“The featherless bipeds throw back their heads, open their mouths, showing their teeth, and let out short barks or grunts.

Periodically they strike their two manipulating organs together.

One faces them, illuminated, on a small platform. His mouth is constantly working.”

I wrote this in the aeroplane, imagining I was a scientist somewhere in the universe, coding a new stream of signals from a newly discovered intelligent planet.

The scientist is watching stand-up comedy.

Reading this back made me think of Philip K. Dick, sad, spooked, Philip Dick, whom I interviewed once in 1982.

Dick believed that other intelligent life forms would be utterly repulsive to us and we to them, with our absurd little heads, wet bulging eyes, sallow hairless skins and other disgusting body parts.

I am going to California. I am reading “Guns, Germs and Steel” by Jared Diamond for the second time.

California is Technology in a Desert.

This morning, when I left, there was an autumn chill, with mist over the cut fields where white daisies flower in the stubble.