I woke with a humming deck under my head, and a sense of a verser. The air was stale as I explored the robotically run cargo-hauling sub-light Bussard ramjet. By the frequent vector changes I figured that the other was onboard.



Finding him crouched by a portable plasma furnace in between vast piles of plastic sealed cargo cheered me immensely. The lack of human contact had weighed on my heart.



A great deal of graffiti adorned the nearby piles. I read it, and saw that unless my host was a multiple personality he could not have written it all.

It was verser graffiti.

“Hi, I’m Tanya. Left in ‘94 from Earth after my microwave blew, went to Naga World, and to the P’clkkkkk Interstellar War next, and learned magic from Merlin next, and now I’m here on this robo-cargo ship.”

That was the longest. Most were simply names, and leave dates.

The number of versers who had landed in this tiny corner of reality reinforced my notion that there were weak spots in the world walls that would guide a person to a landing.



I introduced myself, and since we were surrounded by names of worlds we easily fell into conversation about where we had been.



“I saw a twentieth century big city avenue from my landing spot in an alley. A quick investigation made everything seem normal in Los Angeles. The placename was City of Angels.

When I tried to buy an apple from a street vendor he would not sell it. It seemed the American dollar collapsed in 1995 due to hyper-inflation. Another change he caught from looking at people’s t-shirts. It seemed that Jimmy Carter never made it to the Presidency. He became a mega-rock star instead.

Then he sensed a verser, and more than one …



Next week, meeting the pantheon.



Tadeusz