anything about. Xixobrax wouldn’t give us any better deal
than Calle has, any more than I’d give Calle a better deal
than you would, Your Excellency. They have common pur-
poses and allegiances. All the Central Empire seems to be
like that.”
12-Upjohn thought about it; but he did not like what he
thought. It was a knotty problem, even in theory.
Telepathy among men had never amounted to anything.
After the pioneer exploration of the microcosm with the
Arpe Effectthe second of two unsuccessful attempts at an
interstellar drive, long before the discovery of the Standing
Waveit had become easy to see why this would be so.
Psi forces in general were characteristic only of the subspace
in which the primary particles of the atom had their being;
their occasional manifestations in the macrocosm were
statistical accidents, as weak and indirigible as spontaneous
radioactive decay.
Up to now this had suited 12-Upjohn. It had always
seemed to him that the whole notion of telepathy was a
dodgean attempt to by-pass the plain duty of each man
to learn to know his brother, and, if possible, to learn to
love him; the telepathy fanatics were out to short-circuit the
task, to make easy the most difficult assignment a human
being might undertake. He was well aware, too, of the bias
against telepathy which was inherent in his profession of
mplomat; yet he had always been certain of his case, hazy
though it was around the edges. One of his proofs was that
telepathy’s main defenders invariably were incorrigibly lazy
writers, from Upton Sinclair and Theodore Dreiser all the