MISSING TIME
192
cold and froze t hings but I d on t think I had very much sophisticated i n formation about weather to tell him . . . about the seasons and how h ot it got in the summer and how cold it got in the winter. I told him it got cold enough in th e win ter that you could pour a glass of water out into the snow and it would free ze by t h e time it hit the ground. So I guess he could h av e figured out from that how ,
'
cold it was. Did he show you anything i n return for all this information you gave him? Did he share anything with you? VI I: He told me a lot. He explained a lot. I guess, when we talked about animals, he told me about different kinds of animals and di ffe ren t places. Th ey are very different in dif路 ferent p laces AC: Did he desc ribe them to you? VH: I think t hat when he asked me about animals and I said, Wel l you know how animals are,' and he'd say, 'No,' a nd he'd explain to me patiently that they're not a certain w ay everywhere and t h a t was why he was asking, because they're different in different places. I think he showed me so mething like slides as though, you know, like windows, so that there were di ffe re nt pictures that would . . . mostly they were pictures of star maps, you kn ow they would say, 'This is the star , . .' I d on t think I was able to follow exactly where thi ngs were in relationshi p. But I remember later on I started to look up at the stars. It was j ust at that time that I began to lo ok up the st a rs and try to get a sense of distances a n d relationships . . . So he'd explain them to me, but I didn 't real ly understand. I think most of the pic颅 tures he was trying to show me were whe re he came from and where he visited and where we were with relationship to that and, urn, I don 't know . . . I'll t oy with that and maybe I can reme m b e r it, but maybe if I had studied astron路 amy it would have been familiar, but I h a ven't studied as路 tronomy. I've always avoided astronomy because I knew that our astronomy doesn 't reach far enough to where things are for it to be . . . somehow, I guess he's from a long wa ys away or I wouldn 't have this very distinct impression that I'm not going to find it in our astronomy. And yet he was t rying to relate to me . He did te1l me a b o u t the Milky Way, you kn ow and tried to make a pic t u re of how they were with relationship to our Mi lky Way, a nd I think that AC:
.
'
,
.
'
.
.
.
.