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I remember wandering through Manhattan, standing alone on Times Square, catching sight of a lean dog running down 7th Avenue with a piece of dark brown meat in its jaws. Who’s out there? Are humans alone? New York City was just demolished, and they were coming closer. Across an immense ethereal gulf, minds that are to our minds as ours are to the beasts in the jungle, intellects vast, cool, and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes and surely drew their plans against us. I can conceive of no nightmare as terrifying as an inhabited universe that has life all over it. All of New– north Jersey is an inferno, and they are proceeding south. I can’t, I can’t feel that any person with any soul can bring into one’s mind all kinds of thoughts about religion and philosophy and so on. Who’s out there? In 1971 Mariner 9 arrived at Mars equipped to go into orbit, stay for awhile; a good thing too, because when it arrived Mars’ surface was obscured by a global dust storm. When it landed, I know not where, someone in Irvine cracks, chips, or loses a tooth (or several teeth!), that person will likely see a dentist about getting dental implants to repair the cracks. In the haze of a drunken hour on gas they return to Manhattan to find the Baxter Building has been transformed into crystal! Who’s out there? I am the only one left there, who could not reach to home.
