【正文】 al, my friends, resumed James Starr, is like thelast drop of blood which has flowed through the veins of the mine! We shallkeep it, as the first fragment of coal is kept, which was extracted ahundred and fifty years ago from the bearings of Aberfoyle. Between thesetwo pieces, how many generations of workmen have succeeded each other inour pits! Now, it is over! The last words which your engineer will addressto you are a farewell. You have lived in this mine, which your hands haveemptied. The work has been hard, but not without profit for you. Our greatfamily mustrent pits cameforward to shake hands with him, whilst the miners waved their caps,shouting, Farewell, James Starr, our master and our friend! This farewell would leave a lasting remembrance in all these honesthearts. Slowly and sadly the population quitted the yard. The black soil ofthe roads leading to the Dochart pit resounded for the last time to thetread of miners39。 feet, and silence succeeded to the bustling life which hadtill then filled the Aberfoyle mines. One man alone remained by James Starr. This was the overman, SimonFord. Near him stood a boy, about fifteen years of age, who for some yearsalready had been employed down below. James Starr and Simon Ford knew and esteemed each other well.Goodby, Simon, said the engineer. Goodby, Mr. Starr, replied the overman, let me add, till we meetagain! Bill became rich. He had two children, Barbara and Robert. In time, his daughter Barbara married another optometrist., and Billy set him up in business. Billy39。s son Robert had a lot of trouble in high school, but then he joined the famous Green Berets. He straightened out, became a fine Young man, and he fought in Vietnam. Early in 1968, a group of optometrists, with Billy among them, chartered an airplane to fly them from Ilium to an international convention of optometrists in Montreal. The plane crashed on top of Sugarbush Mountain, in Vermont. Everybody was killed but Billy. So it goes. While Billy was recuperating in a hospital in Vermont, his wife died accidentally of carbonmonoxide poisoning. So it goes. When Billy finally got home to Ilium after the airplane crash, he was quiet for a while. He had a terrible scar across the top Of his skull. He didn39。t resume practice. He had a housekeeper. His daughter came over almost every day. And then, without any warning, Billy went to New York City, and got on an allnight radio program devoted to talk. He told about having e unstuck in time. He said, too, that he had been kidnapped by a flying saucer in 1967. The saucer was from the planet Tralfamadore, he said. He was taken to Tralfamadore, where he was displayed naked in a zoo, he said. He was mated there with a former Earthling movie star named Montana Wildhack. Some night owls in Ilium heard Billy on the radio, and one of them called Billy39。s daughter Barbara. Barbara was upset. She and her husband went down to New York and brought Billy home. Billy insisted mildly that everything he had said on the radio was true. He said he had been kidnapped by the Tralfamadorians on the night of his daughter39。s wedding. He hadn39。t been missed, he said, because the Tralfamadorians had taken him through a time warp, so that he could be on Tralfamadore for years, and still be away from Earth for only a microsecond. Another month went by without incident, and then Billy wrote a letter to the Ilium News Leader, which the paper published. It described the creatures from Tralfamadore. The letter said that they were two feet high, and green., and shaped like plumber39。s friends. Their suction cups were on the ground, and their shafts, which were extremely flexible, usually pointed to the sky. At the top of each shaft was a little hand with a green eye in its palm. The creatures were friendly, and they could see in four dimensions. They pitied Earthlings for being able to see only three. They had many wonderful things to teach Earthlings, especially about time. Billy promised to tell what some of those wonderful things were in his next letter. Billy was working on his second letter when the first letter was published. The second letter started out like this: 39。The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. 39。When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is so it goes.39。 And so on. Billy was working on this letter in the basement rumpus room of his empty house. It was his housekeeper39。s day off. There was an old typewriter in the rumpus room. It was a beast. It weighed as much as a storage battery. Billy couldn39。t carry it very far very easily, which was why he was writing in the rumpus room instead of somewhere else. The oil burner had quit. A mouse had eaten through the insulation of a wire leading to the thermostat. The temperature in the house was down to fifty degrees, but Billy hadn39。t noticed. He wasn39。t warmly dressed, either. He was barefoot, and still in his pajamas and a bathrobe, though it was late afterno