VI
Cahann felt suddenly tired.
Too much too soon. He wiped his forehead with his palm. He was still sitting on the ground, Harvey squatting beside him and the others, with the goggle-eyed Marine, standing around in front of him. He leaned forward, arms lax, and gazed bleakly at the ground between his knees.
“All right,” he said dully. “Tell me about it.”
“I don’t know what the colonization methods of the Old Empire were,” Harvey told him, “but our ancestors were on a one-way street. They got on their ship, left Earth, traveled until they found a place where they could land and live, and that was it. There was no contact with Earth, and no way to get back to Earth. Nor was there any way to leave their new home once they’d chosen it. The ship needed a complex launching pad they weren’t equipped to build.
“So they came here,” he went on, motioning at the world around them. “They landed, stripped down the ship for parts, planted, started to build shelters… and then the enticer went to work on them.”
“The way it did on me,” said Cahann.
“Exactly. Now, here’s the point. Telepathic ability is dormant, to a greater or lesser extent, in every human being who ever lived. Back on Earth, there were countless cases of individuals whose ability was advanced almost to the threshold of self-awareness. You see, the capability is greater in some people than in others. Just as some people have better memories than others, some are better at mathematics than others, and so on.”
Cahann nodded.
“To get back to the original settlers of Cockaigne,” said Harvey. “They were stranded here, five thousand of them. And they were being picked off by the enticer, which struck them telepathically, and below the level of conscious resistance. Do you see what that! meant?”
“I think so,” said Cahann. “It meant that the people with the greatest telepathic capacity would be the ones most likely to survive. The ones who could catch what the enticer was doing in time to get back out of range.”
“Of course,” said Harvey. “On this planet, for the first time in man’s history, telepathic ability was the primary survival characteristic. This world forced man to breed for telepathy. The survivors of each generation were just a little bit more advanced toward full use of the ability than the generation before them.”
“Until now,” Cahann finished for him, “you are all fully telepathic.”
“Exactly. And with, in addition, the complementary abilities that go along with it. Such as the shield. And such as, for instance — well, for instance, what’s your name?”
He looked at Harvey blankly. Why ask that?
“Come on,” said Harvey. “Tell me your name.”
“My name’s…”
He didn’t know. He thought desperately, trying to remember, and it just wasn’t there. He didn’t know his own name! It was as though he had never had a name, as though a name had never been given him.
“Your name’s Cahann,” Harvey told him gently.
Of course! How stupid to forget it!
Cahann looked sharply at Harvey, in sudden understanding. «You made me forget it.”
Harvey nodded.
It was as though a dull weight were pressing on Cahann’s soul. “Is there no limit to what you people can do?” he asked.
“There are limits,” Harvey told him, “but they’re nothing to worry about.”
“What are you going to do with us?”
“We’ve been trying to decide. At first, when you’d just landed here, we thought the best thing to do was make you take off again at once, and give you the idea the planet was uninhabitable. It’s unlikely any other Earth ship will ever stumble across us.”
“I wish you had done that,” Cahann told him.
Harvey smiled. “You won’t when we’re finished with you,” he said. He motioned at the Marine, still goggle-eyed in the background. “See Elan there? He’s an intelligent boy. He’s also a latent telepath of a very high order. Harriet tells me she thinks she could bring the ability out completely in less than a year. But do you know what Earth has done to that boy?”
Cahann looked.at the Marine, not understanding. He hadn’t ever really paid any attention to him, he was simply an impassive face and a uniform, one of the depersonalized enlisted men from block six.
“Of course,” said Harvey. “That’s what you think of him. That’s what everybody thinks of him. They’ve told him so long and so often that he doesn’t count as a person, as an individual, that he believes it himself by now. Do you know that he has seriously considered requesting reconversion, to kill off the individuality which was only worthless and which brought him only self-doubt and worry? Do you know that four per cent of Earth’s Marines every year volunteer for reconversion? That’s how little life and individual worth have come to mean with you people.”
“I didn’t know the figures,” said Cahann distractedly. He was gazing at the Marine, trying to see him as a person, trying to see him the way Harvey saw him. It wasn’t easy to do.
“Your Empire,” Harvey told him, steel now coming into his voice, “is an open sore. It’s a gaping wound on the face of the universe. We wouldn’t feel right if we let it go on.”
“No,” said Cahann. “With all of your powers, you can’t do that. You can’t fight the Empire. One ship, yes, you could beat one ship. But not the Empire.”
“Don’t be so sure.”
A native came strolling up at that point, casually saying, “Group of them forming outside the ship. They’re going to come this way.”
“All right.” Harvey got to his feet, saying, “Come along, Cahann, We can talk while waiting for them.”
Cahann stood up, awkwardly. He was stiff and aching in every joint. He limped along beside Harvey, the Marine and the other natives following.
Harvey said, “We’re going to have to make you forget most of this, but only temporarily. We’d rather not give the Empire any warning. Ten of us are going to go back to Earth with you people, on your ship.”
“Ten of you? You can’t possibly—”
“Don’t worry about it, Cahann,” said Harvey. “Your commander is deciding right now to bring us along.”
They stopped at the edge of the meadow. In the distance, the procession was moving toward them.
How pompous they looked! Cahann had never noticed that before, how silly and pompous they all looked. Nor how completely defenseless.
“You can do it,” he said in a low voice. He felt sick and frightened, but at the same time he was beginning to feel a kind of exultation. They would do it, they really would.
And was there any doubt the Earth would be a better world when they were finished with what they would do to it?
“Earth is out of step,” said Harvey, “out of step with life. Like this group coming toward us. They’re all out of step. We have to change that.”
In the distance, the marching group all hopped at once, changing step.
1963
The Question
Not infrequently it used to happen that we would get an idea for a story, only to find that another writer had not only gotten the same idea, but had written it down (and sold it) before we did; other writers report the same phenomena. Now we are an editor and we find it often happens that a MS will arrive on our desk only a day or so after we have bought one on the same theme. Coincidence? Telepathy? The Collective Unconscious? Who knows? At any rate, only a week after we got the Harris-Westlake story, along came the Demmon story. Intrigued by the way the different writers, who are unknown to each other, handed the subject which occurred to them independently, we decided to print both stories together. We think that two differently-angled views may, like those of the stereoscope, produce a three-dimensional image.