It was theoretically possible. The new breed would have to be like Varsi, tough, driving and selfishly independent. In time they might inherit the world. Civilization could arise again. It was not impossible.
His thoughts turned briefly back to the artifact. It still bothered him. He still knew far too little about it. It was a fascinating speculation to dream of what it might have been. At any rate, one thing was sure. It was not a structure of his race. If nothing else, those cabalistic markings on the side of the cylinder were utterly alien.
Thoughtfully he traced them in the sand. What did they mean?
Planaria are worms. Worm-runners are people who run worms through mazes. The Worm Runners’ Digest is the journal of the Planaria Research Group of the University of Michigan’s Mental Health Research Institute. Worm-runners throughout the country—amateur and professional—use the WRD as an information and idea exchange, discussing via lab reports, speech reprints, research papers, semipersonal letters, art, verse, parody, fable, and farce the latest news about worms, themselves, and the human condition, with special reference to the provocative and productive research initiated by the PRG on the biochemistry of learning and memory.
I was fascinated by WRD. And I not only learned about worms; I thought I had found out something about the Ul Kworn too. Who would be more likely to think of worms than a veterinarian?
So I wrote to Dr. Bone. He answered, “The Ul Kworn was built up from terrestrial precursors, but he was made to the requirements of the gadgetry. The gadget is real. NASA had it walking around the banks of the Potomac, shooting out sticky threads and reeling them in for several months before I got the idea for a story. I modified the gadget by making it sessile, but the rest of the machine is about the way it really is. Since NASA intends to shoot it at Mars in the not-too-distant future, I had the planet.
“So all that was left was to build a believable character that could be elemental enough to be trapped by the machine, yet advanced enough to elicit sympathy from the reader. The hunger motivation was inherent in the machine. . . .
“Physically, the Ul is a composite of a snail, a starfish and an amoeba, with the protective mantle being my own creation and dictated by Mars’ temperature variations. His reproductive pattern was pirated almost verbatim from the coelenterates, in this case Hydra, which reproduces sexually and asexually.
“A far worse problem was to arrange some sort of social order that would make the NASA gadget a problem. By using the hunger motivation and a scanty food supply, I hit upon the idea of territorial strips. After that the formulation of social rules was easy.”
Easy, that is, for a man whose profession has accustomed him to thinking and feeling nonhuman thoughts and emotions. We do not ell possess this faculty in the same degree; too many of us are completely untrained in its use—or more accurately, perhaps, have had it trained out of us. Call it imagination, intuition, empathy: it is something other than logic; something more than the simple sum of observations and deductions. Children have it, far more than adults—as they have other capacities for learning that most of us can hardly perceive.
POPPA NEEDS SHORTS
Walt and Leigh Richmond
Little Oley had wandered into forbidden territory again —Big Brother Sven’s ham shack. The glowing bottles here were an irresistible lure, and he liked to pretend that he knew all there was to know about the mysteries in this room.
Of course, Sven said that not even he knew all of the mysteries, though he admitted he was one of the best ham operators extant, with QSOs from eighteen countries and thirty-eight states to his credit.
At the moment, Sven was busily probing into an open chassis with a hot soldering iron.
“Short’s in here some place,” he muttered.
“What makes shorts, Sven?” Oley wasn’t so knowledgeable but what he would ask was an occasional question.
Sven turned and glared down. “What are you doing in here? You know it’s a Federal offense for anybody to come into this room without I say so?”
“Momma and Hilda come in all the time, and you don’t say so.” Oley stood firm on what he figured were legal grounds. “What makes shorts?”
Sven relented a little. This brother had been something of a surprise to him, coming along when Sven was a full ten years old. But, he reflected, after a few years maybe I should get used to the idea. Actually, he sort of liked the youngster.
“Shorts,” he said, speaking from the superior eminence of his fourteen years to the four-year-old, “is when electricity finds a way to get back where it came from without doing a lot of hard work getting there. But you see, electricity likes to work; so, even when it has an easy way, it just works harder and uses itself up.”
This confused explanation of shorts was, of course, taken verbatim, despite the fact that Oley couldn’t define half the words and probably couldn’t even pronounce them.
“I don’t like shorts. I don’t like these pink shorts Momma put on me this morning. Is they electrics, Sven?”
Sven glanced around at the accidentally-dyed-in-the-laundry, formerly white shorts.
“Um-m-m. Yeah. You could call ‘em electric.”
With this Oley let out a whoop and dashed out of the room, trailing a small voice behind him. “Momma, Momma. Sven says my shorts is electric!”
“I’ll short Sven’s electrics for him, if he makes fun of your shorts!” Oley heard his mother’s comforting reply.
In the adult world days passed before Oley’s accidentally acquired pattern of nubient information on the subject of shorts was enlarged. It was only days in the adult world, but in Oley’s world each day was a mountainous fraction of an entire lifetime, into which came tumbling and jumbling— or were pulled—bits, pieces, oddments, landslides and acquisitions of information on every subject that he ran into, or that ran into him. Nobody had told Oley that acquiring information was his job at the moment; the acquisition was partly accidental, mostly instinctive, and spurred by an intense curiosity and an even more intense determination to master the world as he saw it.
There was the taste of the sick green flowers that Momma kept in the window box and, just for a side course, a little bit of the dirt, too. There were the patterns of the rain on the window, and the reactions of a cat to having its tail pulled. The fact that you touch a stove one time, and it’s cool and comfortable to lay your head against, and another time it hurts. Things like that. And other things—towering adults who sometimes swoop down on you and throw you high into the air; and most times walk over you, around you, and ignore you completely. The jumble of assorted and unsorted information that is the heritage of every growing young inquiring brain.
In terms of time, it was only a couple of weeks, if you were looking at it as an adult, until the next “shorts” incident.
Oley was sitting peacefully at the breakfast table, doing his level best to control the manipulation of the huge knife-fork-and-spoon, plate-bowl-and-glass, from which he was expected to eat a meal. Things smelled good. Momma was cooking doste, and that to Oley smelled best of all. The doster ticked quietly to itself, then gave a loud pop, and up came two golden-brown slices of doste. Dostes? Oley wasn’t sure. But he hadn’t really begun paying too much attention to whether one doste was the same as two doste or what, though he could quite proudly tell you the difference between one and two.