Mark Clifton

“ There was a stir in the Assembly; something between a gasp of horror and admiration at the audacity of man's sacrificing a whole planet to his knowledge. They had not known we were so far along the way.
And then, on second thought, a settling back in satisfaction. It seemed a simple solution to an impossible problem. To take not only VanDam's tests away from Earth, but all nuclear testing of every kind! To quell the fears and still the clamoring of the humanists who would rather see man stagnate in ignorance than risk the future to learn. ”

“ Recognition is not wisdom. With the unwisdom of inexperience in communicating with an unlike thing, not realizing that the values of their kind of awareness might not be the values of this differing kind, they rushed in with all their powers and forces, a joyful rapturous pyrotechnical display of material manipulation to show this new life form that they too were aware—to communicate that the loneliness of one might now be softened by the presence of the other. ”

“ Miss Kitty was astonished at her sudden vehemence, the red wave of fury which swept over her.
But of course she was right. That was their urgent drive. "A male human is nothing more than a sex machine!" Wasn't that what her roommate at college had once said? Or was it her maiden aunt who had dominated her widowed mother and herself through all the years she was growing up? What did it matter who said it? She knew it was true. No wonder they were so anxious to get back to Old Earth! ”

“ There was a certain stiff formality in the way McCabe, flanked by his own two selected subordinates, approached the ship—until I turned around at the foot of the steps and he recognized me.
"Hap!" he yelled, then. "Happy Graves, you old son of a gun!" He broke into a run, dignity forgotten, and when he got to me he grabbed both my shoulders in his powerful hands to shake me as if he were some sort of terrier—and I a rat. ”

“ Wasn't it the same danger that men of science had always faced, the same mistake they had always made—leaving out the human element in a problem?
The eternal blind spot in men of science! The average man doesn't give a tinker's damn for progress or knowledge, not really. He wants only that he and his shall be ascendant at the center of things, the inevitable, the only possible goal of the non-science mind. Surely the history of science versus non-science should have made this evident long ago! ”

“ I opened my lower desk drawer and pulled out a couple of the Auerbach cylinders which we had used the night before. I laid them on top of the desk.
"These cylinders," I said, "act like the photographic film. They will record, in permanent form, the psi effects you command. At last, for all mankind the doubt will be stilled; man will at once know the truth; and you will take your place among the immortals."
I thought it was pretty good, and that, with his overweening ego, it would surely do the trick. But the Swami was staring at the cylinders first in fascination, then fear, then in horror. ”

“ I ask him why gardeners always insist on forcing long meaningless names upon non-gardeners who simply don't care. He ignores that, and says that subconsciously I hate my Aunt Mattie because I secretly recognize that she is a challenge too great for me to overcome. I ask him why, if I subconsciously hate Aunt Mattie, why I would care about how much affection she gives to her flora collection. ”

“ To see down and into that huge, vaulted room. To see the living Martians in that room shrivel, blacken, writhe and die. To see some priceless, alien works of art writhe and blacken and curl; some burst into flame; some shatter unto dust.
That was when the scientists, sitting there watching their monitors with horror-stricken eyes, felt jubilation replaced with terrible guilt.
I, too. For naturally I was watching the master monitors to see that the equipment kept working. I saw it all.
I saw those miniature people, yes people, whole and beautiful, in one brief instant blacken, writhe and die. ”

“ All over the world everybody was wondering about the enigma of Eden, everybody speculating, everybody with a different answer. Some were gleeful that science had finally got its comeuppance, and felt no more than a pleasure that the bigdomes had proved they weren't any smarter than anybody else. Others took an equal pleasure in crying woe, woe, at this proof there were mysteries beyond man's knowing, woe, woe, now that man would be punished for trying to know what he was not meant to know.
The operator took time out, in spite of the supervisor's admonishments, to listen frankly. ”

“ Consciousness came back in little dribbles like a montage—half reality and half nightmare of the insomniac. Lt. Harper's voice shouting at her with a roar like a waterfall, "My God, Miss Kitty, are you sick?" Blackness. More shouting, Sam calling the lieutenant, something about a red flare in the sky. A lucid moment, when Sam was explaining to her that Earth had been given the warp coordinates, and had sent a red flare to see if they could get through. Then another gap. A heavy trampling of feet, a great many feet. ”

“ The man was good, he knew his trade. All men search for truth at one level or another. I began to realize why such a proportionate few choose the cold and impersonal laboratory. Perhaps if there were a way to put science to music—
The Swami talked on for about twenty minutes, and then I noticed his voice had grown deeper and deeper in tone, and suddenly, without any apparent transition, we all knew it was not really the Swami's voice we were hearing. And then he began to tell members of the audience little intimate things about themselves, things which only they should know. ”

“ In all the universe, how could there be any such thing as unnatural happenings?
"Don't worry about it, Johnny," I said as we started walking again. "And don't worry about your career, either. Aunt Mattie likes you, and she's mighty pleased with the results of her work out here. Certain people in the State Department may consider her a bit of a meddlesome pest, but make no mistake about it, every politician in the universe trembles in his boots at the very mention of the D.T.'s. And she likes you, Johnny." ”

“ Now let him think, to realize that measuring the balance of the status quo of things in only one relationship of an infinity of possibilities, to realize that he can change his measurements to balance an equation designed to express the status quo, or with equal truth, at his desire, he can change the status quo, the shape of things, to fit the equation he desires.
Let him wander, puzzled, worrying on this. Let him work it out himself, for experience from long ago had taught them that if man was not ready to accept an alien thought he could not, would not, accept but in his own interpreting. ”

“ She thought of the flock of wild chickens which had learned to hang around the cabin for scraps of food, the grunting lazy pigs, grown quite tame, begging her to find their acorns for them, the nanny goat with two half-grown kids Lt. Harper had brought back from a solitary walk he had taken.
New Earth was truly a paradise—and all to be wasted if there were not Man to appreciate it truly. ”

“ If Auerbach and I reached for them, we would be permitted to grasp them.
I leaned back and snapped off the overhead light to darken the room in an eerie, blue glow.
We sat there, holding hands, for a full ten minutes. Nothing happened.
It was not difficult to estimate the pattern of Henry's mind. Six persons, ten minutes, equals one man-hour. One man-hour of idle time to be charged into the cost figure of the antigrav unit. He was staring fixedly at the cylinders which lay in random positions in the center of the table, as if to assess their progress at this processing point. ”

“ Out of the billions of gross people on Earth, once in a generation a tiny midget is born and matures to adult of such perfection in proportion and surpassing beauty that the huge, coarse, normal person can only stare and marvel—and remember the delicate perfection of that miniature being, with nostalgic yearning for the rest of his life. ”

“ In every framework of thought which man had ever devised, the circle was prominent, vital. It played its part in every creed of every race, of every time. It was as essential to the ancient arts of magic as to the current methods of science. It played its part in the movement of planets, the shape of stars, perhaps the essence of the total universe.
Man might be too didactic in requiring that awareness develop a physical science comparable to his own, but surely awareness, whatever form it took, would know the circle. ”

“ The two subordinates were gasping such words as "Fantastic, amazing, astounding, incredible, wondrous, weird".
Aunt Mattie took it all in, and her face lit into a beatific smile.
"You see, young man," she said to Johnny. "They needed only to be shown right from wrong. Let this be a lesson to you."
"But how did they do it?" Mrs. Waddle gasped.
"Give them some credit for diligence and ingenuity," Aunt Mattie almost snapped at her assistant. "I always say we underrate the intelligence and ingenuity of the lesser orders, and that it saps their strengths if we are overprotective. ”

“ He was an entirely different type, tall, blond, but just as fatuously masculine, as arrogantly handsome. Probably neither one of them had an ounce of brains—handsome people so seldom needed to develop mental ability.
Sam, too, turned his face farther away from her. Both backs told her plainly that she could dress, take care of her needs, with as much privacy as the lifeboat could allow anybody.
Not that it would take her long. She'd worn coveralls since the catastrophe, saving the dress she'd had on for landing on Earth. They'd had to leave most of her luggage behind. ”

“ From all practical points of view, a worthless world.
"But invaluable to science. For there, without destroying anything of value to man, we can put our theories to test. We believe we can start a nuclear reaction in ordinary rock and dirt, and keep it under control to produce a continuous flow of power. We believe we can keep it from running wild out of control.
"If the innumerable tests we must run do contaminate the planet, or even destroy it slowly, our gain in knowledge will be greater than the loss of this worthless real estate." ”

“ That there was no proof of loss or destruction bothered no one in journalism. If it did turn out this way, they'd have been on top of the news; and if it didn't, well, who remembers yesterday's headlines in the press of today's new hate and panic.
The public, with an established addiction to ever increasing daily doses of sensationalism, and deprived of its shots through this dry spell, snapped out of its apathy to greet this new thrill with vociferous calls to editors, wires to congressmen, telegrams to the Administration.
What are we doing about this colony that has been wiped out? ”

“ She straightened up and almost spilled the container of wild rice she had been garnering from the swampy spot at the upper reaches of the lake. "Why! The very idea of saying such a thing, Katheryn Kittredge!" But her heart was not in the self chiding.
But what reason, in heaven's name, would they have for staying here? Three people, marooned, growing old, dying one by one. There was no chance for Man's survival here. From the evidence about them, they had come to the conclusion that on this New Earth, in the tree of evolution, the bud to grow into a limb of primates had never formed. ”

“ The minor would become major, the recessive dominant. The endless aim of non-science to make all others subservient had lost its purpose for those who could still think. The dominion over things instead of people, the goal of science—was that also to lose its purpose for those who could still think? Until man, defeated by purposelessness, sank back in apathy, lost the very willingness to live—and so died?
What if some other awareness did inhabit the universe, sentient—and lonely? ”

“ I'm not even a colorful character. If I'm expert in my job it's only because I learned early what any lazy man with an ounce of brains also learns—that life goes easier for the expert than for the ignorant. Which is not exactly the hero attitude the public likes to hear, but true all the same.
I did have an advantage which qualifies me to tell this tale.
Supervision, nowadays, sits on its duff in an office surrounded by television monitors showing them every phase of their responsibilities, and punches buttons when some guy tries to goof-off or starts lousing up the operation. ”

“ They changed the shapes of things themselves, these men; the seed ground into meal, the moving animal shot down with stick or stone and stilled and changed to food, the moving of the smaller rocks, erection of a dwelling made of poles and thatch to change environment for the man inside. Change, then, man knew; why fear the greater change, the easier one? Why tug and lift and strain to move the boulder from the path, when all was needed was to shift proportion in one tiny way, rebalance the equation of relationship with one slight thought, and lo, the stone no longer barred the way? ”

“ Harper and Sam had talked about the possibility of millions of Earths, each infinitesimally removed from the other, and if they could bridge the gap to one, they might bridge it to an uncountable number. Perhaps there were millions of others, but for her there was only one New Earth. ”

“ If there were unseen beings, stronger and more important than he, who could do unexplained things to his environment; then it was plain that he must assume positions of subservience to those beings, lest he himself be destroyed.
So man created his gods in his own image, with his own attributes magnified.
Was this a wrong turning of the road? No-o.... Awareness carries with it its commands and penalties. A problem must have an answer. Conscious and willful beings beyond his own strength and importance became the only answer open to him at that stage of his mental evolution. ”

“ Awareness! Once man had got over his greedy delight in occupying more and more of the universe simply because he could, to protect himself against the cosmic loneliness that must follow, he too would be searching for awareness.
But he would define it in his own terms, and pass it by if it did not meet those terms.
That there was some other intelligence which had found man instead, Cal did not doubt. The experiment of Eden, the manipulation of natural laws, the denial of physical tools—for what purpose? To clear away the debris which prevented communication of awareness as They defined it? ”

“ Once a man became a full-fledged Extrapolator he was outside all law, all frameworks, all duty, all social mores. That was the essence of E science, that any requirement outside of his own making didn't exist. It had to be that way. That kind of mind could not tolerate barriers, but spent itself constantly in destroying them. Erect barriers of triviality, and it would waste its substance upon trivial matters. The only answer was to remove all possible barriers for the E, lest immersion in something trivial prevent that mind from seeking out a barrier to knowledge, a problem of significance. ”

“ That was the E brand of thinking which gave everybody trouble—and without which man could never have gone on creeping outward and outward among the stars. Every new planet, or subplanet, or sun or blasted asteroid seemed to call for some revision of known laws. Sometimes an entirely new co-ordinate system had to be resolved. Oh, science was easy, a veritable snap, while man crawled around on the muddy bottom of his ocean of air and concluded that throughout all the universe things must conform to his then notion of what they must be. ”

“ People forgot how to be kind to one another and get along when there wasn't any hardship to share among themselves.
It would mean deserting the planet entirely. Even though his sympathies were with the ones who wanted to go, Jed felt there was something wrong, real bad, about deserting the planet. Still and all, if they voted to go he couldn't stop them.
Maybe Earth would let the three-generation colonists come on out without the total test period. But maybe not. Maybe E.H.Q. would decide that Eden was too hard to colonize because it was too easy. Maybe they'd abandon the planet entirely. ”

“ It was as if, in spite of E training, for the first time in his life, he could commit himself wholly, in all areas of his being, to the consideration of a problem.
His conviction was complete that the ship could give him nothing he needed, that all Earth's mechanical science could give him nothing he needed. That it could not provide the key to unlock the door which led into this new area of reality. He must find, must define, some new concept of man's relation to the universe. ”

“ Cal sighed softly to himself. The human kind of civilization, yes, that would have left traces. But what of some other kind? Perhaps a deep-sea kind that had never come out upon the land? Never mind the arguments that such a civilization could not have developed—that was looking at it from the human point of view again. Had man grown so accustomed to not finding comparable intelligence anywhere in the universe he had begun to discount, or forget, there could be? ”

“ This new key we have that unlocks the door to another vista of knowledge, another point of view whereby we can change material things to suit our desire, is merely another advance of science. For science, after all, is no more than organized knowledge of reality. You can't multiply six times six until you've learned how to add two and two. Most people won't bother. ”

“ They wandered among the trees and bushes, picking fruit and nuts, eating leaves and stems and flowers of plants. They wandered down to the river to lie prone on the sand, dip their faces into the clear cold water to drink. During the heat of the day they bathed in the river, and as they lay on white sand or grassy slopes to dry, they slept contentedly.
The phenomenon was not as startling to Cal as it might have seemed to others.
On Earth, gradually learned through trial and error, experimental colonists were not picked for their jobs because of flexible, incisive, or brilliant minds. ”

“ It was an old police, prosecution, and political trick to separate a few items from the total context, but still a good one; for the public never bothered to know the whole context of anything. An old trick to fasten on phrases and slogans to fix an attitude in the public mind, for a phrase or slogan was about all the public was able to master. ”

“ And right at the time, too, when the civil government had decided to place a curb on E.H.Q.'s freedom of movement, its control over the experimental phases of planet development. The injunction to halt a Junior E from taking over the Eden problem fooled none of them. They knew that Gunderson wasn't concerned for those colonists out there, that he was merely using the public furor to advance his own personal power. They knew that the police worked unremittingly, unceasingly, always and ever to bring every phase of human activity under their control. ”

“ Dead are the gods, forever dead, and yet—to what may man now turn in rapture? In ecstasy? In communion? What, in all physical science, filled the deep human need of these expressions?
The climb of the first slope, up to the crest of the ridge he intended to follow, was quickly done. He turned there and looked behind him, at the valley of the colonists below, and far down where the valley merged into the sea, and far on out at the hazy purple line of another island. ”

“ Cal felt no condemnation for him. He was not the first man, seemingly dedicated to science, who, confronted with mysteries beyond his power to comprehend, reverted to childlike superstitious awe for an explanation. In the face of mystery or catastrophe, [117] it takes a faith beyond the capacity of most to continue believing that the universe has a rational order to its laws that can be comprehended if man persists. It is temptingly easy for man to revert back to the irresponsibility of childhood, assuming that the control of phenomena is in the hands of those stronger, wiser than he. ”

“ Two or three people commented on how easy it was to go back to nature, wondered why they hadn't all done it before. How stupid it was for man to knock himself out chasing all over the universe, undergoing such hardships, when all a man could ever want was right here.
Jed tried to put down this kind of talk when it came up. He reminded them it was Lotus Land thinking, and would be the ruination of a prime bunch of colonists. ”

“ He allowed himself the momentary secret luxury of hating all Extrapolators. Once upon a time, when he was a kid, he had dreamed of becoming an E. What kid hadn't? He'd gone farther than the wish. He'd tried. And had been rebuffed.
"Clinging to established scientific beliefs," the tester had told him with the inherent, inescapable superiority of a man trying to be kind to a lesser intelligence, "is like being afraid to jump off a precipice in full confidence that you'll think of something to save yourself before you hit bottom." ”

“ This is the first Garden of Eden, where man lived in complete innocence. Now man has been returned to it, to live again in complete innocence. You do not think straight because there is no reason. You will be cared for. Woe unto him who seeks to despoil it again by seeking vain knowledge!"
His eyes were wild, his face contorted with a mixture of exaltation and condemnation.
"Shut up, Louie," Tom said in a low, firm voice.
"We understand," Jed said tolerantly. "Some of the colonists are talkin' the same way. He's got plenty of company." ”