“Because the ‘person’ on Xixobrax is a colony of Callg, and knows everything that goes on here. It took the two planets in co-operation to destroy the fleet. There’s almost full telepathic communion between the twoin fact, all through the Central Empire. The only rapport that seems to weaken over short distancesinterplanetary distancesb the sense of identity. That’s why each planet has an 1’ of its own, its own ego. But it’s not the kind of ego we know 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 purposes 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 way down to …