Read Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel for Free Online Page B

that the people are to take the place of God, seems proper there should be only One of them, don’t you know.”
    Linhouse laughed, for the joke, and for the old gent’s mannerly try at switching the talk to Linhouse’s realm—that soup. He made a try at a return. “And the world’s to be one and the same place too, hmm? Or dozens of the same.”
    “Ah, that is American of you, that worry. Or rather, their side of you. All so afraid they’ll seem gauche for liking places that way.” He smiled. “Your provost or what d’ye call ’m apologized to me for the sameness of his house. Had to tell him I didn’t bother much about the difference of places.”
    “Not even—out there?” They were above the clouds now, on a clear, fleece night.
    Sir Harry looked sideways, delicately, and away. “I know the principle of heavier-than-air machines as well as anybody,” he said grumpily. “A nursemaid took me up in one of the fun-machines at Brighton, unfortunately early.” Then he winked. “I can be as psychological as anybody, too.” He leaned back, and once more relaxed his arms. “What’s out there is space. Not place, either nostalgic or political.”
    “Not just something for the Foreign Office, hmm.” Linhouse’s comment fell worse than flat in his own ears—it was the kind of chummy remark the untraveled made to him. She had been right. This was the way even a philosopher felt with these interstellar men nowadays. Even with one who wouldn’t look out of a window at twenty thousand feet up. “Still,” he said kindly—the old boy was only human—“you do hold with Lovell and Shapley? I gathered so, last night. That there is life out there?”
    The human old boy sat right up. Humanity in fact purpled him, not stinting that extra cragginess of forehead, eyeball and temple which so often gave skinny old men of distinction a look of having twice the number of features they’d been born with. “They—” He choked, and recovered. “—they … hold with me! ”
    A moment later, seeing Linhouse’s alarm, he touched a hand to Linhouse’s shoulder. “Sorry. That’s the real nastiness of getting old—these absolutely uncontrollable rushes of ego. I’ll be snuffling my food next. Same last-minute greediness.” He coughed and looked away, to allow a mutual recovery of reticence. Then he forced himself to look steadily out and into that moving blue-black—at this height unstarred or coddled with cloud—which was being consumed by the plane but not diminished. He continued to look there, as if age had given him the courage.
    “We all hold,” he said. “There isn’t a chance that there isn’t life out there. Or perhaps a proportion of one against it to—ten to the twentieth power number of chances—it does exist.” He turned away from the window, then back. “I don’t know if you know anything about this sort of—”
    “Nothing,” Linhouse said at once. It occurred to him that his own stance, voice, in fact whole mental field, was that of a man facing a firing squad. “Absolutely nothing.”
    His seatmate made the humble, sideways nod that a mandarin must get tired of making. “Well, let’s see—half the stars in the Milky Way have planetary systems, you know … For life forms resembling ours, what you’d ask first would be—” He shrugged. “Does it have water in a liquid state? … And so on. And so on.” He gave up, confronted by how to choose for this child at his knee. “Yes, there’ll be life.” He sighed. “Yes. Life.”
    Linhouse stared out there with him, looking at a lesser distance however, say from wherever they were now—well past Gander—and back. It shouldn’t take much more than that—say the time jump from London, between some streets less genteel than Sloane, and those of a town fifty miles up the Hudson—to cure him of the jolt that a woman had given him, in preferring some man from out of town. One of the first things he’d do when he got to London