What I learned from reading Explore/Create My Life in Pursuit of New Frontiers, Hidden Worlds, and the Creative Spark by Richard Garriott.
It was almost 03:00 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 had 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 10:00 my guests were gone.
When the doorbell rang just after midnight, I didn't think too much about it.
Guessing that someone had just left something behind.
I had forgotten to close the front gate.
I went to a window.
Standing at the front door, shifting nervously from side to side with his hands jammed into the pockets, was a stranger.
He was wearing a baseball hat.
The hat was pulled down over his eyes.
I didnt answer the door.
Instead, I stood there watching him to see what he was going to do.
I stood at the window for about a half an hour.
Occasionally, he would walk around the side of the house, and I moved from window to window to follow him.