Dinner had been finished and young Graham hustled off to bed. Granther unearthed, with great solemnity, another bottle of good brandy.
“That boy is a caution,” he declared. “I don’t know what’s to become of him. Imagine him out there all day long, fighting those fool battles. If he was going to take up something, I should think he’d want it to be useful. There’s nothing more useless than a general when there are no wars.”
Grandma clacked her teeth together with impatience. “It isn’t as if we hadn’t tried. We gave him every chance there was. But he wasn’t interested in anything until he took up warring.”
“He’s got guts,” said Granther proudly. “That much I’ll say for him. He up and asked me the other day would I write him some battle music. Me!” yelled Granther, thumping his chest. “Me write battle music!”
“He’s got the seeds of destruction in him,” declared Grandma righteously. “He doesn’t want to build. He just wants to bust.”
“Don’t look at me,” Nelson said to Paxton. “I gave up long ago. Granther and Grandma took him over from me right after Anastasia left. To hear them talk, you’d think they hated him. But let me lift a finger to him and the both of them—”
“We did the best we could,” said Grandma. “We gave him every chance. We bought him all the testing kits. You remember?”
“Sure,” said Granther, busy with the bottle. “I remember well. We bought him that ecology kit and you should have seen the planet he turned out. It was the most pitiful, down-at-heels, hungover planet you ever saw. And then we tried robotry—”
“He did right well at that,” said Grandma tartly.
“Sure, he built them. He enjoyed building them. Recall the time he geared the two of them to hate each other and they fought until they were just two piles of scrap? I never saw anyone have such a splendid time as Graham during the seven days they fought.”
“We could scarcely get him in to meals,” said Grandma.
Granther handed out the brandy.
“But the worst of all,” he decided, “was the time we tried religion. He dreamed up a cult that was positively gummy. We made short work of that…”
“And the hospital,” said Grandma. “That was your idea, Nels…”
“Let’s not talk about it,” pleaded Nelson grimly. “I am sure Stanley isn’t interested.”
Paxton picked up the cue Nelson was offering him. “I was going to ask you, Grandma, what kind of painting you are doing. I don’t recall that Nelson ever told me.”
“Landscapes,” the sweet-faced old lady said. “I’ve been doing some experimenting.”
“And I tell her she is wrong,” protested Granther. “To experiment is wrong. Our job is to maintain tradition, not to let our work go wandering off in whatever direction it might choose.”
“Our job,” said Grandma bitterly, “is to guard the techniques. Which is not to say we cannot strive at progress, if it still is human progress. Young man,” she appealed to Paxton, “isn’t that the way you see it?”
“Well, in part,” evaded Paxton, caught between two fires. “In Politics, we allow evolvement, naturally, but we make sure by periodic tests that we are developing logically and in the human manner. And we make very sure we do not drop any of the old techniques, no matter how outmoded they may seem. And the same is true in Diplomacy. I happen to know a bit about Diplomacy, because the two sections work very close together and—”
“There!” Grandma said.
“You know what I think?” said Nelson quietly. “We are a frightened race. For the first time in our history, the human race is a minority and it scares us half to death. We are afraid of losing our identity in the great galactic matrix. We’re afraid of assimilation.”
“That’s wrong, son,” Granther disagreed. “We are not afraid, my boy. We’re just awful smart, that’s all. We had a great culture at one time and why should we give it up? Sure, most humans nowadays have adopted the galactic way of life, but that is not to say that it is for the best. Some day we may want to turn back to the human culture or we may find that later on we can use parts of it. And this way, if we keep it alive here in Project Continuation, it will be available, all of it or any part, any time we need it. And I’m not speaking, mind you, from the human view alone, because some facet of our culture might sometime be badly needed, not by the human race as such, but by the Galaxy itself.”
“Then why keep the project secret?”
“I don’t think it’s really secret,” Granther said. “It’s just that no one pays much attention to the human race and none at all to Earth. The human race is pretty small potatoes against all the rest of them and Earth is just a worn-out planet that doesn’t amount to shucks.”
He asked Paxton: “You ever hear it was secret, boy?”
“Why, I guess not,” said Paxton. “All I ever understood was that we didn’t go around shooting off our mouths about it. I’ve thought of Continuation as a sort of sacred trust. We’re the guardians who watch over the tribal medicine bag while the rest of humanity is out among the stars getting civilized.”
The old man chortled. “That’s about the size of it. We’re just a bunch of bushmen, but mark me well, intelligent and even dangerous bushmen.”
“Dangerous?” asked Paxton.
“He means Graham,” Nelson told him quietly.
“No, I don’t,” said Granther. “Not him especially. I mean the whole kit and caboodle of us. Because, don’t you see, everybody who joins in this galactic culture that they are stewing up out there must contribute something and must likewise give up something—things that don’t fit in with the new ideas. And the human race has done just like the rest of them, except we haven’t given up a thing. Oh, on the surface, certainly. But everything we’ve given up is still back here, being kept alive by a bunch of subsidized barbarians on an old and gutted planet that a member of this fine galactic culture wouldn’t give a second look.”
“He’s horrible,” said Grandma. “Don’t pay attention to him. He’s got a mean and ornery soul inside that withered carcass.”
“And what is Man?” yelled Granther. “He’s mean and ornery, too, when he has to be. How could we have gone so far if we weren’t mean and ornery?”
And there was some truth in that, thought Paxton. For what humanity was doing here was deliberate doublecrossing. Although, come to think of it, he wondered, how many other races might be doing the very selfsame thing or its equivalent?
And, if you were going to do it, you had to do it right. You couldn’t take the human culture and enshrine it prettily within a museum, for then it would become no more than a shiny showpiece. A fine display of arrowheads was a pretty thing to look at, but a man would never learn to chip a flint into an arrowhead by merely looking at a bunch of them laid out on a velvet-covered board. To retain the technique of chipping arrows, you’d have to keep on chipping arrows, generation after generation, long after the need of them was gone. Fail by one generation and the art was lost.
And the same necessarily must be true of other human techniques and other human arts. And not the purely human arts alone, but the unique human flavor of other techniques which in themselves were common to many other races.
Elijah brought in an armload of wood and dumped it down upon the hearth, heaped an extra log or two upon the fire, then brushed itself off carefully.
“You’re wet,” said Grandma.
“It’s raining, madam,” said Elijah, going out the door.
And so, thought Paxton, Project Continuation kept on practicing the old arts, retaining within a living body of the race the knowledge of their manipulation and their use.