Captain Bibb's Blog: Stardate 061108.1There she lies. This morning, just after breakfast, my first mate came to my cabin door and knocked gently three times. This action was per my earlier instructions, of course. The entire crew knows how much I desire to see the great land of my forefathers, the wellspring of modernity, the cradle of the industrialized world. At once, I was out of bed and on the bridge, peering through my squinted eyes at the bright hodgepodge of blues and greens that filled the ship's monitor.
Believe me when I tell you that I almost wept. Had I not been afraid that such a public display of emotion would incite laughter, or worse, contumely, I would have shouted "Huzzah!" and danced around like an impish moon-fox. O, how I long to touch the very soil of that great land, to revel in the simple breathing of its air, to move about in the same segments of time-space that once clung to the immortal forms of Marx, Darwin, Mill, Bentham, Newman, Arnold, Tennyson, Dickens, Barrie, Carroll, MacDonald, Yeats, Wilde, Conrad, Wells, Stevenson, Tolkien, Lewis, and, perhaps the most noble name of all, J. Rudyard Kipling. The honor seems beyond all comprehension, beyond any merit a humble traveler like myself could possess. I am compelled to ask, "Who am I? What right do I have to be here among the ghosts of intellectual giants? Surely my place is on a lowlier rung of humanity's ladder."
And yet, there she lies. Just a few weeks more, and our descent will be complete. In the name of St. Christopher, may those weeks pass swiftly!
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