"Well, nothing right now," Graham answered. "But I'm really curious as to how you came into being."
"HOW! I! CAME! INTO! BEING? Hmmmmm. Oh, you mean how I was manufactured. Well, originally a tinsmith made me. But then I lost my head over a girl. Then one day an electrical genius from Mars came to Oz to discuss a contract to build satellite dishes. They wanted to bounce signals from Mars to earth in order to relay Martian soap operas in exchange for some earth programming to Mars. Their favorite earth programs are reruns of Mork and Mindy and Star Trek. They're even more popular than their prime-time blockbuster, My Favorite Earthling. Anyway … as I was saying … Let's see … I had lost my head, and—"
"Now, wait a minute!" Graham interrupted. "There are no people on Mars.
Besides, the environment there is too hostile to support life."
"Oh. You mean that they have too many harsh TV critics?"
"No. I mean that—For one thing, the temperature would be too harsh. It's way too cold on Mars to support life. Not to mention the atmosphere, which is mostly carbon dioxide."
"Oh, my dear boy," smiled the face. "You don't know anything, do you? Oh, you know your scientific facts all right but, according to my memory banks, there is life all over the universe that your scientists' crude observation methods cannot even detect."
"You're beginning to sound like the UFO people I talked to," Graham answered with a tone of disapproval in his voice.
"Well, nevertheless, life exists simultaneously on many different frequency levels that are undetectable from one to the other—an analogy would be the many TV channels that are in the air simultaneously, but you can only tune in to the one frequency that your tuning device is locked into."
"Well, I've heard that before," answered Graham.
"Yes. And people are tuning devices in themselves. That's why some people are sensitive to the vibrations from Oz and can see what is going on there. Mr. Baum was the first person in America who was able to tune into Oz, and he wrote many history books on this land. Well, that is to say, they were recordings of current events at the time he wrote them, but they are now history. And as much as he wrote, he was only able to record a tiny fraction of our history. Since then, many people have contributed. Some more than others."