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said Rupert, exasperated. “They’re Martians. They don’t even have language as we commonly understand the term.” He poked Melvin on the shoulder. “This is clearly a job for Annie.”
    â€œWhat?” said Melvin, removing the headphones.
    â€œIt’s a job for Annie,” said Rupert.
    â€œAgreed,” said Melvin.
    â€œWho?” I said.
    â€œAnnie Porlock,” said Rupert. “She built her own harpsichord.”
    â€œSoul of an artist,” said Melvin.
    â€œHeart of an angel,” said Rupert.
    â€œCrazy as a bedbug,” and Melvin.
    â€œFor our immediate purpose, the most relevant fact about Annie is that she chairs our Interplanetary Communications Committee, in which capacity she cracked the Martian tweets and twitters, or so she claimed right before the medics took her away.”
    â€œHow do we find her?” I asked.
    â€œFor many years she was locked up in some wretched Long Island laughing academy, but then the family lawyer got into the act,” said Melvin. “I’m pretty sure they transferred her to a more humane facility here in New York.”
    â€œWhat facility?” I said. “Where?”
    â€œI can’t remember,” said Melvin.
    â€œYou’ve got to remember.”
    â€œSorry.”
    â€œTry.”
    Melvin picked up the soccer ball and set it in his lap. “Fresh from the guillotine, the head of Maximillien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre,” he said, as if perhaps I’d forgotten he was a paranoid schizophrenic. “Oh, Robespierre, Robespierre, was the triumph of inadvertence over intention ever so total?”
    I brought both lunatics home with me. Valerie greeted us with the sad news that the Winter Garden, the Walter Kerr, the Eugene O’Neill, and a half-dozen other White Way theaters had been lost in the Battle of Times Square. I told her there was hope for the Big Apple yet.
    â€œIt all depends on our ability to devise a set of robust arguments favoring either scientific materialism or theistic revelation and then communicating the salient points to the Martians in their nonlinguistic language, which was apparently deciphered several years ago by a paranoid schizophrenic named Annie Porlock,” I told Valerie.
    â€œThat’s not a sentence you hear every day,” she replied.
    It turns out that Melvin is even more devoted to board games than Rupert, so the evening went well. We played Scrabble, Clue, and Monopoly, after which Melvin introduced us to an amusement of his own invention, a variation on Trivial Pursuit called Teleological Ambition. Whereas the average Trivial Pursuit conundrum is frivolous, the challenges underlying Teleological Ambition are profound. Melvin remembered at least half of the original questions, writing them out on three-by-five cards. If God is infinite and self-sufficient, why would he care whether his creatures worshiped him or not? Which thought is the more overwhelming: the possibility that the Milky Way is teeming with sentient life, or the possibility that Earthlings and Martians occupy an otherwise empty galaxy? That sort of thing. Bobby hated every minute, and I can’t say I blame him.
    AUGUST 12
    Shortly after breakfast this morning, while he was consuming what may have been the last fresh egg in SoHo, Melvin announced that he knew how to track down Annie Porlock.
    â€œI was thinking of how she’s a walking Rosetta Stone, our key to deciphering the Martian tongue,” he explained, strapping on his dish antenna. “Rosetta made me think of Roosevelt, and then I remembered that she’s living in a houseboat moored by Roosevelt Island in the middle of the East River.”
    I went to the pantry and filled my rucksack with a loaf of stale bread, a jar of instant coffee, a Kellogg’s Variety Pack, and six cans of Campbell’s soup. The can opener was nowhere to be found, so I tossed in my Swiss army knife. I guided my