If at first you don’t succeed, deny, deny again. Welcome to Night Vale.

There is so little left. The University of What It Is has explained almost everything away. The man who is not tall and the man who is not short are only government employees with a predilection for idle chit-chat and murder. The City Council is merely a confused and angry den of rattlesnakes, plus Tamika Flynn. And the lights above the Arby’s…oh the lights above the Arby’s. Well, it doesn’t matter what they turned out to be. They are gone now. And the memory of my first kiss with my husband is forever tarnished.

Soon there will be nothing left in Night Vale except me, speaking into a microphone, and the Ralphs. When Dr. Lubelle saw the Ralphs she said “yep, that’s a Ralphs” and walked away without further comment. So I guess at least I’ll have a place to buy my basic necessities, like eggs and orangemilk.

Carlos has become bolder out of necessity. After his last brush with the law, he is no longer denying his interest in science. He has this message for Night Vale.

CARLOS: There is an old saying in science. “Enough is enough.” What that means is that when there is a sufficient quantity of something, then you absolutely have to stop adding to it. And this town has had enough explanation for now, I’d say. So many words describing the background and purpose of every little thing. This is not the science I know and love. This is the science of those who want the universe to be dreary, to be reduced to a prize that can be held in the hand. “I explained this, so therefore I own it.”

It is time for those who believe in the science of discovery, of research, of humility, of using these tools to make our lives better, it is time for us to take a stand. It is time for me to take a stand. There is a stubborn problem I must fix. A problem that is also an old colleague of mine. Dr. Lubelle, we will speak soon.

CECIL: Dr. Lubelle issued her own statement in response. In the interest of journalistic integrity and messy gossip, I will now play it.

DR. LUBELLE: Hello, Dr. Janet Lubelle here. Scientist, philosopher, great woman of history, etc. It seems that someone has forgotten who they are.

Carlos, I know you. I knew you when you were only an upstart fellow grad student at the University of What It Is. I knew you when you got it in your head that there was somewhere in the great deserts of the United States a town that was the most scientifically interesting community in the country. Oh the attention you got for this so called discovery, nonsense though it was. You got headlines, you got grants, an entire research team for this fully funded expedition. Meanwhile the budget for my own research withered away. Absolutely no one wanted to fund my research anymore. Apparently the world didn’t need a version of the measles that was more contagious and also made your eyes explode. You think it’s easy to make Super Exploding Eye Measles? It’s very hard, and takes great science to do. But no, instead the money flowed to perfect Carlos and his perfect idea about a weird desert town.

Well look at me now, Carlos. I’ve explained most of this nonsense away. Your great discovery, disappearing one piddling explanation at a time. And now, I have decided to finish the job. I am going to explain you, Dr. Carlos Robles of the University of What It Is. I am going to explain you right away. And then there will be no one left to defend this place, and I will become the scientist that gets to define what Night Vale is to the world.

This is what is right. Because it’s what I want. And everything I want is objectively the correct thing.

CECIL: No. No, she can’t explain Carlos. This is a line that must not be crossed. This is not just my town. It is my family. It is my love.

Carlos has left Night Vale. And I was like “sweetie, I thought you were going to make a stand. This looks a little like you’re running away instead.” But he told me there was an old friend he must go to see, who was also, in a way, a new friend. Honestly, I could not understand most of what he was trying to tell me, but I do know this with a certainty born of years of love and trust: Carlos will see us through this crisis. He must. He must. Because if he doesn’t…well, I can’t think about that.

Oh no. The foul Dr. Lubelle has another message for us.

DR. LUBELLE: You’re a brave man, Carlos Robles. I’ve never told you that, because it’s never been true before. But it’s true now. I’d say I’m impressed, but I make it a policy never to be impressed. Do you look out on the glorious world, this starship upon which an unlikely group of animals and plants are touring the universe? Do you marvel at the beauty and splendor of something so simple as rainfall in sunlight? Do you look at that and feel any sense of wonder? Then that’s a lack of objectivity, and you shouldn’t be allowed to be a scientist.

You have been wondering, haven’t you Carlos? Out here where time doesn’t work, you said. Where your friends including actual heavenly angels, you said. Where you spent ten years trapped in a desert Other-world, you…oh oops! That was supposed to be a secret wasn’t it? That time worked differently for you there and so you experienced an entire decade in that wasteland of an Other-world? Hiding that truth from your husband and community so as not to cause them anguish and alarm? Whoopsie. Discretion, in my opinion, isn’t the better part of anything.

Well, Carlos, if you aren’t a coward (and for everything I think of you, I don’t believe that you are a coward), then you will meet me at the gates of the University of What It Is, Night Vale adjacent campus. Where we can debate face to face. Where my idea of science can be put against yours for one final test. Where your family and community can watch as I completely explain you away.

See you soon. Hugs and kisses!

CECIL: Of course, Carlos cannot take her up on this offer. There are limits, and my limit is the threat of explanation against my husband, and the father to my child. Except, and yet, if we back down now, then where do we stop backing down? What will be left if we do not risk ourselves for this fight?

And Carlos must be thinking the same grim thought, as he has sent me this message.

CARLOS: I speak now not to my adversary, but to my community.

People of Night Vale: Meet me at the gates of the University of What It Is. We cannot let ourselves be explained away, but neither can we live in fear. I want you to see two scientists meet face to face, so you can realize that the danger here is not the manner in which we are thinking, or the curiosities that drive us, but the human intention behind the thought. I seek to help with science. Dr. Lubelle seeks to destroy. That is the difference between us. Although I suppose today we are not so different, because if I am unable to help Dr. Lubelle stop her conquest, then I will have no choice but to destroy her. People of Night Vale, the people of this community I belong to, I will see you there.

CECIL: You heard him. Let’s go now to the University of What It Is, and let’s also go now to the w….to a song.

[SONG]

Carlos arrived at the gates of the University of What It Is, Night Vale adjacent campus. A collection of trailers and tents just outside of city limits. He arrived in a stylish old fashioned purple-striped jalopy. Trailing behind him was a glowing cloud, from which fell the bodies of dead animals. This was the child of the Glow Cloud.

“I just needed to collect my two friends,” Carlos said, and here I was confused, because I only saw one companion, but then his jalopy winked and I realized it was none other than the shapeshifter Josh Crayton, who had brought Carlos back from his trip to retrieve the Glow Cloud.

Dr. Lubelle stepped forward to meet our hometown hero. Behind her was her henchman, Dr. Blake Jones (released last week on bail for breaking and entering), and behind them was a nearly endless crowd of begoggled scientists. Dr. Lubelle smiled with venom, and crossed her arms over her chest. “Welcome to the party,” she said.

Behind Carlos, there gathered a more ragtag group, the community of Night Vale, or what was left of us after so much of our town had been explained away. They glared at both Dr. Lubelle and Carlos, radiating hatred for the scientific method and all who practice such heresy.

Carlos cleared his throat, and spoke both to the University of What It Is and to his town.

CARLOS: I once said science is neat. I don’t know if I believe that anymore. Because science is messy. It can be used for greatness, for love, for humanity. And it can be used to other, to murder, and to mutilate. We want science to be something outside of, higher than, ourselves, but it has always just been us. And so it is up to us what to do with science.

Dr. Lubelle has presented you with a vision of science that is colonizing, devoid of wonder, as barren as the Atacama Desert. And you have reacted against that with distrust and fear and anger. I understand that.

But I am presenting you with a different vision of science, and I have done so for my decade in your community. A science that is your neighbor, that seeks not to steal the stars, but to show them to you all the better.

I am asking you, my community, to trust me. To trust that the best way to fight science used for ill is not superstition, or a retreat away from everything we have learned, or to distrust all science. Science is a tool, helpful and dangerous, but we will use it only for our fellow humans, with the benefit of the least of us always in mind. This is the only true way to face up to those who use this most beautiful of human inventions against humanity itself. I invite you to join me in doing so.

CECIL: Well, I don’t mind telling you, I cried when Carlos spoke those words. Because we had been thinking about this the wrong way. We had seen it as us vs science. When this whole time we could have seen it as our science vs a perversion of science. And then we never had to look at Carlos or my family with distrust.

There were grumblings among the towns people, however. It seemed maybe they weren’t as convinced, when there was only one scientist on our side, and a horde of Dr. Lubelle’s minions in lab coats following her every evil word. Josh revved his engine in frustration. The Glow Cloud gusted and moaned. Dr. Lubelle sneered at us from afront her army, daring us to act.

And then someone did act. And it was no one on our side. Dr. Blake Jones, assistant to Dr. Lubelle, her loyal henchman who had tricked me so cruelly not two months before, he stepped forward and spoke in a clear reedy voice.

“The scientist of Night Vale is right. Our former colleague. Our friend. Dr. Carlos Robles. He speaks of science as we all once understood it. Not as an alternative to humanity, but as humanity’s greatest instrument. I say that the University of What It Is once had a higher purpose: to find out what IT is. What all of it is. But we got waylaid. Now we merely find out what we can possess, what we can destroy. And there is only one person who can bring us back to our original purpose. It is not this pretender that has led us to this disgraceful state. But Carlos. Carlos, will you be our new dean?”

There was an uncertainty of silence. The horde of scientists looked at each other. They murmured and debated, and then they came to a scientific consensus. And as one, they stepped forward with a deafening whomp of footfalls, following Blake Jones, and abandoning Dr. Janet Lubelle. The doctor sputtered in disbelief, faced for the first time with the world not acting according to her whims. And then she forced a laugh, a laugh like a pipe organ tumbling down a hillside.

DR. LUBELLE: This is your move, Carlos? You get my own people to turn on me? You bring with you a car that can wink and a shiny puff of vapor functionally identical to one that I already explained away? Let me tell you, Dr. Carlos Robles, originally of Pomona, California. Let me tell you, Dr. Carlos Robles who did his undergraduate in marine biology at UC Santa Barbara. Let me tell you, Dr. Carlos Robles, whose middle name, if I remember right, is inexplicably “Dave”.

Let me tell you that nothing you have thrown at me makes even a dent in my confidence. Your magic tricks of shapeshifting 20-somethings and glowing clouds are no more impressive to me than if you asked me to pick a card. And I don’t need Dr. Jones or any of these other deadweights. I am sovereign, dependent on no one, sure always of the right course, the correct point of view. Nothing can cause me to waver in what I know to be true. Every single one of my hypotheses are proven. You say that’s not how science works? I say that you’re just worse at science than me.

Now you’re starting to understand. There is no defeating me. No trick to wriggling out under my thumb. I’ve gamed out every gambit. Foreseen every fumbling, sweaty strategy. You have lost. And now…now Carlos, I will explain you away.

You, Dr. Carlos Robles, were the son of [WHISTLING SOUND OF SOMETHING FALLING FROM THE SKY. LOUD SPLAT]

[LONG PAUSE]

CECIL: And that’s when the Glow Cloud dropped a dead cow on Dr. Lubelle. I sure hope she wasn’t injured. We should definitely check on her at some point, you know, eventually. But either way the crowd of locals and the crowd of renegade scientists were confused, then shocked, then ecstatic, then they all began to chant “ALL HAIL THE CHILD OF THE GLOW CLOUD!”

The scientists, with Dr. Jones in the lead, stepped around the messy splatter of cow parts to approach Carlos. Dr. Jones said, “by the power vested in me due to the last person in charge getting squashed by a cow, I now declare you dean of the University of What It Is, Night Vale adjacent campus.”

Carlos nodded seriously. “I accept,” he said. “But, I’m going to keep working out of my lab. I’m comfortable there, even though the sound level hasn’t been great since Big Rico’s Pizza added that animatronic band.”

“But our town is mostly gone,” shouted a voice from the crowd. I did not recognize the voice, but it spoke for all of us. Maybe, even, it was my own. The voice continued. “You said that science could help us. So use your science to help us.”

Carlos nodded. “Dr. Lubelle did explain away most of Night Vale. But I have had a look at her explanations, and they do not hold up to scrutiny. They are hasty constructions, full of pedantry, without rigor. And most importantly of all: not peer-reviewed! And one by one, I have been carefully debunking her sloppy debunking.”

Carlos waved his hand to indicate. There was the City Council, back with its many voices screeching in terrifying joy, and Tamika Flynn in the middle plugging her ears and smiling. And the Brown Stone Spire, humming with indifferent violence. And, here I shouted with joy, because the lights above the Arby’s, inscrutable sigils of invaders from another world, shone just where they had been those ten long years ago when a young scientist asked an ancient radio host to meet him, and to sit awhile on the warm hood of his car.

Finally we all looked to the sky, confident that we would see an old friend returning. But we only saw the child of that friend, still glowing its many colors, still humming its bewitching song.

“I’m sorry,” Carlos said to the child of the Glow Cloud. “I wasn’t able to explain that explanation away. I’m afraid…I’m afraid your parent is gone for good.”

And the child of the Glow Cloud, now the only one of its kind, and so forever forward just known as “The Glow Cloud,” dropped a flutter of dead starlings and let out a mournful cry, and we took up its cry, as the entire community grieved those losses that could never be regained. An emptiness that we could never fill, not in a thousand years of sunny days.

I walked up to my Carlos, the new dean of his old University, and a scientist whose work would serve to lead us into the future, not turn us into servants of an inhuman future.

“What do we do now?” I asked him.

He smiled, “First we go home, eat meals together, remember that we are a community, and that we are better together than we are alone.” He paused, narrowed his eyes, and looked out past the horde of scientists now under his command, past the corpse of a cow with two human legs sticking out from underneath, past the sprawling campus that he now had the job of incorporating into his lab operations, to the horizon, a wash of storm clouds and dust.

And Carlos said, “Then there is some research I would like to do on a desert Other-world.” He smiled. “Yes, I think there is still so much to learn about that place.”

Stay tuned next for another year, much like the year before, except for all of the details.

Good night, my Night Vale restored. Good night.