| | FICTION: JUVENILEWORKS |
BAROON — Initial Draft BY J. ROBINSON WHEELER | Introduction | Part 1 |
29 August 1987
There are impossibly more stars in the Universe than any one being couldpossibly worry about counting, though evidently some find the time duringtheir lives to concern themselves with it. They also find time to estimatethat every hundred million or so a star has at least one planet orbitingit, and an astronomically small number actually produce life of some kindworth mentioning, and I don't even want to mention how impossibly remotethe Universal chances of intelligent species forming truly is. Let alonethe ones that turn out "humanoid", intelligent, on a planet capableof sustaining life. Out of those few, however, there is a surprisingly high number of beingswilling to calculate this all out, only to become totally brainwashed bythe total unlikeliness of their own existence and refuse to believe in themselvesand subsequently vanish in a puff of green smoke. Out of all of this comes a generally accepted law that "The onlysacred truth in science is that there IS no sacred truth in science."In fact, there is such an unlikely chance of any two exact occurances takingplace on a Universal scope that it is accepted that it NEVER happens, andso far nobody has ever bothered to disprove it. But as it turns out, absolutely every intelligent culture in the Universegoes through a particularly arrogant period of knowledge when they believethemselves to live at the center of the entire Universe, that they are itand everyone else will have to make do revolving around THEM. Every Universal rule is made to be broken, however, and there is onecivilization that is so uniquely opposite in thinking as to flat out REFUSEto accept the fact that they might be at the center of everything. Theirearliest scientists were remarkably ahead of the game in assuming that,the Universe being infinite, it couldn't have a center, and so they weren'tit. No if's, and's, or but's. As it turned out, however, the Universe was finite, and they were atthe center. Not even the star that their planet rotated around, by a quirkof Universal law, the planet maintained its position at the center evenas it orbited. And not once did they didn't stop to think about the incredible numberof clues around them that pointed to this fact. Unfortunately, just about all of the other advanced civilizations oftheir particular galaxy, and a few from neighboring systems, came to thisinevitable conclusion and were on their way their to give their opinion. Some species which had outgrown the arrogant way of thinking were comingto congratulate them and observe their species out of curiosity. The vastmajority were narrow-minded cultures who, though their science had improveda thousandfold, still clung to the theory that they were in charge and weren'tabout to stand for anything less than the Universe revolving around THEM. |