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Show •289 under the string of wrinkled pappers that hung between the cabinets. Out the window I caught a glimpse of dark trees and a bit of clear sky with a star or two burning and whirling at an unguessable distance from us. The silence of those infinite spaces, which had so frightened Pascal, scared the hell out of me also. We Americans, however, keep our heads down and stay on the prod, listen to the infinite spaces with the special ears of the radio-telescope; we find instead of silence the twenty-one centimeter wave of hydrogen-the sound of continued creation, someone called that unsteady hiss - and we say to hell with the metaphysics of the situation. And in this we were smarter than the French, I thought, feeling Morgan's waist warm under my palm, bending and unbending as we danced across the floor; in the long run that twenty-one centimeter wave will produce less despair, more hard information, and more poetry also, than all the Reason in the world. We are pragmatic sons of bitches, and suffer less. Except for some like my father. But he was half-French. "What are you thinking about?" Morgan said. "I was thinking about my grandmother and deciding that we have a great advantage over the French because we don't believe in Reason, but in facts. And you know what else?" She opened her eyes; we stood almost still, barely swaying while the music played. "I was thinking that it's |