THE CRUCIBLE OF TIME BY JOHN BRUNNER

“You have no idea how reassuring it is to find a person like you,” Ugant sighed. “If you’d followed formal courses in astronomy, you might just be parroting what your instructors had told you. But you said you haven’t. Yet you take the result of our studies seriously. Someone is listening, at least.”

“And sometimes I can’t help wondering why,” muttered Wam. “Dreams of colorful and exotic alien civilizations are obviously more attractive than dull and boring facts. The giant planets which you, like us, believe to be vast balls of chilly gas—are not they among the favorite playgrounds of the psychoplanetarists?”

“Indeed yes!” Chybee shuddered. “They like them particularly because they are so huge. Thus, when two—well—teachers, or dream-leaders, make contrary claims about the nature of their inhabitants, Imblot can reconcile them with one another on the grounds that on such a vast globe there’s room for scores, scores-of-scores, of different species and different cultures.”

“That may be relatively harmless,” Ugant opined. “What frightens me above all is this new yarn that’s spreading so rapidly, most likely thanks to a pithstorm on the part of Aglabec himself.”

“You mean the idea that our ancestors were on the verge of spaceflight, so alien creatures hurled the Greatest Meteorite at them?” Wam twisted her mantle in pure disgust. “Yes, I’m worried too at the way it’s catching on here. Chybee, had you heard of it in Hulgrapuk?”

“It’s very popular there,” the girl muttered. “Just the sort of notion my parents love to claw hold of!”

“Not only your parents,” Ugant said. She turned back to Wam. “I’ll tell you what worries me most. I’m starting to suspect that sooner or later projects like yours and mine will be attacked—physically attacked—by people who’ve completely swallowed this kind of loathsome nonsense and now feel genuinely afraid that if either of us achieves success we can look forward to another hammer-blow from on high.”

“But we have to anyway!” Chybee cried.

“Yes indeed!” Wam said. “That’s why it’s at once so subtle and so dangerous, and also why Ugant proposes to enlist your help. Will you do as she suggests?”

Chybee searched her memory for details of Ugant’s plan, and failed to find them. She had been too distracted during the earlier part of the discussion. At length she said, “Perhaps if you could explain a bit more …?”

“It’s very simple.” Ugant hunched forward. “What we don’t understand, what we desperately need to understand, is how to prevent the spread of this—this mental disorder. As you mentioned just now, some folk suspect that modern air-pollution has already rendered a counterattack hopeless. Even our ancestors, according to the few records we’ve managed to excavate or recover from under the sea, realized that tampering with metals can be dangerous to our sanity—not just radioactive metals, either, like stumpium and sluggium, but any which don’t occur naturally in chemically reactive form. If I start using too many technical terms, warn me.”

“I understand you fine so far!”

“Oh, I wish there were laqs more like you in Slah, then! But we’re trapped by this fundamental paradox: no substance of organic origin can withstand the kind of energy we need to deploy if we’re to launch even the most basic vehicle into space. Correct, Wam?”

“I wish I didn’t have to agree, but I must,” the other scientist grumbled. “Though I won’t accept the view that we’ve been poisoned into insanity. If that’s the case, then our opponents can just as well argue that we too have lost our wits. Hmm?”

“Not so long as we benefit from the best available advice concerning our homes and our diet. But few people share our good fortune—Yes, Chybee?”

“I was thinking only a moment ago that if my parents had been as well off as you, then maybe…” She broke off in embarrassment, but she had given no offense. Ugant was nodding approval.

“One reason why I feel that trying to go the whole way at once is over-risky! We might harm the very people we’re most eager to protect from the consequences of their own folly … All right, Wam! I’m not trying to reopen the whole argument! I’m just asking Chybee whether she’s willing to act as a spy for us, pretend she’s still a dedicated follower of Aglabec and infiltrate the psychoplanetarist movement on our behalf. I won’t insist on an immediate answer. Before you return home, I want you to look over my experimental setup. We’ll take her along, and leave it to her to judge whether what we’re doing justifies our making such a demand.”

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