Страница 35 из 39
"We should have gotten together sooner," said Harrison.
"I don't understand," said Jason. "Why, man," said Harrison, "you have got it made. So have we. The two of us together…"
"Please," said Jason. "The others are waiting for us. We can't stand here, talking. After you have met them, there will be breakfast. Thatcher is cooking up some pancakes."
30
(Excerpt from journal of Aug. 23, 5152)… When a man gets old (and now I am getting old) it seems he climbs a mountain to leave everyone behind, although I would suspect, if he but stopped to think of it, he'd realize he was the one who was left behind. In my circumstance the situation is not really applicable, for I and all the rest of us were left behind 3,000 years ago. But in a normal human community such as existed before the Disappearance, the old were left behind. Their old friends died or moved away or simply went away, moving so quietly and so softly, like leaves dried to paper thi
Sitting here, I think of this and know there is not as much fantasy in such a notion as someone of more youthful years might believe. It seems to me that even now I can see farther and with greater clarity, although perhaps neither so far nor so clear as may be the case closer to the end. For, as yet, I ca
At the time of the Disappearance we took a different path than the one that Man had followed through the ages. We were forced, in fact, to take another path. We no longer could continue as we had before. The old world came crashing down about us and there was little left. We thought, at first, that we were lost and indeed we were, if lostness means the losing of a culture we'd built up so laboriously through the years. And yet, in time, I think we came to know that the losing of it was not entirely bad— perhaps not bad at all, but good. For the loss had been the loss of many things we were better off without. Rather than losing, we gained a chance for a second start.
T must confess that I am still somewhat confused by what we did with this second start, or rather what the second start did to us. For certainly what we did came about through no conscious effort. It happened to us. Not to me, of course, but to the others. I was, I suspect, too old, too molded in that older, earlier life, for it to happen. I stood aside, not particularly because I wanted to, but because there was no choice.
The important aspect of the whole situation, it seems to me, is that this business of traveling to the stars and talking back and forth across the galaxy (Martha, at this moment, has spent a good part of the afternoon gossiping across light years) is no more than a bare begi
What comes next, I ask myself, and I do not know. There seems to be no logical progression to this sort of thing and the reason that there is no logic is that we are too new at it to have an understanding of what may be involved. The flint worker of prehistoric days had no idea why a stone would cleave in the fashion that he wished when he struck a blow in a certain place upon its face. He knew how, but not why, and he didn't spend much time, I would suppose, in figuring out the why. But as the cleaving of the flint came clear to men of later days, the mechanism of the parapsychic ability some mille
As it stands at the moment, I can only speculate. Speculation is a footless endeavor, I am well aware, but I ca
Will there come a time, perhaps, when a race of godlike men can manipulate the very fabric of the universe? Will they be able to rearrange the atoms, bending their structures and their energies to the will of mind alone? Will they be able to save a star tottering close to the nova stage from its natural evolutionary course and enable it to continue as a normal, stable star? Will they be able, by the power of mind alone, to engineer a planet, converting it from a useless mass of matter to an abode for life? Will they be able to alter the genetics of a life form, by the power of mind alone, refashioning it into a more significant and more satisfactory life form? Perhaps more importantly, will they be able to free the minds of universal intelligences from the chains and shackles that they carry from the olden days of their evolutionary cycle so that the intelligences become reasonable and compassionate intelligences?
It is good to dream and there could be the hope, of course, that this all might come about, man finally emerging as a factor in introducing even a great orderliness into the universe. But I ca
In my far view from the mountain of my age, I seem to see an end to it, a point beyond which we ca