165 - One Hundred Sixty Five

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[TRANSCRIPT]

[click, static]

“F not here” — I assume by F, you mean Francis. And not that I’m going to take your word for it, but it’s...it’s interesting. That you should say that. That you should know that.

I think maybe I’m starting to understand. Well, maybe not understand, but I...I’m beginning to form a theory. Maybe.

So, there’s a pond. The pond is quiet, maybe has some ripples in it from what’s swimming underneath the surface, or the wind, the rain—the normal stuff that a pond experiences. And all those things create some kind of...chain reaction. But again, it’s the usual things—a frog dies, a tadpole grows legs, algae blooms, whatever.

But if you throw a huge boulder into that pond, everything goes fucking bananas. It kills a duck or displaces so much water that fish drown on dry land and then...

You have an empty pond? You have a series of smaller ponds? The water evaporates? I don’t know where to go from there. But if Harry, Leann, and I are all fish that got thrown into another pond by the water splashing around the boulder then...

[click, static]

(frustrated sigh) I’m not sure that that’s anything.

I wish there was...I don’t know, a book I could read, a scientific journal, something. I’m going to go into the next library I find and see what I can dredge up. Because this all feels vastly beyond my comprehension.

I—it occurred to me...well, am I a terrible person for thinking of my art fence before thinking of Martha? It’s not that I didn’t care about her—sure, we were never committed, but I cared.

I think I’ve just been hoping that I wasn’t important in her life to really have an impact. She was this bright, uncomplicated spot in a pretty messy life and I hope...I hope she stayed that way. I hope we were both a refuge for each other, an escape from our real worlds. And that, because of that, the mistakes of my real world didn’t shake hers.

[click, static]

[beeps]

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Asimov End of Eternity