Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery. — Kurt Vonnegut

Like most science-fiction writers, Trout knew almost nothing about science.

Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind.

Listen:

The waitress brought me another drink. She wanted to light my hurricane lamp again. I wouldn't let her. "Can you see anything in the dark, with your sunglasses on?" she asked me.

"The big show is inside my head," I said