuff up with things that did rather more damage than was really necessary. Normally a planet will barely notice the tiny things scuttling around on it in much the same way you don’t notice the mites living in your eyebrows, but this latest development was downright bothersome. Granted it wasn’t as bad as having a major asteroid run into you, but it did leave visible scars and was causing some rather hurtful speculation about the Earth’s personal hygiene.

Otherwise the ages plodded on pretty much as usual.

Humans, on the other hand, were strutting around feeling pretty damned important, thank you. They had, as far as they were concerned, invented some really amazing things, including bombs that did rather more damage than was really necessary along with pick-up trucks, grain futures, country music, French cooking, conference calls and telemarketing. That all of these things had been invented and discarded as useless, if not criminal, by the life forms on countless other planets didn’t bother humans in the least because they didn’t know about those other planets and wouldn't believe you if you told them.

This doesn’t mean that humans think they are alone in the Universe. Quite the contrary. The human ego demands that there must be other beings in the Universe if only to look in awe at what they, humans that is, have accomplished. Currently the theories concerning the population of the universe breaks down to:

• There are those who believe there are simply oodles of civilizations zipping around the galaxy, but space is just so huge that we haven’t bumped into each other yet.
• Those who think that we are being visited all the time, but aliens are just so shy they can only work up the nerve to land in front of one or two people at a time and so far have been unable to catch any of the world’s leaders in an Arkansas swamp (although they had a really good chance in the 1990s).
• Those who think we are the frogs in some sort of galactic pond and every once in a while the junior high students come around to collect a few of us to have a try at dissection.
  

The other consideration, which humans never think of because it doesn’t fit in with their view of their own cleverness, is that the other life forms living on this side of the galaxy know we’re here, but avoid us in much the same way you avoid that cousin who thinks professional wrestling is for real and has those disturbing stains on his pants.

Now Thomas—you do remember Thomas don’t you? Middle-aged, tending toward a paunch, the kind of hair that has made Germanic types throughout history envy corn silk for its body. Anyway, Thomas was in a bit of a funk. It wasn’t anything you would really be likely to notice like your rainy day, curled up on the sofa with a cup of tea and the occasional heavy sigh kind of funk. It was more of a less than friendly attitude that seemed to say, “I’m really pissed off and I think you are the reason.”

That was on the surface. If you were to delve just a little deeper you would come to those murky little layers of psyche that enable so many psychologists, priests, and other forms of witch-doctor to live so comfortably. Here you would find that what we are talking about is the full blown hang ‘em first and then maybe slap their maiden aunt kind of funk that caused the guy who wanted to be called Ishmael to go out whale hunting.

To find the cause of Thomas’s irritation would require delving deeper into his mind than he, or any vaguely sane person, would wish to go. If, however, you were to have enough courage, and maybe the psychiatric department of a major hospital to back you up, you might decide, like a sewer worker counting the days until his retirement, to take the plunge. Down passed the current dreams involving the various ways a certain department chair becomes suddenly unemployed among other, more messy accidents. Then you would have to wade through some rather lurid fantasies about a certain red headed young lady, some of them involving whipped cream and a feather duster. After a quick shower and a change of clothes you would come to all of the adolescent fantasies of super-powers and daring-do that no male ever really gives up. (Your average one hundred twelve year old man will, on his death bed, be daydreaming in some hidden corner of his mind, about how he saves the nurse from the clutches of that smug orderly with a few simple, but amazingly powerful punches and she then decides to show her gratitude in a way that just might utilize whipped cream—and perhaps a feather duster.)

Finally, after several dead ends and one or two tantalizing but completely misleading paths that left you checking the bottom of your shoes, you would come to that place where primal screams are considered unnecessarily wordy. Looking about you would decide that this was where things start getting truly nasty, and Thomas was definitely out of sorts. In fact it would probably be more accurate to say he was as pissed off as a man can get without involving the government.

The cause of these deeply hidden levels of rage, indeed they are so deep and so hidden that Thomas is only sometimes vaguely aware that they exist, are many and complex but mostly have to do with the fact that he was middle aged and still didn’t have a clue as to why he was here or what he was supposed to be doing. It is the kind of despair that affects most males around the ages of fourteen and forty, (and, interestingly enough, is often cured at both ages by the acquisition of a red sports car and a not too bright playmate—usually blond) and while it can cause a person to spend many nights staring into the darkness, Thomas had to admit it was not as existentially disconcerting as his friend Garrideb’s conviction he was the product of a joke being played by some guy in Illinois.