Page 68 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

Ark Two

Crackpots seem to go, like moths to flame or bees to flowers, to
end-of-the-world scenarios and their equally spectacular opposite,
deus ex machina global panaceas. Within the utopian category,
however, they differ from the rest of the populace blessed with
overheated imaginations merely in degree. The latter set their sights
on exotic labor-saving devices, self-improvement rituals, and cures
for the major and minor complaints of old age, thus putting
themselves and their life savings at the disposal of con artists, cult
leaders and self-deluded flat-Earthers. The former, truly extravagant
theorists and problem-solvers, had few followers or funds: they were
the sort of psychoceramics Al Magnus had engaged me first to
contact and then, having established trust, to connect with a
financing arrangement for their schemes through an ad hoc
organization created by Magnus exclusively for that function.
Kile Vosky was one of these big thinkers. True to type, as the
problem grew in size, so did the eccentricity of the solution. The
rickety edifice of civilization in our era, and the range of easily-
imagined consequences of its collapse, could be rivaled in scope as
impending disaster only by a Texas-sized asteroid’s direct hit on
Texas. No doubt prior periods of ecological and political turmoil
have stimulated similar millennial thought through the millennia, the
difference being that scientists were now in the mix with the
Jeremiahs of superstitious religion. Wouldn’t it be fun to know the
first thinking biped’s reaction to his first perceived solar eclipse? With
regard to the final curtain ringing down on this planet’s personnel’s
precipitously poor performance I remained agnostic, neither
panicking nor doing anything in the least useful to prepare for the
coming apocalypse. Not so the people I had to convince to take Al
Magnus’s money: they were operating on another plane of
importance and urgency. Perhaps those of Mr. Vosky’s ilk sublimate
their dread into an obsessive quest to escape the otherwise inevitable,
an ego trip linked inextricably to a very bad trip, indeed.
Being a journeyman astronomer (a nocturnal part-time telescope
jockey, no academic heavyweight or celebrity popularizer) Vosky
tended by “professional deformation” to apply his slightly-warped
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