A Choice of Gods

31

"I do not know," Harrison said to Jason, "how I can talk reason to you. All we want is to send a small group of people here so they can learn the parapsychic abilities, in return for which…"

"I have already told you," Jason said, "that we cannot teach you the abilities. It's apparent you refuse to believe what I have told you."

"I think," said Harrison, "that you are bluffing. So, all right, you're bluffing. What more do you want? Tell me what you want."

"You have nothing that we want," said Jason. "That's something else you won't believe. Let me spell it out to you once again. You either are parapsychic or you aren't. You are technological or you aren't. You can't be both of them. They are mutually exclusive because so long as you remain technological, you can't be parapsychic and once you're parapsychic you have no use for technology. We do not want any of you here under the pretense of learning what we know or can do, even if you think you want what we know or can do. A few of you, you say, and it would be a few at first, then more of you, and after that still more and once you understand there was no chance of going parapsychic, why, then, you'd settle in. It's the pattern of technology—to grab and hold, then grab and hold some more…"

"But if we were sincere," protested Reynolds. "If we really meant it. And, of course, we do. We are being honest with you."

"I have told you it can't be done," said Jason. "If you want to be parapsychic, you don't have to come to Earth. Let those people who want to be parapsychic strip themselves of everything they have, let them live thus stripped for two thousand years. At the end of that time it might happen to them, although I'll not guarantee it. We didn't know of it until it happened to us. It was easier for us than it would be for you. There'd be a difference in the attitude of people who set out deliberately to acquire the abilities and that difference in attitude might make it impossible."

"What you are talking about," said John, "is a combination of your way of life with ours. You see a great advantage to both of us if it could be done. If some of your people could only find the way, you'd figure that you had it made. But it wouldn't work. If some of your people could become parapsychic, they'd stand alien from you; they'd take the same attitude toward you that we are taking now."

Harrison looked around the table slowly and deliberately, at each one sitting there. "Your arrogance is appalling," he said.

"We are not arrogant," said Martha. "We are so far from arrogant…"

"But you are," said Harrison. "You assume that you are better now than you were before. How better I don't know, but better. You hold technology in contempt. You view it with disdain, and perhaps alarm, forgetting that if it had not been for technology we'd all be squatting in a cave."

"Perhaps not," said Jason. "If we'd not cluttered Up our lives with machines…"

"But you don't know that."

"No, of course I don't," said Jason.

"So we should forget our squabbling," said Harrison. "Why can't we…"

"We've made our position clear," said Jason. "You must believe us when we say we can't teach you parapsychics. It's not something that can be taught. You must find it inside yourself. And you must believe us when we say we want nothing of technology. We people of this house have no need of it. The Indians dare not touch it, for it would ruin the kind of life they've fashioned. They live with nature, not on it. They take what nature gives; they do not rip their living out of nature. I can't speak for the robots, but I would suspect they have a technology of their own."

"There's one of them here," said Reynolds. "You need not speak for them."

"The one who is here," said Jason, "is more man than robot. He is doing mankind's work, has picked up something that we found too bulky or too inconvenient or not worthwhile to carry."

"We seek the truth," said Hezekiah. "We work for faith."

"This may all be true," Reynolds said to Jason, ignoring Hezekiah, "but there still remains your opposition to our resettling the Earth, colonizing it. There probably would not be many who would want to come, but you don't want even a few of us. You do not own the Earth. You cannot own it."

"Except for an emotional revulsion at seeing another technological threat to Earth," said Jason, "I don't suppose that Martha and myself could raise logical objection, and of this house, we are the only two who matter. The others are among the stars. When Martha and I are gone this house will stand empty and I know now there would be few, if any, who would really care. Earth has gone back to its primitive heritage and I would hate to see it stripped and gutted again. We did that to it once and once should be enough. Earth should not stand In double jeopardy. To me the matter is emotional, but there are others, many others, to whom it really matters. The Indians owned this continent once and the whites took it from them. We slaughtered them and robbed them and pushed them into reservations and those who escaped the reservations we forced to live in ghettos. Now they have made a new life, based on the old—better than their old life because they learned from us—but still their life, not ours. Neither should they stand in double jeopardy. They should be left alone."

"If we agreed," said Harrison, "to leave this continent alone, to only settle on the others…"

"In the old days," said Jason, "we made treaties with the Indians. So long as the rivers flow, so long as the winds shall blow, we said, the treaties would be kept. They were never kept. And neither would your so-called agreements. A few hundred years perhaps, more likely less than that. No longer. Even from the first you would interfere. You'd want to set up trade. You would break your old agreements and then make new agreements and each time the Indian would get less and less. It would be the same old story as it was before. A technological civilization is never satisfied. It is based on profit and progress, its own brand of progress. It must expand or die. You might make promises and be sincere in the making of them; you might intend to keep them, but you wouldn't and you couldn't."

"We would fight you," Red Cloud said. "We would not want to fight, but we'd have to. We would lose, we know that even now. But we still would fight—once a plow was put into the ground, once a tree was felled, once a wheel had turned…"

"You're insane!" shouted Harrison. "You are all insane. You talk of fighting us! You? With spears and arrows!"

"I told you," said Horace Red Cloud, "that we know we'd lose."

"And you close the planet to us," said Harrison, grimly, turning to Jason. "It's not your planet to close. It is ours as well as yours."

"The planet is not closed," said Jason. "We have no legal, perhaps not even a moral right to stand upon. But I ask you, in the name of common decency, to stay away from us, to keep your hands off us. You have other planets, there are still others you can take…"

"But this is our planet," Reynolds said. "It's been waiting all these years. You, a handful of people, can't keep the rest of the human race from taking what is theirs. We were taken from it; we did not desert it. All these years we have thought of it as home."

"You can't possibly expect us to believe that," said Jason. "Not the story of expatriates coming back, gratefully, to the old familiar shore. Let me tell you what I think."

"Yes, please do," said Reynolds.

"I think," said Jason, "that you may have known for years the location of the Earth, but you had no interest in it. You knew that it had little of value left, that it offered nothing but the room to live. And then, somehow, you heard a rumor about people left on Earth and how they could travel to the stars without any help at all—going anywhere they wished in the flicker of an eyelash—and how they talked telepathically across great distances. Perhaps not a true picture in the first rumor, but there were other rumors and the story built up and up. And you thought if only you could add this sort of ability to your technology you could progress the faster, that you'd increase your profits, that you'd have more power. And it wasn't until then that you thought of coming back to Earth."

"I fail to see the point of what you say," said Harrison. "The fact is we are here."

"The point is this," said Jason. "Don't use your threat to take over Earth in the belief that we are bluffing and will finally give in and give you what you want to keep you from colonizing Earth."

"And if we still decide to colonize?"

"Then you'll colonize. There's no way we can Stop you. Red Cloud's people will be swept away. The robotic dream may end. Two cultures that might have come to something will be cut off and you'll have a worthless planet on your hands."

"Not worthless," Reynolds said. "You should give us credit for the progress we have made. With what we have now Earth would have economic value as an outpost, as a base, as an agricultural planet. It would be worth our while."

The candles guttered in a wind that came out of nowhere and a silence fell—a silence, Jason thought, because all had been said that could be said and there was no use of saying further. This was the end of it, he knew. There was no compassion in these two men across the table; an understanding, perhaps, of what might be at stake, but a cold, hard understanding that they'd weigh to their own advantage. They'd been sent to do a job, these two here and the others up there in the ship orbiting the Earth—they had been sent to do a job and they meant to do it. It did not matter to them what might come about because they did the job—it had never mattered, neither now nor in the years before. Societies had been smashed, cultures erased, human lives and hopes used up, all decency ignored. All was sacrificed to progress. And what, he wondered, might progress be? How did one define it? Was it merely naked power, or was there more to it than that?

Somewhere a door banged and a rush of chill autumn air came with the banging of the door. Feet came down the hall and through the doorway came a robot that glittered as he walked.

Jason came swiftly to his feet. "Stanley," he said, "I'm glad that you could come, although I am afraid too late."

Stanley gestured at the two across the table.

"Are these the ones?" he asked.

"They are, indeed," said Jason. "I would like to have you meet…"

The robot brushed aside the introduction.

"Gentlemen," he said to them, "I have a message for you."