The Argo Goes West

133, Project Steinbeck

Here is no water but only rock

Rock and no water and the sandy road

The road winding above among the mountains

Which are mountains of rock without water

--T. S. Eliot "The Waste Land"

"Oh, my goodness!" Dorothy exclaimed in amazement.

"What's wrong?" asked Giles, but Dorothy couldn't answer immediately.

"Disappeared!" said Dorothy after a while.

"What?"

"The Pacific... The Pacific is gone."

It was Dorothy's first time in San Francisco, but she had a general knowledge of the geography. Since she will be living in this town after getting a job, she had studied beforehand. Although many buildings had collapsed, she was able to identify the Beaux Arts-style Ferry Building, Chinatown and Grace Cathedral facing the San Francisco Bay. Beyond was the open land of the Presidio, lined with rapid-firing artillery batteries, but beyond which there was no sea for enemy ships to enter, and a vast expanse of barren land.

"That mountain is Mount Olympus," said Giles happily.

Is that a mountain? Dorothy wondered. The shape was certainly a circular truncated cone and looked like a mountain, but it was too big and too high. The summit was hidden behind clouds and she couldn't see it. It looked much, much higher than Everest or Mont Blanc.

"If that mountain is your world's mountain, is it your world?"

"I think so."

"In Greek mythology, Mount Olympus is said to be home to gods. In other words, heaven, isn't it? Could heaven have fallen from the sky to the earth? "

"I do not know."

"Pegasus. Please rise."

Dorothy wanted to see the top of Mount Olympus, so she flew above the clouds. The slope of the mountain covered in a white robe stretched gently into the sky, melting and disappearing into the faint blue.

"Have you read Steinbeck's The Red Pony?" Conrad asked.

"No," Billy Chen replied.

"It was written in the 1930s." Conrad explained the book. "The main character is a boy and consists of four short stories. In one episode, the grandfather, who lives elsewhere, visits the boy's house. He starts talking about old times. The boy's father is disgusted that it has started again, but the boy listens to his grandfather. The grandfather was the captain of a wagon train headed west during the frontier era. He nostalgically tells the boy about his various adventures, including fighting the Native Americans. But the good old days are over, he says. At the west end was the Pacific Ocean. They couldn't go further west. It meant the end of the adventure, the end of the dream. Since then, the United States has lost its dreams and become cruel. Cavalry killed Native Americans like rats, he laments.

It was also the beginning of American imperialism. The United States had no more frontiers at home, so it had gone abroad. It sent troops to Cuba and the Philippines. Also in the Korean Peninsula and Vietnam. We fought China there.

What would American history have been if the Pacific had never existed and the West had extended further?

That's why I suggested Project Steinbeck."

Americans, Chinese, and volunteer scientists and mathematicians who survived on Mars accepted Conrad's proposal. (It was one of many projects. Various projects have been tried, but none have yet managed to avert the final war.) They used the Ren Yi Men to link the 1900 West Coast of America with ancient Mars over a vast area. Ancient Mars was Mars when Ren Yi Men was created, but they were surprised to learn that it was the world of Greek mythology.

Ancient Martians were gods in Greek mythology! Why did the ancient Greeks know about Martians? Did the Martians visit Earth and then create Greek mythology? Or did the aftermath of Project Steinbeck affect ancient Greece? (Billy Chen also confirmed that this project created a local distortion of space-time.)

No doubt the Earthlings saw the Martians (or Martian monkeys) performing various miracles and called them gods. The gods gave civilization to earthlings. Fire, Language, and Geometry. But is that all? Did the gods create humans or other creatures in their own image, as written in some myths? for what?

Is it possible for earthlings to understand the will of God, who lives in a high-dimensional universe and is beyond human understanding?

Does God play like we do the God game of Video games? (If so, perhaps God's avatar is mixed in the human world.)

"The tracks end here," reported Orpheus Granger, standing on the edge of the cliff.

The Mad Bomber leaned forward and looked down at the bottom of the cliff. "There are dead centaurs. One, two, three...six in total."

"Deception," Pat Garrett said coldly. "So that we can't track John Carter and the others, they erased Carter's tracks before crashing themselves down the cliff. By the way, what's ahead?"

Slim opened the map and answered. "There is a gold mine. The Big Dipper Gold Mine."

"There it is."

The faces of the members of posse who followed Carter's Raiders through the Sierra Nevada mountains were lively. Americans really like the West. thought Billy Chen. No, we Chinese are the same. We love 'Journey to the West.