Stories (74 page)

And they continued with their mating rituals. We then discontinued the emission of thought material, if for no other reason than that we had already used up a fourth of our power supply with no result. This, then, was the end of Phase I, which was the attempt to transfer the warning material into the brains of selected members of the species for automatic telepathic transmission to others. We set about Phase II, which was to take possession of the minds of suitable individuals in a planned campaign to use them as mouthpieces for the warnings. We decided to abandon the first phase in the belief that the material was running straight through their mental apparatus like water through sieves because it was so foreign to the existing mental furniture of their minds that they were not able to recognise what we were saying. In other words, we still had no idea that the reason they did not react was that the idea was a commonplace.

Three of us therefore accompanied the four youngsters in their machine when they returned to the city, because we thought that in their company we would most quickly find suitable individuals to take over—we had decided the young were more likely to be useful than the mature. The way they handled this machine was a shock to us. It was suicidal. Their methods of transport are lethal. In the time it took to reach the suburbs of the city—between the lightening of the dark and the sun’s appearance—there were four near collisions with other, equally recklessly driven vehicles. Yet the four youngsters showed no fear and reacted with the mechanism called laughter; that is, with repeated violent contractions of the lungs, causing noisy
emission of air. This journey, their recklessness, their indifference to death or pain made us conclude that this group of four, like the group of twenty older ones, was perhaps untypical. We were playing with the idea that there are large numbers of defective animals in this species and that we had been unlucky in our choices. The machine was stopped to refuel and the four got out and walked about. Three more youngsters were sitting on a bench huddled against one another, in a stupor. Like all the young, they wore a wide variety of clothing and had long head fur. They had several musical instruments. Our four attempted to rouse them and partly succeeded: The responses of the three were slow and, it seemed to us, even more clumsy and inadequate. They either did not understand what was being said or could not communicate what they understood. We then saw that they were in the power of some kind of drug. They had quantities of it and the four wished also to put themselves in its power. It was a drug that sharpens sensitivity while it inhibits ordinary response: The three were more sensitive to our presence than the four had been—they had not been aware of our presence in the vehicle at all. The three, once roused from their semiconsciousness, seemed to see, or at least to feel us, and directed towards us muttered sounds of approval or welcome. They seemed to associate us with the sun’s appearance over the roof of the refueling station. The four, having persuaded the three to give them some of the drug, went to their vehicle. We decided to stay with the three, believing that their sensitivity to our presence was a good sign. Testing their thought streams, we found them quite free and loose, without the resistances and tensions of the others we had tested. We then took possession of their minds—this was the only moment of real danger during the whole mission. Your envoys might very well have been lost then, dissolving into a confusion and violence that we find hard to describe. For one thing, at that time we did not know how to differentiate between the effects of the drug and the effects of their senses. We now do know and will attempt a short description. The drug causes the mechanisms dealing with functions such as walking, talking, eating, and so on, to become slowed or dislocated. Meanwhile, the receptors for sound, scent, sight, touch are opened and sensitised. But for us, to enter their minds is in any case an assault, because of the
phenomenon they call beauty, which is a description of their sense intake in an ordinary condition. For us, this is like entering an explosion of colour; for it is this that is the most startling difference between our mode of perceiving and theirs: The physical structure of their level appears in vibrations of brilliant colour. To enter an undrugged mind is hard enough for one of us; to keep one’s balance is difficult. As it was, it might easily have happened that we were swept away in contemplation of vivid colour.

Although the temptation to dwell on this is great, we must condense this report if we wish to keep any use of this channel: the pressure of local material is getting very strong. In brief, then, the three youngsters, reeling with pleasure because of this dimension of brilliance which we of course all know about through deductions but which, I assure you, we have never approached even in imagination, shouting and singing that the city was doomed, stood on the side of the road until one of the plentiful machines stopped for us. We were conveyed rapidly into the city. There were two individuals in the vehicle, both young, and neither reacted in any way to the warnings we were giving them through the minds or, rather, voices of our hosts. At the end of the rapid movement, we arrived in the city, which is large, populous, and built around a wide indentation of the shore of the water mass. It is all extremely vivid, colourful, powerfully affecting the judgement, and it heightened the assault on our balance. We made a tentative decision that it is impracticable for our species to make use of this method: of actually possessing selected minds for the purpose of passing on information. It is too violent a transformation for us. However, since we were there, and succeeding in not being swept away into a highly tinted confusion of pleasure, we agreed to stay where we were and the three we were possessing left the vehicle and walked out into the streets, shouting out the facts as we thought them: that there was little doubt that at some moment between now and five years from now, there would be a strong vibration of the planet at this point and that the greater part
of the city might be destroyed, with severe loss of life. It was early in the day, but many of them were about. We were waiting for some sort of reaction to what we were saying, interest at the very least; queries; some sort of response to which we could respond ourselves with advice or offers of help. But of the very many we met in that brief progress through the streets, no one took any notice at all, except for a glance or a short indifferent stare.

Soon there was a screeching and a wailing, which we at first took to be the reaction of these creatures to what we were saying, some sort of warning, perhaps, to the inhabitants, or statements that measures toward self-preservation must be taken; but it was another vehicle, of a military sort, and the three (we) were taken up from the streets and to a prison because of the disturbance we were making. This is how we understood it afterwards. At the time, we thought that the authorities had gathered us in to question us as to the revelations we had to make. In the hands of the guards, in the street and the military vehicle and the prison, we kept up a continuous shouting and crying out of the facts and did not stop until a doctor injected our three hosts with some other drug, which caused them instantly to become unconscious. It was when we heard the doctor talking to the guards that we first heard the fact of the previous catastrophe. This was such a shock to us that we could not then take in its implications. But we decided at once to leave our hosts, who, being in any case unconscious, would not be any use to us for some time, even if this method of conveying warnings had turned out to be efficacious—and it obviously was not—and make different plans. The doctor was also saying that he had to treat large numbers of people, particularly the young ones, for “paranoia.” This was what our three hosts were judged to be suffering from. Apparently, it is a condition when people show fear of forthcoming danger and try to warn others about it and then show anger when stopped by authority. This diagnosis, together with the fact that the doctor and the authorities knew of the coming danger and of the past catastrophe—in other words, that they consider it an illness or a faulty mental condition to be aware of what threatens and to try to take steps
to avoid or soften it—was something so extraordinary that we did not then have time to evaluate it in depth, nor have we had time since to do so, because—

… AND FINALLY, TO END THIS NEWS FLASH, A REAL HEART-WARMER. FIVE PEOPLE, NOT RICH FOLKS, NO, BUT PEOPLE LIKE YOU AND ME, HAVE GIVEN UP A MONTH’S PAY TO SEND LITTLE JANICE WANAMAKER, THE CHILD WITH THE HOLE IN THE HEART, TO THE WORLD-FAMED HEART CENTER IN FLORIDA. LITTLE JANICE, WHO IS TWO YEARS OLD, COULD HAVE EXPECTED A LONG LIFE OF INVALIDISM: BUT NOW THE FAIRY WAND OF LOVE HAS CHANGED ALL THAT AND SHE WILL BE FLYING TOMORROW MORNING TO HAVE HER OPERATION, ALL THANKS TO THE FIVE GOOD NEIGHBORS OF ARTESIA STREET—

… the expected interruptions on this wave length; but, as we have no way of knowing at which point the interruption began, to recapitulate, we left the doctor and the guards in discussion of the past catastrophe, in which two hundred miles of ground was ripped open, hundreds of people were killed and the whole city was shaken down in fragments. This was succeeded by a raging fire.

The doctor was discussing humorously (note previous remarks about laughter, a possible device for release of tension to ward off or relieve fear and, therefore, possibly one of the mechanisms that keep these animals passive in the face of possible extinction) that for some years after the previous catastrophe, this entire geographical grouping referred to the great fire, rather than to the earth vibration. This circumlocution is still quite common. In other words, a fire being a smaller, more manageable phenomenon, they preferred, and sometimes still prefer, to use that word, instead of the word for the uncontrollable shaking of the earth itself. A pitiable device, showing helplessness and even fear. But we emphasise here again that everywhere else in the System, fear is a mechanism to protect or to warn, and in these creatures, the function is faulty. As for helplessness, this is tragic anywhere, even among these murderous brutes, but there is no apparent need for them to be helpless, since they have every means to evacuate the city altogether and to—

… THE NEW SUBURB PLANNED TO THE WEST. THIS WILL HOUSE ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND PEOPLE AND WILL BE OPEN IN THE AUTUMN OF NEXT YEAR FULLY EQUIPPED WITH SHOPS, CINEMAS, A CHURCH, SCHOOLS AND A NEW MOTORWAY. THE RAPID EXPANSION OF OUR BEAUTIFUL CITY, WITH ITS UNIQUE CLIMATE, ITS SETTING, ITS SHORE LINE, CONTINUES. THIS NEW SUBURB WILL DO SOMETHING TO COMBAT THE OVERCROWDING AND—

… In view of the failure of Phases I and II, we decided to abandon Phase III, which was planned to be a combination of I and II—inhabiting suitable hosts to use them as loud-speakers and, at the same time, putting material into available thought streams for retransmission. Before making further attempts to communicate, we needed more information. To summarise the results of Phase II, when we inhabited the three drugged young, we understood we must be careful to assume the shapes of older animals, and those of a technically trained kind, as it was clear from our experience in the prison that the authorities disliked the young of their species. We did not yet know whether they were capable of listening to the older ones, who are shaped in the image of their society.

While at that stage we were still very confused about what we were finding, we had at least grasped this: that this species, on being told something, has no means of judging whether or not it is true. We on our planet assume, because it is our mental structure and that of all the species we have examined, that if a new fact is made evident by material progress, or by a new and hitherto unexpected juxtaposition of ideas, then it is accepted as a fact, a truth—until an evolutionary development by-passes it. Not so with this species. It is not able to accept information, new material, unless it is from a source it is not suspicious about. This is a handicap to its development that is not possible to exaggerate. We choose this moment to suggest, though of necessity briefly, that in future visits to this planet, with information of use to this species (if it survives), infinite care must be taken to prepare plenipotentiaries who resemble in every respect the most orthodox and harmless members of
the society. For it is as if the mechanism fear has been misplaced from where it would be useful—preventing or softening calamity—to an area of their minds that makes them suspicious of anything but the familiar. As a small example, in the prison, because the three young animals were drugged and partly incoherent, and because (as it has become clear to us) the older animals who run the society despise those who are not similar to the norms they have established, it would not have mattered what they said. If they had said (or shouted or sung) that they had actually observed visitors from another planet (they had, in fact, sensed us, felt us) as structures of finer substance manifesting as light—if they had stated they had seen three roughly man-sized creatures shaped in light—no notice at all would have been taken of them. But if an individual from that section of their society which is especially trained for that class of work (it is an infinitely subdivided society) had said that he had observed with his instruments (they have become so dependent on machinery that they have lost confidence in their own powers of observation) three rapidly vibrating light structures, he would at least have been credited with good faith. Similarly, great care has to be taken with verbal formulation. An unfamiliar fact described in one set of words may be acceptable. Present it in a pattern of words outside what they are used to and they may react with all the signs of panic—horror, scorn, fear.