Gaea's twelve regions were too headstrong, too unreliable to unite against her. Her most faithful ally was the land of Hyperion; her implacable enemy, Oceanus. They were adjacent territories. Both were devastated before the war became an armed truce.

But revolt and war were not to be enough disgrace for an elderly God; elsewhere worse disaster approached. In the wink of an eye the airwaves were flooded with the most astonishing noises. At first she thought it was a new symptom of encroaching dotage. Surely she had invented these impossible voices from space with names like Lowell Thomas, Fred Allen, and the Cisco Kid. But she eventually caught on to the trick. She became an avid listener. Had there been mail service to Earth she would have sent in Ovaltine labels for magic decoder rings. She loved Fibber McGee and was a faithful fan of Amos and Andy.

Television hit her as hard as talkies had stunned audiences in the late 1920's. As in the early days of radio, for many years most television was of American origin, and it was these programs she liked best. She followed the exploits of Lucy and Ricky and had all the answers to The $64,000 Question, which she was scandalized to discover was rigged. She watched everything, something she suspected not even the producers of many of the shows did.

There were movies and there was news. In the electronic explosion of the eighties and nineties there was much more as entire libraries were transmitted. But by that time her studies of human culture were more than academic. Watching Neil Armstrong's performance confirmed something she had long suspected. Humans would come calling by and by.

She began preparing to meet them. The outlook was not good. They were a warlike breed, possessed of weapons that could vaporize her. They could not be expected to take lightly the presence of a 1,300 kilometer living wheel-God in "their" solar system. She recalled Orson Welles's Halloween broadcast of 1938. She remembered This Island Earth and I Married a Monster from Outer Space.