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It was the day before Christmas, fairly cold, something between a late autumn day and one late in winter. There was a belated feeling about the day itself as well. Not fully illuminated, misty, sluggish. Stray snowflakes sailed through the icy air like poplar seeds. The tram cars huddled in herds on the broad trunk line, their bells clanging plaintively. A beggar familiar to all Warsaw sat himself down on the sidewalk near the jewelry store. He spread out his legs in the light, shifting snow to intimidate fainthearted passerby. But I knew that his prostheses, made of plastic and nickel, were hollow, and though they might freeze to the sidewalk, our beggar would feel no cold. Endless crowds of pedestrians rushed by along the walls. Occasionally one, lost in thought, would collide with another, yet would keep on walking without apology. Or one would jostle another with a Christmas tree, then curse him out. Some stumbled and fell but rose quickly, feeling no pain, and went on their way. Your usual day before Christmas.

This day was creeping across a little planet in a small solar system. The planet, called Earth, is a rocky oval filled with liquid lava; its surface is covered by thin layers of water, as well as by air, a volatile mixture of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and several other elements, each of which would pose a threat to its existence. Due to a confluence of favorable circumstances, life arose on this planet. This protein-based life, after millions of years, created intelligent beings called people, a group to which I, who wrote these lines, have the honor of belonging. Humanity, or the sum total of intelligent inhabitants of the earth, has created civilization, which allow us to comprehend the universe (though not, of course, completely), aids us in combating the ancient misfortunes of human existence (and creates new and increasingly menacing ones), and permits man to take short walks in space while depriving him of the hope of great voyages into the depths of space. A most essential piece of information must be added here: life on Earth is subject to a strange rhythm which makes for quite unusual transformations of energy — birth and death, maturing and aging, being and non-being.

I am compelled to make these few superficial explanations in the hope that some copy of this book which I now labor over will reach the hands, antennae, or computers of other intelligent beings who may happen by our galaxy, intelligent beings from the central regions of the universe, from the more elegant neighborhoods of the Lord God’s metropolis, beings better and wiser than we, the noble supermen of man’s imagination. I write with such an ambitious, indeed unusual intention, only because I am bored by communication with my fellow men, my fellow wise men and idiots, my fellow prophets and scoundrels, my fellow torturers and victims.

Every year Christmas Eve brings Earthlings a certain magical hope, awakens strange, exciting forebodings in us, and stirs our longing for our primal, unknown homeland. On that day, at the beginning of winter or a summer two thousand years ago, a man was born whom we acknowledge as God, that is, as the co-creator of the unknowable edifice of the universe, a man who, in our belief, intercedes between us and an awe-inspiring, mysterious Supreme being.

On this particular day before Christmas I was standing wrapped in a warm sheepskin coat in front of a jewelry store named, with no particular finesse, The Jeweler. There were about twenty people stamping their numbed feet behind me. I was shivering a bit myself, even though I was covered with abundant fur, shivering in anticipation of that day, of those few uncommon hours which might bring me, and all of us, some decisive solution.

“Look at that one, she’s in good shape,” muttered the individual behind me, a thick cloud of steam issuing against the collar of my coat. Eyes tearing from the cold, he pointed at the store’s display window. “Just looking at that could get you in trouble.”

The outlines of a woman’s face could be seen through the dusty glass. A dark-haired girl with slightly indecent lips was looking out at the cheerless street with sepia eyes.

“Precisely, but not for us,” I said melancholically.

“Why’s that, we are worse than anybody else?”

Long gray hair protruded from beneath the fur cap of the man behind me, reaching down to the collar of his navy-blue jacket with orange piping.

“Maybe not,” I sighed. “It’s just that our birth certificates are slowly expiring.”