One afternoon, light-years from here, where afternoons are a kind of joke, Polaris grew restless and decided to take a holiday to the Wild West.
He arrived in the early 1880s, dusty and superheated from the trip. Out on the oceans ships began to drift off-course.
Polaris stepped through the swinging doors of a saloon. The honky-tonk piano tinkled to a stop as the ivory keys became brittle, the strings melted, the case caught fire and the player went up in flames. People didn�t even have time to scream.
How about two fingers of whisky, Polaris said to the inferno.
Get out of here! Screamed a prostitute from the hotel balcony down the street. Take your infernal body of fire and get the hell back to the night sky!
Ma�am, he said, you best be looking at me through a chip of polarized glass.
Aaagh! She screamed. I�m blinded!
Then the hotel and all the other buildings sublimated to ash from the heat. Montana fused to glass. The glass became a kind of plasma. Tourism suffered.
You know what? Polaris said. I like it here. It has a kind of austere and magnificent beauty. I think I�ll be staying a spell. I hereby appoint myself mayor and sheriff of Plasma-Montana. Not to mention suzerain.
Telegrams sped from the Republic of Plasma-Montana to the remotest parts of the Earth. Emissaries from Manchuria, Georgia, Belgian Congo, Prussia all came to pay their respects. Polaris set them up in a nice hotel in North Dakota. Relations progressed smoothly until an unusual Easterly wind ignited the Dakotas and most of Minnesota. Lake Superior boiled. Residents of Thunder Bay sweated profusely.
President Garfield, clad in an asbestos suit, set out to meet with Polaris and negotiate a treaty for reasonable coexistence. On his way there he was shot by an attorney with a grudge.
After six months Polaris got bored and went back home to his place in the dark heavens. Plasma-Montana eventually cooled and solidified, although it would not be fit for human habitation until 2500 AD.
