There was an episode of the original Star Trek in which the Enterprise encounters another starship whose entire crew has been killed by an alien disease that sucked all the water from their bodies and then crystallized the remaining chemicals that comprise a living organism. The visualization of the end result was typically cheap, but reasonably effective: empty uniforms sprawled across consoles and heaped in corridors, with piles of what looks like rock salt spilling from the shirt collars and cuffs, pant legs, and boots. I think I’ve noted before that the one thing the original series had that none of the spin-offs or the recent reboot movie has managed — or even attempted — to capture was a deep sense of eeriness. Space was weird in the classic Trek series, and sometimes it was pretty damn spooky. The idea of the rock-salt disease gave me a major case of the willies when I was a kid, and those empty uniforms are an image that has stayed with me all these years.

Case in point: When I got off the train tonight at the end-of-the-line station, I noticed a little one-piece jumpsuit thingie of the sort worn by babies draped over a low fence that runs along the edge of the platform. Now, obviously what happened is that someone dropped it, and a good samaritan placed it in an obvious spot in case the owner came back looking for it. But I have to admit that for just a moment — a brief, vertiginous, irrational moment — I glanced downward, to see if there was a pile of white crystals on the ground below the jumper’s collar opening…

Man, am I a geek or what?