Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/161

Rh world linked together by streaming filaments; solitary worlds, and worlds in hordes: tremendous worlds and tiny worlds: some of them made of material like the material of this earth; and worlds that are geometric super-constructions made of iron and steel Or not only fall from the sky of ashes and cinders and coke and charcoal and oily substances that suggest fuel—but the masses of iron that have fallen upon this earth.

Wrecks and flotsam and fragments of vast iron constructions Or steel. Sooner or later we shall have to take up an expression that fragments of steel have fallen from the sky. If fragments, not of iron, but of steel, have fallen upon this earth

But what would a deep-sea fish learn even if a steel plate of a wrecked vessel above him should drop and bump him on the nose?

Our submergence in a sea of conventionality of almost impenetrable density.

Sometimes I'm a savage who has found something on the beach of his island. Sometimes I'm a deep-sea fish with a sore nose.

The greatest of mysteries:

Why don't they ever come here, or send here, openly?

Of course there's nothing to that mystery if we don't take so seriously the notion—that we must be interesting. It's probably for moral reasons that they stay away—but even so, there must be some degraded ones among them.

Or physical reasons:

When we can specially take up that subject, one of our leading ideas, or credulities, will be that near approach by another world to this world would be catastrophic: that navigable worlds would avoid proximity; that others that have survived have organized into protective remotenesses, or orbits which approximate to regularity, though by no means to the degree of popular supposition.

But the persistence of the notion that we must be interesting. Bugs and germs and things like that: they're interesting to us: some of them are too interesting.

Dangers of near approach—nevertheless our own ships that dare not venture close to a rocky shore can send rowboats ashore

Why not diplomatic relations established between the United States and Cyclorea—which, in our advanced astronomy, is the name of a remarkable wheel-shaped world or super-construction? Why not missionaries sent here openly to convert us from our barbarous prohibitions and other taboos, and to prepare the way for a good trade in ultra-bibles and super-whiskeys; fortunes made in