#257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration)

It was almost three o'clock in the morning when the sound of a glass door being smashed woke me up. I was alone in my house. A few seconds later I heard someone walking on the broken glass. The stranger

Had come back. Hours earlier, my house had been filled with friends who'd come to watch huge fragments. of the comet Shoemaker Levy Nine crashing into Jupiter. The first time in history it was possible to watch an extraterrestrial collision in our solar system. I'd built this house on the highest point in Austin just for nights like this.

And its centerpiece is a large telescope. When my friends arrived early in the evening I had opened the security gates in the front of the house and turned off the exterior lighting so it would not interfere with our observation. The spectacle lasted only a few hours, and by ten o'clock my guests were gone. When the doorbell rang just after midnight.

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