They heard a faint voice behind them. "Not all of us, Gill." The brothers turned. They saw Tak Laleen, dressed again in the white uniform of the missionary1. She came slowly through the metal panel of a door.
"You see, it is possible for us to learn," she said when she stood within the room. "I have."
"Then all your people—"
"Not all of them. A few, if they're fortunate."
"They watched you grow up. The change was so gradual, they weren't aware of it. I fell into your hands at the moment when you were yourselves discovering your potential capabilities3. I followed the three of you when you ran away from the sphere police in Santa Barbara. One of you had touched my force-field capsule and drained away its power. I had to know how you did it. By intuition I guessed something very close to the truth, but even so it could have unhinged my mind if it hadn't been for Juan Pendillo. He taught me what he had taught you—a new point of view, a new way of looking at the world. He was so gentle and so patient, so easy to understand."
"And after all that, you ran away from the skyport and betrayed him."
"It was a put up job." She smiled. "Juan and I worked it out together. He wanted to force the city guards to attack the treaty area; but, if my people refused to believe what I told them, at least Gill would try to rescue his father and Lanny. We had to make the conflict begin before you were armed. If you won by using a machine, you might put your faith in machines again instead of yourselves. It was a risk for Juan and myself, but more so for you. No one really knew what you might be able to do, or what your ultimate limitations were."
"There are none," Gill said.
"I know that now, because I've made the reorientation myself. I didn't then. The rational mind is the only integrating factor in the chaos4 of the universe—Juan told me that. It is literally5 true. Mind creates the universe by interpreting it." She put her hand in Lanny's and looked up at the stars patterning the void of night. "I wish I might say that to my people and have them understand; but the clatter6 of our machines closes us in. Our world will die in violence and madness, the way the skyport died tonight. We may be able to help the survivors afterward7; we can do nothing now."
"But we must do it now," Lanny persisted stubbornly. "We don't want revenge, Tak Laleen; we've outgrown8 our reason for that."
"Can you teach my people any differently than you learned yourself? It took an invasion and twenty years of imprisonment9 before you were able to break free from your old patterns of thinking."
"But you did it in a day."
"In the beginning, your teachers didn't know what their goal was; they only knew they had a problem and it had to be solved. I came in at the end, when their job was nearly finished and they were pretty sure where they were headed. That's why it was so easy for me."
"And your world does that, too."
Gill fingered his lip. "The trouble is, Lanny, it isn't simply a matter of giving them the facts. To us they are obvious, but you saw what happened to the governor. How can we make a man believe a new truth, when it means giving up all the science he has always believed?"
"We failed with the governor because we threw the end result in his face without giving him a logical reason to accept it."
Tak Laleen shook her head. "And so we're back where we started. We have to let my world fall apart before we can save it." She moved impatiently toward the door. "This building is a tomb. I want to walk on the soil and smell the wind and taste the energy of the earth."
In an uncomfortable silence they left the government building. Gill integrated with the power in the lift, and they rode the elevator to the ground level. As the cage slid past the empty floors, Gill broke the silence abruptly11.
"If all we want is to prevent chaos on your world, Tak Laleen, it won't be hard. We'll just go through with the treaty we intended to offer to the governor. We can put things back as they were and go on delivering resources to the Almost-men. The only people who know the truth will be our prisoners. We can keep them out of sight and ourselves play at being Almost-men to satisfy any tourists who come to the skyport."
"We'll have to do that for a while, until we work out something better; but it's only a stopgap. We have a problem," Lanny said doggedly12. "We know it can be solved, because it has been for ourselves and for Tak Laleen. All we have to find is the method."
"Learning begins with a need," the missionary said. "For you, it was twenty years of despair: invasion, humiliation13, surrender. Your old ideas didn't work. You either had to accept status as second-raters or work out a new way of thinking. As for me—" She shrugged14 her shoulders. "I suppose I couldn't help myself. I did try to run away, remember. I tried every possible answer in terms of our logic10 first. I even thought, for a while, that Lanny was a robot. Anything but the truth."
Gill asked, "When did you first begin to understand? What happened that made you willing to believe the truth?"
"It was an accumulation of many things, I suppose."
"That isn't specific enough. There must have been one instant when you were willing to give up what you believed and start learning something new."
"I don't know when it was."
They left the government building and walked through the lower courtyards of the city. Groups of Almost-men were being herded15 back into the city from the game preserve. They clung together, hushed and terrified. The city lights were in working order once more and the flashing colors turned their faces into gargoyle16 masks. Three guards, in torn and bloodstained uniforms, stood looking at the machines which men had hauled out of the arsenal17. Suddenly one of the soldiers began to kick at an abandoned gun, screaming in fury while tears of rage welled from his eyes.
Lanny turned away. It was painfully embarrassing to watch the dissolution of a human personality, even on the relatively18 immature19 level which the machine culture of the Almost-men had achieved. But as Tak Laleen watched the spectacle of childish rage, sudden hope blazed in her eyes. She grasped Lan's arm.
"He's blaming the machine for our defeat," she said. "Now I remember what happened to me; now I know! When you were running away from Santa Maria, Lanny, you fired an energy gun at my sphere. It destroyed the force-field and I fell out of the port. I was terrified—not so much of you, but because my machine had failed. All night while I lay in the launch, I faced that awful nightmare. For the first time in my life, I began to doubt the system I had trusted. I lost faith in my own world. I felt a need for something else."
Lanny repeated slowly, "Loss of faith in the status quo—"
"Could we duplicate that for all your people, Tak Laleen?" Gill asked doubtfully.
"Yes, I'm sure we could, Gill. We have a clue; we know what has to be done. And we have an experimental laboratory." The missionary nodded toward the mob of cringing20 Almost-men coming in from the preserve. "We have a city of people, disorganized by panic, with their faith in the machine already shattered. While we teach these people how to make the reorientation, we'll learn the methods that will work most effectively with my world."
They left the city and began to cross the bridge toward the treaty area. Tak Laleen passed her arms through theirs. She said, with sorrow in her voice, "No matter what we do, no matter how carefully we try to cushion the panic, we still have no way of being entirely21 sure of the results. Something that works with our prisoners or with us might destroy my world; it could send a planet into mass paranoia22."
"That risk is implied in all learning, Tak Laleen," Lanny answered. "We can never escape it. I'm not sure we ought to try. The individual who lives in a closed world of absolutes—shut in by prison walls of his own mind—is already insane. The sudden development of a new idea simply makes the condition apparent."
"In a sense," Gill added, "there is no such thing as a teacher. There are people who expose us to data and try to demonstrate some techniques we can use, but any learning that goes on must come from within ourselves."
"We will develop the most effective method we can," Lanny said. "Then we will apply it to your world, Tak Laleen. The rest is up to them. That's as it should be—as it must be."
Arm in arm they crossed the bridge—two men and a missionary from an alien world. They had been enemies, but during a night of chaos and death they had learned to become men—the first men to catch the vision of the new world of the mind. Each of them was soberly aware that the discovery was not an end, but a beginning. And they faced that beginning with neither fear nor regret, because they had the confidence that comes of maturity23. The unknown was not a god-power or a devil-power, but a problem to be solved by the skill of a rational mind.
The End
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1
missionary
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| adj.教会的，传教(士)的；n.传教士 | |
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survivors
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| 幸存者，残存者，生还者( survivor的名词复数 ) | |
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capabilities
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| n.能力( capability的名词复数 )；可能；容量；[复数]潜在能力 | |
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chaos
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| n.混乱，无秩序 | |
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literally
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| adv.照字面意义，逐字地；确实 | |
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clatter
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| v./n.(使)发出连续而清脆的撞击声 | |
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afterward
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| adv.后来；以后 | |
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outgrown
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| 长[发展] 得超过（某物）的范围( outgrow的过去分词 )； 长[发展]得不能再要（某物）； 长得比…快； 生长速度超过 | |
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imprisonment
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| n.关押，监禁，坐牢 | |
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10
logic
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| n.逻辑(学)；逻辑性 | |
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abruptly
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| adv.突然地，出其不意地 | |
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doggedly
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| adv.顽强地，固执地 | |
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13
humiliation
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| n.羞辱 | |
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shrugged
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| vt.耸肩（shrug的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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herded
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| 群集，纠结( herd的过去式和过去分词 )； 放牧； （使）向…移动 | |
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gargoyle
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| n.笕嘴 | |
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arsenal
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| n.兵工厂，军械库 | |
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relatively
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| adv.比较...地，相对地 | |
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immature
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| adj.未成熟的，发育未全的，未充分发展的 | |
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cringing
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| adj.谄媚，奉承 | |
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entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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paranoia
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| n.妄想狂，偏执狂；多疑症 | |
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maturity
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| n.成熟；完成；(支票、债券等)到期 | |
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