Slim Novel 2 - http://adventuresofkimi.blogspot.com - See Homepage
76. Will Worlds Collide?
76. Will Worlds Collide?
The Wylie porch has chairs, table, side books & magazines – Science, Time, Life, Vogue. Front door opens inward revealing an attractive, fashionably dressed, slim lady who exclaims “Kay!” gives Ali & me a curious “Oh, hello.” and smiles.
“Excuse our cheekiness,” explains Ali. “We made friends with Kay and we had a big fruit salad and talk. We’ll go now.”
The lady says "No, please come in." She introduces herself as Kay's mother." Call me Ricky” she adds as she shows us into an art deco
“Excuse our cheekiness,” explains Ali. “We made friends with Kay and we had a big fruit salad and talk. We’ll go now.”
The lady says "No, please come in." She introduces herself as Kay's mother." Call me Ricky” she adds as she shows us into an art deco
Art Deco: Sleek, Futuristic, this 1930's Radio
living room with books lining walls. She seats us on sofa and asks about drinks, adding “Phil and I like a lunch aperitif. I have anything you might desire short of opium."
Ali requests scotch & soda for us, which turns out to be the Wylies’ usual and, as Mrs Wylie goes to make the drinks, Ali turns to me, fingers up in V. Little did I know when I got the urge to see Miami Beach that a chance to talk with the Philip Wylie and everything that goes with that would go with it. And it is all thanks to Ali’s forwardness getting to know a little girl on a bridge. And her cheekiness pushing us into the Wylie home is making this happen. It is a case of increasing the probabilities of interesting encountering of a novel kind by boldly going where no good manners have gone before.
Suddenly, Philip Wylie.
I recall his file: Born 1902, so age 37, scripted for Hollywood, authored novels, and has a reputation among intellectuals as a modern Nostradamus due to uncannily correct predicting the future. His critical look at us transmits the feeling “Who in hell are you, Jap, and your kid-blonde whore?” and also a “Whoever you are, me and my whore are pleased to meet you” . His handshake is firm and I can see he appreciates a pretty girl. Mrs Wylie sets down the drinks and once a scotch greases the social cogs Wylie’s slightly cool edge warms up. Wife sits beside him with an expression that seems to be signaling: Don’t get him started. It is just what I desire to do.
“Kimura? From Tokyo? Karl Marx must be squirming in sarcophagus when he watches from Hell how the Rooskies are massacring his system. He wasted all that time thinking up Communism with pal Engels when all he had to do was visit Tokyo.”
I recall his file: Born 1902, so age 37, scripted for Hollywood, authored novels, and has a reputation among intellectuals as a modern Nostradamus due to uncannily correct predicting the future. His critical look at us transmits the feeling “Who in hell are you, Jap, and your kid-blonde whore?” and also a “Whoever you are, me and my whore are pleased to meet you” . His handshake is firm and I can see he appreciates a pretty girl. Mrs Wylie sets down the drinks and once a scotch greases the social cogs Wylie’s slightly cool edge warms up. Wife sits beside him with an expression that seems to be signaling: Don’t get him started. It is just what I desire to do.
“Kimura? From Tokyo? Karl Marx must be squirming in sarcophagus when he watches from Hell how the Rooskies are massacring his system. He wasted all that time thinking up Communism with pal Engels when all he had to do was visit Tokyo.”
Wylie enjoys his joke. He’d taken his first scotch neat and glanced toward Wife who goes to step & fetch more.
I go at an interview, sure we shall never meet again.
About his novels he comments: “My characters are as crazy as all the people you will encounter. They cannot endure this civilization. They consider themselves each a free soul when they are in fact puppets. And what they consider the laws of God or Nature are the common prejudices of their generation.” He continues: “The average adult knows virtually nothing – about himself or the universe - and he imagines he knows all he needs to know and about the hereafter too. But what he knows is the bunk!”
I ask if he had special knowledge to write such a highly original story of Earth’s collision with another planetary body? Wylie is downing his 2nd scotch. In half joking, half conspiracy voice he says, “OK you two: you ask for it, you get it! Just settle back and I tell all before lunch.”
77. It Could Happen Here (Philip Wylie narrating)
There are stories that grab interest because they deal with death – yours! This is one. It starts while I am writing movies for Hollywood. Before, at Princeton, I’d done courses in biology, physics, higher math, and geology. One day in L.A., I met a famous physicist and our mutual interest sparked fellow feeling and he took me to meet his group at California Institute of Technology. I read up on the math, hung around the labs, did seminars where Ph.D.’s discussed their T.O.E. (theory of everything) and ultimately got to sit in on an Einstein chalk talk. Yep, the greatest scientist of them all! When you move at that level – with understanding – you discover more things, as wise guy Hamlet told pal Horatio than hitherto were thought of in Heaven or Hell.
Speaking of Hamlet, recalls Hammett, that Maltese Falcon man. In the middle of The Maltese Falcon is a bit about a guy, Flitcraft, who – almost killed by a falling roof piece of dislodged brick that whizzes past his face grazing his cheek while walking in the street – suddenly realizes that this seemingly nice, ordered world is a murderous anarchic lunatic asylum for us helpless pawns in a cosmic crap game of unknown player with loaded dice. And Flitcraft – having been brought face to face with reality by a brick that missed killing him by a millimeter – sees the metaphoric manhole cover of life lifted and looks down on the slimy scurrying things in the dark sewer of true reality ready to destroy those whom fate has mysteriously marked.
I saw that reality at the California Institute of Tech.
Speaking of Hamlet, recalls Hammett, that Maltese Falcon man. In the middle of The Maltese Falcon is a bit about a guy, Flitcraft, who – almost killed by a falling roof piece of dislodged brick that whizzes past his face grazing his cheek while walking in the street – suddenly realizes that this seemingly nice, ordered world is a murderous anarchic lunatic asylum for us helpless pawns in a cosmic crap game of unknown player with loaded dice. And Flitcraft – having been brought face to face with reality by a brick that missed killing him by a millimeter – sees the metaphoric manhole cover of life lifted and looks down on the slimy scurrying things in the dark sewer of true reality ready to destroy those whom fate has mysteriously marked.
I saw that reality at the California Institute of Tech.
My physicist pal was working with a paleontologist, an astronomer, a climatologist and an evolutionary biologist; together they discovered a crater one hundred twenty miles across in the sea off Australia and spent a year gathering data and consulting fellow experts. The conclusion: A fifty-mile wide asteroid had slammed Earth two-hundred fifty million years ago. The question then arose: Have other collisions happened? And could the next one be the end of us all? To answer these questions a Cassandra Council was initiated, and I am a member. It includes Einstein and is secret because its deliberations would panic a civilization whose stability is based on Robert Browning’s God’s in His Heaven all’s right with the world. But the possibility of god's coming out of his heaven to collide with Earth and end all our futures sparked the research which discovered - Indeed! - that the fossil record shows a striking series of discontinuities. The first was the two hundred fifty million years ago mass extinction, when at a stroke, 95% of life on Earth was ended because an asteroid larger than NYC crashed the southern hemisphere into the ocean upping temperatures several thousand degrees, creating pressures millions of times greater than atmospheric and blowing out a crater greater than poor little Rhode Island. Just think - If we were to reveal it - of the reaction of the man in street! I mean how many ordinary dopes would be spooked by the vision that something like that could happen here?
The cataclysm was not limited to explosion – terrific as it was. It was the climate change that followed. Because the surface of oceans boiled, the resulting gases, steam and smoke clouded the skies for years blocking Sol's rays and dropping the heat radiation on Earth’s surface. It created an ice age that would make the last glacier period feel like a balmy summer day. Ice covered the planet from poles to equator; only the deep sea worms survived because they lived off the heat of Earth's core from cracks in the ocean bottom and subsisted on the corpses raining down on the seabed from the great killing off above. From these deep sea slugs the present life evolved but many millions of years of evolution were wasted. Lucky for us today, the sun then was still young enough for another try at the billions-years evolution that leads to intelligence and civilization.
Well, if this will be the only cataclysm in four and a half billion years, interesting as it is, it would not have been a true Flitcraft event, to use Hammett’s metaphor for the dangerous unpredictability of individual lives. So the Cassandra Council delved into the theory of cosmic collisions: How frequent and where have they occurred and what can they explain about the evolution to intelligence and civilization? And, most important, what are the chances for such a collision in our lifetime or that of our immediate descendants?
Well, if this will be the only cataclysm in four and a half billion years, interesting as it is, it would not have been a true Flitcraft event, to use Hammett’s metaphor for the dangerous unpredictability of individual lives. So the Cassandra Council delved into the theory of cosmic collisions: How frequent and where have they occurred and what can they explain about the evolution to intelligence and civilization? And, most important, what are the chances for such a collision in our lifetime or that of our immediate descendants?
The Council studied the rate of collisions. Early-on, a chemist deduced that temperatures and pressures generated in the instant after a major asteroid struck Earth should result in unusual carbon molecules. He had in mind, diamond, a form of pure carbon like graphite except tremendous pressures from overlying rocks, acting over millions of years, crushed the carbon atoms into the more tightly packed form in diamonds. He deduced that unusual carbon molecules might identify cosmic collision sites. Diamond is not a good marker because it occurs naturally. With this hint he started examining samples. And he discovered a carbon molecule, a sphere whose surface forms a patchwork of 60 carbon atoms arranged of 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons - very like the common kickball.
With this key, and searching out such molecules in the rocks and carbon dating them, the Council estimated major collisions on average at six-thousand year intervals. ‘Major’ is an asteroid at least hundreds of feet across. If you talk about a cataclysm like the one of two-hundred fifty million years ago, or MYA, five lesser ones have occurred in these last five hundred thousand years, the most recent, sixty-five MYA, off the Yucatan Peninsula when a ten-mile-wide asteroid hurtled out of the sky over Mexico and extinguished half of life on Earth, including the dinosaurs. Because of it, we Homo saps oppress Earth today. It cleared a way for the dominance of a rat-like mammal whose small size and habitation holes allowed it to survive the fire and ice in the years that followed and to evolve into us rats.
I have lectured enough. Now you know why those few of us, awakened from this sick-dream civilization into the real-fact world of Science have a new vision. To me it does not suggest living an amoral life; rather, it gives me the deepest appreciation of my once-in-the cosmos individual, temporary consciousness; it makes me strive to live what Socrates called the well examined life at a time when Science has liberated us higher humans from the mindless drudgery and cruelly shortened lives of the recent past.
And it gives me an appreciation of being a writer who aspires to being read by those who are the event makers, and an intellectual, and en-famille – a husband of Ricky and father with her of Kay, who will be part, I hope, of the New People.
The idea of Cosmic Collision stalks me. We, the higher intelligence persons, or, as I like to say, the cognoscenti, must unite to work for Science Civilization. Exploration beyond Earth and the colonization of Luna and Mars is not a talking point, it is a must-do for us whose reason to live is progress and future. Before the imminence of such cataclysm, the immanence of all parochial religions and national beliefs pales. I do not under-rate these beliefs – those who hold them are dangerously important because they may prevent the best of us from surviving in our ever more fragile earth environment and prevent us from advancing toward exploration beyond Earth, which is a must for long-term survival in a big bang universe on a collision course planet in a Nova-doomed solar system. I advocate that we, the science-educated folk, struggle each in his way mightily in this War that has been going on since Man discovered fire – the war between Science and ignorance.
As for the vast majority – Mr. Mencken’s boobery – if I were to preside over their fate…, I’d say Good riddance to bad rubbish!
The idea of Cosmic Collision stalks me. We, the higher intelligence persons, or, as I like to say, the cognoscenti, must unite to work for Science Civilization. Exploration beyond Earth and the colonization of Luna and Mars is not a talking point, it is a must-do for us whose reason to live is progress and future. Before the imminence of such cataclysm, the immanence of all parochial religions and national beliefs pales. I do not under-rate these beliefs – those who hold them are dangerously important because they may prevent the best of us from surviving in our ever more fragile earth environment and prevent us from advancing toward exploration beyond Earth, which is a must for long-term survival in a big bang universe on a collision course planet in a Nova-doomed solar system. I advocate that we, the science-educated folk, struggle each in his way mightily in this War that has been going on since Man discovered fire – the war between Science and ignorance.
As for the vast majority – Mr. Mencken’s boobery – if I were to preside over their fate…, I’d say Good riddance to bad rubbish!
(End of Wylie’s comment)
Wylie falls silent, Wife sits with brooding look, I glance at Ms Ali lost in herself. Then Wife breaks the silence by saying there will be an afternoon soiree that includes entertainment and interesting guests. It is now noon so we can rest in the guest room and afterward join the party.
To read next, click 2.79 The Afternoon Soiree With Famous Entertainme...
To read next, click 2.79 The Afternoon Soiree With Famous Entertainme...
No comments:
Post a Comment