"I'm really glad you folks came down."
She looked askance at him, but Lyman interposed himself. "Now, Sara,
these guys really, really wanted to talk something over with you all,
but they've been having a hard time getting a hearing."
Kurt and Alan traded uneasy glances. They'd carefully planned out a
subtle easeway into this conversation, but Lyman was running with it.
"You didn't know that I was involved, huh?"
"Surprised the hell outta me," Lyman said. "Will you hear them out?"
She looked back at her collective. "What the hell. Yeah, I'll talk 'em
into it."
#
"It starts with the sinking of the *Titanic*," Kurt said. They'd
arranged their mismatched chairs in a circle in the cramped back room of
the bookstore and were drinking and eating organic crumbly things with
the taste and consistency of mud-brick. Sara told Kurt that they'd have
ten minutes, and Alan had told him that he could take it all. Alan'd
spent the day reading on the net, remembering the arguments that had
swayed the most people, talking it over. He was determined that Kurt
would win this fight.
"There's this ship going down, and it's signaling S-O-S, S-O-S, but the
message didn't get out, because the shipping lanes were full of other
ships with other radios, radios that clobbered the *Titanic*'s
signal. That's because there were no rules for radio back then, so
anyone could light up any transmitter and send out any signal at any
frequency.
Pages:
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224