You’re entirely right there. We don’t discard ideas simply because they point us in disquieting directions; that would be a betrayal of our academic responsibilities in most cases. I think, though, you may have overlooked something. It’s understandable, since this idea of yours would point toward a universal emergency if it were true, but consider that, according to you, the messages you’ve found were deliberately concealed. So then, do you have any way of accounting for that? I mean, who hid them, and why? If your theory were correct, then it would follow that a conscious language that hides such messages might be unable to prevent them from “leaking out” into print, let’s say, in the same way that, oh, an arsonist can’t direct where the smoke from his fire will go. Every act leaves traces behind, even the act of erasing traces; that’s physics, you must agree. Are you okay? You look a little peaked. Don’t you think you should sit down?

There—any better? I’ll go get someone in a moment, if you need me to. Should I call someone for you? No?

Well, I don’t know when I’ll have another opportunity to talk with you, so, if you don’t mind, I’d like to finish what I was saying. It won’t take long. I want you to understand that I take what you’re saying very seriously, and thank you again for bringing it to my attention. You’re one of a very very small number of people who would be likely to discover such messages, if all this were true. But you see, if your idea were true, then it would follow that language itself would want to keep its secrets, and so anyone who might make such a discovery as this, which I again assure you is really not what you think it is, but probably just an unusual series of typos or misprints or something, but anyone who might make such a discovery of this type in a universe where your theory is true, would be liable to deletion by language. I mean, someone may continue to exist in a sense, or literally in a sensory manner, but without a name, without a being, without any of the fixity that language alone can establish in the discursive construct that we call reality, that person is essentially lost. But—are you all right? You see, we don’t live in that universe, not at all. We can speculate freely about whatever we like, even to the extent of speculating about this particular fact of language, provided that speculating is all we are doing. If we start to believe it, well...