I do a lot of writing between 10 at night and 2 in the morning, and I enjoy a bit of rhetoric-free background chatter as I type. Lately I've been listening to a guy named Art Bell, in my opinion one of the best all-night talk radio hosts who's ever lived.

I've heard him interview mystics, prognosticators, UFOlogists of every stripe -- even some woman who claimed that reptilian aliens not only lived in big cities in the center of the earth, they drove previously-owned Ford Tauruses. I'm not making this up.

What I like about Art Bell is his unwillingness to sneer at his callers and guests. (Of course, he believes a great deal of this stuff, which helps in the civility department.) His favorite responses to outlandish remarks is "Wow," or if he's really amazed, "I'll be darned." He has a great radio voice too, gravelly and inviting. He lets people talk.

Bell broadcasts nightly from the high desert, which also thrills me. I have an image of him in a double-wide trailer, sitting behind an old battered microphone, calm, soothing, encouraging every shy obsessive in America who believes that there are alien bases on the far side of the moon to pick up the phone and dial.

Now, I just read an essay in the New York Review of Books by Timothy Ferris discussing, among other things, "The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must," by Robert Zubrin (with Richard Wagner). Zubrin apparently is (or was) an actual rocket scientist at Lockheed Martin, and he wants to colonize Mars. (His ghostwriter's qualifications I do not know.)

Zubrin's idea is to send robots up there first, which would then create rocket fuel and water from the Martian atmosphere. This way, humans who fly there six months later wouldn't have to haul gas and water with them, making the trip more cost-effective.

Further, Zubrin proposes that this trip be given to the private sector: "The U.S. government would post a $20 billion reward to be given to the first private organization to successfully land a crew on Mars and return them to earth."

Oh, I can just see it. A swarm of rocket ships, corporate logos prominently displayed, on a market-driven race to the Red Planet. The advancement of human knowledge -- and a fat paycheck-- await the survivors. Pardon me if I remain unexcited.

I'm not really one of them, but among habitual stargazers, I suspect, there are mainly two types of people.

First, there are those who believe that the stars speak to us in some mysterious manner; if we can learn to understand the voice of the stars it will help us shape our destinies.

Let's call them the Learys.

Second, there are those who believe that we can actually reach those stars, strip them of everything useful, then return home with maps, databases and a new appreciation for gravitational radiation conferences. They publish dense papers and can operate stroboscopic quantum nondemolition measurement devices with relative aplomb.

Let's call them the McNamaras.

Contrary to belief, the Learys do not hate the McNamaras. As a matter of fact, Learys often base their theories of how the universe controls their destinies based on misunderstandings of what McNamaras hypothesize.

McNamaras, however, contain in their midst what are called "skeptics." They hate Learys. Yet skeptics are much more obsessed with astrology, UFOlogy and psychics than Learys, most of whom just take a quick glance at their horoscope and then move on to the latest Danielle Steele novel.

Skeptics just can't let it go. They believe that mildly held occult beliefs pose a threat to scientific literacy itself. They dog the heels of UFOlogists, stridently insisting that the bright object they saw in the sky was not Xontar's Flagship, but Venus, or swamp gas, or ball lightning.

You know what they are really? They're a bunch of killjoys. They want us to believe that fairies are really midgets, angels are seagulls and demons only exist in our minds. They're the kind of people who do complicated analyses of Grimm's tales and what moral lessons they teach us, if any. Everything that does not fuel a lesson, alas, must be ruthlessly excised.

They want us to get all excited (in a reasonable kind of way) about some mission to Mars, funded by McDonald's, Disney or Microsoft, overseen by Newt Gingrich.

Why? What do they think is going to happen? Do they think when Mars is finally colonized (after who knows how many deaths), that it'll be populated by skeptics and rationalists, sporting white, mercerized, Sanforized Orlon shirts, pocket protectors and bar graphs? No, it's going to be populated by superstitious yahoos with a weird ax to grind, guys and gals in message T-shirts, tie-dye and stained sweat pants, just the way Earth is.

And eventually, when Mars becomes a vast array of tract homes under bubbles, with their Kitchens of Tomorrow (that never quite work the way they're supposed to) engineered by McNamaras, it will be populated by Learys, Liddys, Milkens, Ovitzes, Gingriches and Art Bell, I hope, out there in his self-sustainable double-wide in the desert, giving the whackos some credence and brief moments of attention in the tiny hours of the Martian night.
Sept. 18, 1997