“Are you guys ready to order?” a waitress asked, standing there with her plastic stylus poised above a digital tablet ready to take their order.
“Blueberry pancakes,” Jason said.
“I’ll have the deluxe omelet,” Helena said.
“Trucker’s breakfast,” Mitchell said.
Lily looked overwhelmed by the choices on the menu. Each meal had a glossy, color image associated with it, and Jason could see her eyes darting around the menu without settling on anything.
“What do you normally have for breakfast in Korea?” he asked.
“Rice.”
“And lunch?” Mitchell asked.
“Rice.”
“And dinner?” Helena asked.
“Fish… With rice.”
“Whatever you do,” Helena said, addressing the waitress, “do not give this girl any rice.”
Lily laughed.
Helena turned to her, saying, “You can have anything on here you want.”
That didn’t help, Jason noted.
Finally, Lily said, “I’ll have what he’s having,” pointing at Jason.
The waitress wandered off.
Mitchell leaned across the table, addressing Lily as he said, “So, what do you remember from your childhood? Say, when you were about three or four?”
Jason kicked him beneath the table.
Lily looked confused.
“Don’t worry about him,” Helena said. “Mitch was born with his foot in his mouth. That’s what I love about him.”
Lily blushed, and Jason wondered what was running through her mind. Here she was, thousands of miles from home, in a strange culture, surrounded by three Americans she didn’t know, unable to find her father. The poor girl must have been terrified, but she kept a brave face.
“You are all very kind,” she said. “I am lucky to have found you.”
Helena spoke in a serious tone, saying, “You need to be careful, Lily. New York is a dangerous place for a girl on her own.”
“Yeah,” Mitchell added, kicking Jason’s feet. “You never know what weirdos you’ll meet.”
Jason smiled, shaking his head as Mitchell laughed.
Lily picked up on their banter and rested her hand on Jason’s knee, saying, “Jason is a gentleman. I feel safe with him.”
Jason turned his head slightly to one side and grinned at Mitchell. Mitch would know precisely the retort Jason wanted to utter to him at that point, something along the lines of, ‘Take that, Bitch!’ Mitchell smiled knowingly.
Lily pointed at the computer tablet lying on the table and asked, “What’s in the news?”
“The news?” Mitchell replied, sounding innocent. “Oh, funny you should ask.”
“Mitch, Honey,” Helena said, resting her hand on his forearm.
Jason jumped in with, “Mitch thinks New York is about to be invaded by aliens.”
“Really?” Lily asked, and Jason saw some of the naiveté he’d noted the night before. She seemed intelligent, but was easily led.
The waitress arrived carrying all four plates. She set them down and left.
“The odds are against it,” Jason said, pouring maple syrup over his pancakes. Lily copied him.
“Space is absurdly large,” he added, picking up a tiny speck of dust between his fingers and holding it up, examining it in the morning light, somewhat lost in thought. “If this was the sun… Well, actually, even this is a bit too big. If our sun was a single blood cell, visible only under a microscope, then our galaxy, the Milky Way, would be the size of the Continental US.”
“And the nearest star?” Lily asked.
Jason looked out the window of the restaurant and across the street at Central Park. From their first floor booth, he could see over the tops of the trees. There were some kids throwing a frisbee in an open grassy patch by the lake.
“About there,” he replied, pointing at them. “Roughly two hundred yards away, perhaps a little more. And it too would be no more than a microscopic speck of dust.”
“What about Voyager?” Mitchell asked. “It’s left the solar system and is headed toward the stars, right?”
“Well, yes and no,” Jason replied. “It all depends on how you define the solar system.”
Jason pulled a quarter out and put it on the table in front of him, with his finger resting in the middle of the coin.
“If the sun was the size of a blood cell, most of the planets, including Earth, would orbit inside this quarter. Voyager would be just marginally beyond our quarter. Voyager is beyond the most distant, recognized planet, and well beyond the heliopause, where solar winds buffet against interstellar space, but it’s not really the edge of our solar system, not if you consider the solar system as the system directly affected by the sun.”
Jason pointed across the street at a man walking his dog through the park, just visible through the trees. He’d only just walked his beagle across the street.
“He’s probably at about the right distance. Surrounding our sun almost a light year away is the Oort cloud containing billions, if not trillions of comets all held loosely in check by the sun’s gravity, just waiting to start their long slow fall in toward the inner solar system and put on a show. That’s the real edge of the solar system, at least from a gravitational perspective.”
Lily had stopped eating. She sat there with her elbows on the table, her head resting on her hands, listening with rapt attention.
“Space is mindbogglingly huge. There’s a whole lot of nothing out there. Imagine New York City as an empty void. You’d have maybe a couple of hundred microscopic specks of dust scattered around as stars. Perhaps one of them would be on top of the Empire State Building, another might be on the Statue of Liberty, and so on. But there would only be a couple of hundred tiny specks broadly scattered around the place.
“If the Milky Way were the size of the Continental US, there would be a massive black hole at the center, just outside of Lebanon, Kansas, up by the border with Nebraska. But it too would be no larger than a few grains of sand. As for us, the tiny speck we call the sun would probably be in St. Louis.”
“I like St. Louis,” Helena said, grinning as she sipped some coffee.
“Black holes in Kansas!” Mitchell cried. “Sounds like you’ve been reading News of the World.”
Jason laughed, saying, “There’s just too much empty space out there. Interstellar travel is impractical. It will take Voyager 30,000 years just to reach the Oort cloud, let alone any of the stars. Thirty to forty thousand years ago, Homo sapiens had just reached Europe and discovered Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon man. Imagine where we will be in thirty thousand years time!
“One day we’ll travel to the stars, and that will be the greatest act of exploration ever undertaken, but make no mistake about it, we’re traversing an arid desert, a desolate Arctic wilderness, an oxygen-starved mountain far more dangerous and inhospitable than Everest. The distances involved and the difficulty of maintaining life in outer space should not be underestimated.”
Helena seemed more interested than Mitchell, saying, “But we’ve been traveling into space for decades. We’ve been to the Moon. We’ve got a space station.”
“Honestly,” Jason replied. “That’s like playing in a duck pond, never being more than an arm’s length from shore. If space travel was swimming, we’d be comfortable in a kiddie pool. Getting to the Moon would be like swimming a few lengths in an Olympic size pool, while traveling to Mars compares to swimming from Cuba to Florida. Going to another star, well, now you’re taking on a distance that makes crossing the Pacific look like your kiddie pool.”
Mitchell disagreed, saying, “And just because we haven’t done it, you think no one can? That makes no sense. There’s no reason to think aliens would be at the same technological level as us. They could be millions of years more advanced.”