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on their own. Amazing their first word isn’t “Help!” Probably is, that cry.
    One hour ten minutes after takeoff, engine instruments in the green, groundspeed 150 knots in the headwind, sky clear, air smooth, ETA Arkansas an hour plus.
    In the midst of all that, we mortals have to learn to be afraid, he thought. When were mortal, danger’s necessary, destruction has to be possible, if were going to play the game.
    Got to play, got to dive down deep, deep, deeper in that ocean of suggestions that we’re mortal, limited, vulnerable, blind to all but the chaff-storm of what our senses tell us; turn lies to unshakable belief, no questions asked and while we’re doing this avoid dying so long as possible and while we’re dodging death figure out why we came here in the first place and what possible reason we might ever have had to call this game entertainment.
    Oh, and all the real answers are hidden. The game is to find ’em on our own in the midst of clouds of fake answers that other players say are fine for them but which somehow don’t seem to work for us at all.
    Don’t laugh, infant. Mortals find the game fascinating, and you will too when you accept the belief that you’re one of them.
    As a flying cadet, Jamie Forbes had been to classes about altitude sickness, supposed to happen when you fly high. Is there such a thing as altitude awareness, he wondered now; you understand some things, having flown some secret number of years, that you never would have known on the ground?
    If you don’t follow rules, you’re not allowed to play. Life in Spacetime Rule One is obvious: You’ve got to believe in spacetime.
    After just a few billion suggestions about the limits of four dimensions, that is, around the time we turn two days old, confirmation comes quick. We’re lost in the I Am A Helpless Human Baby trance, but we’re players.
    What about the ones who change their minds, who decide to withdraw their consent to this planet’s sandstorm of suggestion? The ones who say, “I am spirit! I am not limited by the beliefs of this hallucinated world and I wont pretend I am!”
    What happens to them is, “Poor thing: stillborn. Little tyke lived less than an hour ain’t that a shame. Wasn’t sick, it just didn’t make it. Who said life’s fair?” The ones who go along, give their consent to be hypnotized, thought Jamie Forbes, cruising level at seven thousand five, that’s us. That’s me.
    Groundspeed down to 135. He reset the GPS, changed his destination from Arkansas to Ponca City, Oklahoma. Neverbeen there, he thought; will be soon.



CHAPTER NINE
    W here do you keep your books on aviation?”
    The used-book store near the airport in Ponca City was promising because it had musted up in the same spot, it looked, for eighty years or so.
    “What we’d have on Aviation,” said the clerk, “would be, go down that way to where it says Travel and turn left. It’s at the end of the aisle, right side.”
    “Thank you.”
    What they had was not a whole lot, the pilot found; nothing on his current flame, seaplane history. Three fine books, though, right together: the rare old Brimm and Bogess two-volume Aircraft and Engine Maintenance, way underpriced, marked three dollars each for two forty-dollar books, and Nevil Shute’s Slide Rule, about the author’s life as an aircraft engineer.
    The shelf was at eye level, and when he pulled the three books together, they left a considerable hole. Normally he would have moved on, but as he was in no hurry he noticed another book in the shadows, somehow wedged behind the others. Hoping it might be Seaplanes of the Twenties, he pulled it forward.
    No such luck. Wasn’t even a flying book: Winstons Encyclopedia of Stage Entertainers.
    Yet, struck by the title, he flashed back to Long Beach, California, the Lafayette Hotel, and looked up the only stage entertainer he’d seen in person:

SAMUEL BLACK, AKA BLACKSMYTH THE GREAT
American stage hypnotist (1948-1988).
Through