Ambassadors are rarely, if ever, met by the head of the nation to which they come. They go to him. But this case was an exception to every established precedent, and the President of the United States, Philip Brackney, felt no loss in dignity as he came to the spaceship.
It was, he thought, really a lovely machine, with all the beauty of perfect functionalism—and something more than that, a touch of the haunting indefinable splendor of a clipper ship or a Greek temple. The five-hundred-foot pylon towered over the green Iowan plain, a blinding metallic dazzle in the sunlight, a spearhead poised at infinity. Its gleaming height dwarfed the buildings on the farm on which it had descended.
As the presidential car and its attendants swept up the dirt road—it was in extremely poor condition after the thousands of sightseers who had used it in the past month—the chief of Brackney’s secret service guards said nervously: “For the last time, sir, are you sure this is wise?”
“Of course,” he answered, a little irritable with excitement. “Any other procedure would be madness!”
“But…if they have bad intentions—”
“Listen, Mr. Dickson, if they meant to do anything hostile, they’d do it. That one ship has more power than all this planet’s combined military forces.” The awe of it swept over Brackney, he breathed almost religiously: “A spaceship from the stars—and men aboard—”
The Secretary of Defense spoke slowly: “You know, every night for the past month I’ve gone down on my knees—and am not ashamed to admit it—to thank God that ship landed here. Not in some potential enemy’s camp, but here—with us.”
“It wouldn’t have made any difference,” said the President. “The visitors have been all over Earth in their lifeboats, seeing for themselves, taking almost all the printed matter they could get back. They probably have a better overall picture of Earth than we do.”
He said, as the car swung up the driveway: “This is by rights not a matter for us at all. The United Nations alone should handle it, and they must take over soon. But—it was never set up to deal with ambassadors. I have to make the first official approach, for lack of anyone else.”
The farmer stood nervously waiting. Since that rainy night a month gone when the ship landed in his pasture, he had lived in such a glare of publicity as to become a bit blasé about it. But after all—the President—
“I think they’re waiting, sir,” he mumbled.
“Very well. Come along, gentlemen.” Brackney led the way.
A ramp had been lowered from the entrance lock, a hundred feet above ground. The party stepped on it and it rose smoothly up, with an uncanny, almost living flexibility.
For a moment, Brackney’s throat was dry. A spaceship from the stars—Don’t be a fool! he reproached himself sharply. The Taithans have emphasized their friendliness a hundred times. They aren’t conquistadores, they are representatives of a culture a thousand years ahead of ours—a culture that must have outgrown war, or the race would destroy itself with the weapons it has.
The crew of the ship stood waiting at the lock. There were not many of them, a score or so, and nearly all of these were scientists. The ship, they had said, practically ran itself. Nor were they at all spectacular. They looked like very ordinary human beings of a curiously mixed race—dark skin, Mongoloid eyes of a light shade, thin Caucasoid noses, woolly hair. They wore robes of a shimmering blue material, and had no outward insignia of rank.
“Greetings, gentlemen,” said one, in accented but ready-flowing English, “Permit me to introduce myself—Gor Haml, the one of us who learned your language. The others, of course, have learned other tongues of your planet.”
“I am Philip Brackney—” Introductions went around, acknowledged by the Taithans with grave bows. Thereafter Gor Haml led the way along a bare metal corridor and into a small—well, living room, thought Brackney, who was no sailor. It was furnished with chairs and tables of a comfortable, massive style, and there were some uncannily three-dimensional pictures on the walls. As the party sat down, they felt the chairs mold themselves to the body contours.
“I take it that the visit of such high dignitaries may be considered official?” asked Gor Haml.
“Certainly,” replied Brackney. “But—may I ask if your own visit is in the nature of a formal embassy? Your refusal to admit anyone to your ship, or to hold other than the most academic discourse with those you met, until your invitation to me yesterday—that suggests you are on an official mission yourselves.”
“Yes and no,” answered the Taithan. “We are travelers, exploring this section of the Galaxy, but we are representatives of the Taithan people too, empowered to decide policy with regard to any world we visit.”
“But why did you hold yourselves so aloof?” The Secretary of State looked worried. “All Earth was ready to welcome you. Nearly all churches held thanksgiving services that you had come. Every government has besieged you with official congratulations and invitations.”
Gor Haml seemed a little unhappy. “We have met great courtesy everywhere,” he said, “but it is a rule of the exploration service not to perform any policy-making act until the new planet is—classified.”
“I should hardly think a month would suffice for that,” ventured Brackney.
Gor Haml rubbed a hand over his weary eyes. “It is grueling work,” he admitted, “but it can be done, due to a combination of the highly evolved Taithan psychotechnology and certain phenomena of evolution and history. We have a very exact technique for dealing with human races.”
“Human races!”
“Yes! It seems strange, but the fact is that in three hundred years of Galactic exploration the Taithans have never found an Earth-like world which was not inhabited by a human race. Oh, there are differences, of course, and even races which look and think exactly alike could hardly be so similar as to make interbreeding possible—but by and large, the similarities exceed the differences.”
“I should think the random element—”
“There is none, not if you agree that like causes produce like effects. All planets are produced by the same basic process, and so every Sol-type star must have a system like this one. And every Earth-type planet must produce the same general forms of life—because two processes beginning with the same initial conditions must run the same course.”
“But how can the initial conditions be so much alike?”
“They are, in at least half the cases. There are deviations of greater or less degree, but over half the GO-type stars explored so far have been found to have planets similar to Taitha inhabited by an intelligent race similar to our own—and Earth is such a one.” Gor Haml’s eyes rested speculatively on the President: “We were astonished at this ourselves, when we first began exploring, but the fact was there. Now we know the reasons and see that such similarity is inevitable in this universe, but I cannot explain the philosophy to you. A thousand years from now, Earthlings should be able to understand it—but not at your present stage of development.”
“I begin to see how you were able to learn about us so quickly,” said Brackney. “You knew just about what to expect and what to look for.”
“That is part of it, to be sure. Also, we have the benefits of a psychological science evolved to a point that might seem miraculous to you. It includes all human knowledge, which is after all only a function of the human organism, and integrates it according to principles your scientists and philosophers have not yet imagined. You have the germ of it in your experimental and analytical psychology, in semantics and symbolic logic, in physical and biological sciences, yes, and in some of your philosophical speculations. But you have not begun to exploit the potentialities of your own nervous systems. Taithans have no more inherent intelligence than Earthlings, but they know how to use it; just as a caveman was inherently capable of using, say, tensor analysis, but the knowledge did not exist for him. Thus we can perform such apparent feats of legerdemain as understanding and classifying a planet in a month’s hard work.”
“I see,” nodded Brackney. “I can even guess your main line of approach—simply reading tons of written material of every kind, at some fantastic speed, and analyzing the information, both direct and indirect, it contains.”
“That is one important line, at least,” smiled the Taithan. “I might add that history books are the leading source of the knowledge we are after.”
There was a moment of silence. The Earthlings sat looking at the strangers, seeking some sign of foreignness or of godlike power or anything, rather than the score of weary-looking, ordinary men before them. Brackney, with a politician’s sensitivity to moods, could not, escape the nagging conviction that the Taithans were depressed. They look at us as if they felt sorry for us!
He said, more to break that awkward stillness than for any other reason: “I suppose this is a rather meaningless question, but how far ahead of our civilization is yours? I mean…well, of course we’re contemporaries, but what time equivalent separates us—?” He stopped, acutely aware of his own lack of terminology.
“The question is not meaningless,” replied Gor Haml. “We are about fifteen hundred years ahead of you—in actual time. Our recorded and archeological history is longer than yours by that many years. Indeed, that is the only significant difference between our races.”
“That’s quite encouraging,” smiled the Secretary of State. “I was beginning to fear you were the sort of supermen the fiction writers love—completely alien to us. But if you help us get started, we should be able to catch up with you in a generation or two.”
“That…yes, that is why I have been so thankful,” exclaimed Brackney. “Here on Earth we die of disease and war, we impoverish ourselves and go in fear and ignorance, we are bound to this one little planet—worse yet, to our own archaic superstitions and hates. Taithan science means things like spaceships and limitless energy sources and disease-free men, yes, and that’s what all the world has been so jubilant about. But to me, it is the enlightenment and the freedom from our old heritage of cave and beast which is the great gift—” He stopped, a little embarrassed at his own loquacity. He heard his own blood beating in his arteries, and his face was hot.
Gor Haml smiled. It was a very weary smile, with no humor in it, and his lined gaunt visage was not brightened by it. He said quietly:
“The histories of Earth and Taitha run as parallel as the histories of nearly all human races known to us. The only important difference is that ours is some fifteen hundred years older—but that difference is enormous. In the Galaxy so far, we have found human races in every stage from pure savagery to our own level, but in nearly every case—and your own among them—the only variation seems to be when they got started. Once under way, they follow the same patterns.”
“But—hold on!” exploded Brackney. “You don’t mean to say that on every planet there was an ancient Egypt and Rome, or a United States—?”
“Oh, no.” Gor Haml’s smile twitched with the faintest hint of amusement. “Indeed, the superficial differences—language, dress, religion, laws and customs, almost everything which an untrained observer would notice—are usually radical. I am, however, speaking in a deeper sense. There is a parallelism in mental and, well, spiritual evolution which transcends outward appearances.”
At their evident puzzlement, he went on: “I suppose some of you, at least, are familiar with such philosophers of history as Spengler and Toynbee. They have the beginnings of the truth, in their analysis of history into distinct cultures. And be it noted, those cultures follow a cycle of genesis in barbaric folk-wanderings, growth and expression of innate tendencies in the people, breakdown, time of troubles, stiffening into a ‘universal state’ statism, and ultimate extinction. The cycle has a time scale which varies by no more than ten or twenty years from the norm for each distinct stage.
“There is no reason to invoke a mysterious ‘Destiny’ to explain this fact. The casual law is sufficient. Under similar conditions, human beings react similarly. For instance, the nature myths of primitive peoples who never heard of each other are so alike that your own anthropologists have been able to classify them according to type, and to enunciate the unspoken beliefs underlying magic rites everywhere. In like manner, what is more natural than that outlying barbarians should invade a decadent empire and, coming under its influence, generate a new civilization—or that the miseries of a time of troubles should be forcibly ended by the imposition of a universal state? I am, of course, much oversimplifying, but I believe you can see in a rough way why Earth-type planets must evolve human races and why these races must have similar cycles of history.”
“But history isn’t all cyclic,” objected Brackney.
“No, no, of course not. It is, indeed, an irreversible process only one of whose components, so to speak, is cyclic. For instance, the progress in technology is almost a direct line. Likewise, when a planet has advanced far enough, it is able to break out of the cycle of wars and other social evils—as Taitha has done. But the time of that achievement is governed by casual laws, not by wishful thinking or futile attempts at interference.”
“Wait a minute—” A sudden fear, dim and inchoate, all the more ghastly for that, crawled coldly along Brackney’s spine. “Wait! Aren’t you assuming that conditions remain the same? For instance, your arrival on Earth is a factor which, I suppose, has no parallel on Taitha—”
“That is true.” Suddenly Gar Haml’s eyes were bright—with tears? “But when we depart, our brief visit will have had no long-range significance. Men tend to thrust unpleasant facts out of their minds, and the existence of planets immensely beyond Earth will prove unpleasant to most humans.”
“Not…oh, no!” Brackney started out of his chair. “But you…you’re going to stay! You’re going to guide us, help us become truly civilized—”
“No, Mr. Brackney. We have classified Earth, and it is well below the stage of development at which prolonged contact with superior culture would be safe for either side. We leave immediately.”
He stood up, and laid a hand on the President’s shoulder. His face was bleak and stern and sorrowful. “Your assumption that we, whose intentions are admittedly benevolent, will give you guidance, is based on my own statement that Earthlings are intellectually capable of learning all that Taithans know. But man is not entirely, or even primarily, an intellectual animal. He has to feel his knowledge, if he is not to make hideous misuse of it. A wise man is not necessarily a good man, and intellect turns as readily to destructive as to useful ends. Do not forget the example of Japan, which your own people forced from feudalism to industrialism without changing the inherent structure of society—thus loosing a fanatical menace on the world.”
“But…you would change our society—wouldn’t you?”
“Never. It would leave Earthlings pensioners, with no sense of cultural continuity—worse off than primitive aborigines forced into modern factories.”
The grave, implacable voice seemed to come from enormous distances, gulfs of space and time and evolution. “Man must win his own salvation. He must learn, not only with his brain but with bitter and horrible and unforgettable experience, branded so deep as to be almost an instinct, that he is part of a whole, and that misuse of wisdom recoils a thousand fold.
“I am afraid that there is nothing we can do for you until you have had your atomic wars. We will be back in a thousand years. Good-by, gentlemen.”