Peace's Nailed Desk

Paul and John, Not that this means anything (file under "Free Association"), but this detail of a desk reminded me at first reading of a similar scene in an early Heinlein novel--I think it was HAVE SPACESUIT, WILL TRAVEL. The boyish hero (Kip? Tip? The spacesuit's name was Oscar) wakes up after a near-death medical crisis and is comforted by the sight of his old room; but then when he tries to get his slipstick off the desk, it won't budge (causing some anti-comforting anxiety and confusion). Enter the friendly medical aliens, who explain that they were able to construct the room from a snapshot-like memory in his brain, but they didn't know that the artifacts upon the desk were meant to be separate from the desk. Granted in hindsight, Heinlein was often toying with eschatological and angelic matters; this scene could amount to an "X-Filization" of something from one "Book of the Dead" or another. It certainly rings true with notion that low level ghosts (those that lack physical presence) cannot pick things up. (Obviously not poltergeists.) =mantis=