BOOK OF THE DAMNED 155 



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 expres- 

 sion that fragments of steel have fallen from the sky. If frag- 

 ments, 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 impene- 

 trable 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 bar- 

 barous prohibitions and other taboos, and to prepare the way for a 

 good trade in ultra-bibles and sup* r- whiskeys; fortunes made in 



