“That is the first sensible thing that anyone has said,” the Parson told them. “Has anyone objection to telling who they are?”
“I have none,” said Sandra Carver, speaking so softly that the others were forced to listen closely to catch her words. “I am a certified poetess in the Academy of Very Ancient Athens and I can speak fourteen tongues, although I only write or sing in one — one of the dialects of Former Gaul, the most expressive language in the entire world. How I came here I do not entirely understand. I was listening to a concert, a new composition played by an orchestra from the Land Across the Western Sea, and in all my life I’ve never heard anything so powerful and so poignant. It seemed to lift me out of my corporeal body and launch my spirit into another place and when I came back again into my body, both I, my soaring spirit, and my body were in a different place, a pastoral place of astounding beauty. There was a path and I followed it and—” “The year?” asked the Parson. “What year, pray?” “I don’t understand your question, Parson.” “What year was it? Your measurement of time.” “The sixty-eighth of the Third Renaissance.” “No, no, I don’t mean that. Anno Domini — the year of Our Lord.”
“What lord do you speak of? In my day there are so many lords.”
“How many years since the birth of Jesus?” “Jesus?”
“Yes, the Christ.”
“Sir, I have never heard of Jesus nor of Christ.” The Parson appeared on the verge of apoplexy. His face became red and he pulled at his collar as if fighting for air. He tried to speak and strangled on his words.
“I’m sorry if I have distressed you,” said the poetess. “I did it unknowingly. I would not willingly cause offense.” “It’s all right, my dear,” said the Brigadier. “It’s only that our friend the Parson is suffering culture shock. Before all this is over he may not be the only one. I begin to catch a glint of the situation in which we find ourselves. It is, for me, entirely unbelievable, but as we go on it may become at least marginally believable, although I have the feeling that most of us may come to that realization with a great deal of difficulty.”
“You are saying,” said Lansing, “that all of us may come from different cultures and perhaps from different worlds, although I am not sure about the worlds.” Surprised to hear himself speaking so and thinking back to the time, a few hours before, when Andy Spaulding, speculating idly and certainly meaning none of it, had prattled about alternate worlds, although, he recalled, he had blanked out the prattle.
“But we all speak English,” said Mary Owen, “or we can speak English. How many languages, Sandra, did you say you spoke?”
“Fourteen,” said the poetess. “Some of them rather badly.”
“Lansing voiced a good preliminary grasp of what may have happened to us,” said the Brigadier. “I congratulate you, sir, on your sharp perception. It may not be exactly as you say, but you may be nibbling close to truth. As to the English that we speak, let us speculate a little further. We are one little band, all speaking English. Might there not be other bands? French bands, Latin bands, Greek bands, Spanish bands — small groups of people who can get along together because they speak a common language?”
The Parson shouted, “That is sheer speculation! It is madness to suggest, to even think, of such a concept as the two of you seem to be putting together. It goes against everything that is known of Heaven or of Earth.”
“The knowledge that we have of Heaven and of Earth,“ the Brigadier said, tartly, ”is a mere pinch against the entire truth. We cannot blink our being here, and certainly our being here and the method of our coming does not square with any knowledge that we have.”
“I think that what Mr. Lansing told us…” said Mary. “Lansing, what is your Christian name? We can’t go on calling you Lansing.”
“My name is Edward.”
“Thank you. I think that Edward’s suggestion may be a tad romantic, even visionary. But if we are to seek the knowledge of where we are and the reason for our being here, it would seem that we may be forced to strike out in some new directions in our thinking. I happen to be an engineer, and I live in a highly technical society. Any sort of thinking that projects itself beyond the known or the solidly theoretical grates upon my nerves. There is nothing in any methodology that I can summon up that would provide any explanation. There may be others of you who are better based to suggest an explanation. How about our robot friend?”
“I also have a technical background,” said Jurgens, “but I am not aware of any methodology—”
“Why do you ask him?” shouted the Parson. “You call him a robot and that is a word that slips easily off the tongue, but when you come right down to it, he is no more than a machine, a mechanical contrivance.”
“You go too far,” said the Brigadier. “I happen to live in a world where mechanical contrivances have fought a war for years and have fought it intelligently and well, with an imagination that sometimes surpasses a human’s.”
“How horrible,” said the poetess.
“You mean, I suppose,” said the Brigadier, “that war is horrible.”
“Well, isn’t it?” she asked.
“War is a natural human function,” said the Brigadier. “There is an aggressive, competitive urge in the race that responds to conflict. If this were not so, there would not have been so many wars.”
“But the human suffering. The agony. The blasted hopes.”
“In my day it has become a game,” said the Brigadier. “As it was with many early human tribes. The Indians of the Western Continent looked upon it as a game. A young tribesman did not become a man until he’d counted his first coup. All that is manly and noble stems from war. There might have been times in the past when excessive zeal resulted in some of the consequences that you mention. Today little blood is spilled. We play it as one plays a game of chess.”
“Using robots,” said Jurgens.
“We don’t call them robots.”
“Perhaps not. Mechanicals. Mechanicals that have personal identity and the ability to think.”
“That’s correct. Well built, magnificently trained. They help us plan as well as fight. My staff is very heavily weighed with mechanicals. In many ways their grasp of a military situation is at times superior to mine.”
“And the field of battle is littered with mechanicals?”
“Yes, of course. We salvage those we can.”
“And fix them up and send them out again?”
“Why, certainly,” said the Brigadier. “In war you conserve your resources very jealously.”
“General,” said Jurgens, “I do not think I would like to live in the kind of world you have.”
“What is your kind of world? If you wouldn’t want to live in my kind of world, tell me the kind of world you do live in.”
“A peaceful world. A kindly world. We have compassion for our humans.”
“It sounds sickening,” said the Brigadier. “You have compassion for your humans. Your humans?”
“In our world there are few humans left. We take care of them.”
“Much as it goes against my gram,” said the Parson, “I’m coming to the conclusion that Edward Lansing may be right. Listening, it becomes apparent that we all do come from different worlds. A cynical world that regards war as a simple game—”
“It is not a simple game,” said the Brigadier. “At times it is complex.”
“A cynical world,” said the Parson, “that regards war as a complex game. A world of poetess and poet, of music and academies. A world in which robots take kindly care of humans. And in your world, my lady, a society where a woman may become an engineer.”