Opening Day 2008 for the Timber Rattlers is April 3. That is 80 days from today. This off-season, the countdown will be based on books. Each day between now and Opening Day 2008, I will pick a random book out of my library and excerpt a passage off the page number corresponding with the number of days remaining to the first pitch of the new season. I will try not to repeat a book during the countdown.
Today’s book is 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke.
A hundred million miles beyond Mars, in the cold loneliness where no man had yet traveled, Deep Space Monitor 79 drifted slowly among the tangled orbits of the asteroids. For three years it had fulfilled its mission flawlessly – a tribute to the American scientists who had designed it, the British engineers who had built it, the Russian technicians who had launched it. A delicate spider’s-web of antennas sampled the passing waves of radio noise—the ceaseless cackle and hiss of what Pascal, in a far similar age, had naïvely called the “silence of infinite space.” Radiation detectors noted and analyzed incoming cosmic rays from the galaxy and points beyond; neutron and X-Ray telescopes kept watch on strange stars that no human eye would ever see; magnetometers observed the gusts and hurricanes of the solar winds, as the Sun breathed million-mile-an-hour blasts of tenuous plasma into the faces of its circling children. All these things, and many others, were patiently noted by Deep Space Monitor 79, and recorded in its crystalline memory.
Put today’s excerpt in a baseball context.
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