A Choice of Gods

If man persists, there'll be no stopping him. The question, it seems to me, is not whether he will persist, but whether he has the right to. I shudder when I envision man, the prehistoric monster, continuing into a time and world where he has no place…

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 ca

"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 ca

"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.