Sit here, she said, pointing to the end of the bed. He sat down, and she kneeled at his feet, peering up at his crotch — a scene right out of a porno flick. He looked down at her with a distrustful expression. In case they’re still in the dark and have decided to thermal scan us, she said, puffing on her cigarette. When she finished it, she licked her thumb and pushed it on the stub of the cigarette. Then she threw it in the corner. All right, lie down on the bed. She lay down next to him for a while. Now, she said, leaning on a shoulder and looking him in the eye, I’m going to sit on your pelvis. No funny business, if you know what’s good for you.

During those awkward few minutes, Gary had an itch to keep conversing.

“So why does the professor want to see this thing so badly? Hasn’t he seen others before?”

Amy Girl stared at him for a moment, weighing whether to answer at all, but finally relented with a shrug. “He’s never actually gotten close to one. There are those — whose job it is to keep him away from them.”

“Why?” Gary asked.

“I don’t know. Somebody’s probably afraid that he’ll buck and want to yap about it to get his Nobel Prize.”

“Does he know what it is — who’s on the other end?”

She rocked back and forth a bit — a sudden burst of realism — and Gary had to catch his breath. She said nonchalantly: “Well, he has a good idea. He hasn’t told me a lot. But what he needs is an opportunity to interact with the projection, test some of his hypotheses about how the intelligence on the other end should respond. That would help solve the mystery.”

“Walton seems to think the thing isn’t real.”

“And that’s why he kills people. Right. He’ll deny there’s anything there until his dying day. Lying takes no toll on the fellow, nor does illogic.”

“He did say he was just worried about the social order. Things like that.”

“Well, sure,” she said, in a different tone. “To a degree, it doesn’t matter what’s real, just what people say is real. What’s really dangerous here is the repetition. You can squelch anything that is a one-time phenomenon and whose appearance is predictable. But if it keeps popping up, spontaneously, the chances keep increasing that in one or more communities it’ll come into a maturity where the community spreads the message coherently.”

Gary whispered to himself, “The Blue Ball Society.”

“What?” she said, putting her arms up and clasping the sides of her head, and twisted her upper body side to side.

“So what if it does? We don’t know anything about the intelligence on the other side, and I doubt we ever will.”

“It’s the other side of the equation that matters,” she said. “If you base the social order on there being a closed system, with its own internal logic, then the greatest danger is a sign that the closed system is just one among many, perhaps not even the best. The opportunity to think beyond the limits of the given. Godel’s Theorem. That’s what he’s afraid of.” With that, she looked at her watch and collapsed on him. He could feel her warmth and imagined he could feel her breast resting on his chest. When his eyes managed to focus on her face, directly next to his, she was smirking, but without the saccharine. “Okay,” she said with relief, “I’m going to take a shower.”