“The problem is strictly one-sided. They proved that they know a great deal about us, by projecting pictures in a gas-cloud floating in space. The experts say they must have generated localized artificial gravity-fields to create their images, then excited them to radiate in appropriate colors. We aren’t within centuries of such techniques.”
Contra terrene . . . implying that anything they launched at Earth would boil its entire mass into energy-and what hope was there of intercepting the missiles of a species that must be more advanced by millennia than mankind? And they knew about “the world’s most perfect defensive sys-
tem.” Inasmuch as any clear information could be deduced from the images they projected in their gas-clouds-a series of still pictures, with incredibly fine detail-they were having second thoughts about opening formal relations with mankind. One could guess that they didn’t approve of a race that was capable of destroying its own members.
So now problems that had gone unsolved for generations had to be solved. There was no way of predicting when the aliens’ patience- might run out. When it did, they could-and maybe would-pitch the human race back to the caves. There had been one final picture that rankled in Sheklov’s memory; naturally, he had studied photographs of them all. And that one showed a dirty, misshapen. but recognizable man, wrapped in a raw animal-hide, waving a stone axe . . .
He who is the same to friend and foe, and also in honor and dishonor, the same in heat and cold, pleasure and pain, free from all attachment. ,
With overtones: “who doesn’t give a damn!” But that was an impossible ideal. Sheklov checked the thought, because Turpin was asking him another question.
“So you think someone here might be able to communicate with the aliens? But without explaining the real reason, I couldn’t get funds for research into the problem, and-”
“You misunderstand me,” Sheklov interrupted. “If the solution were technical, we’d have licked it by now. What we want is . . . I guess you’d say a new attitude of mind.”
Turpin shook his head, confused. “Well, we do have some pretty competent psychologists on the payroll!”
A picture arose in Sheklov’s memory: old Bratcheslavsky, cross-legged on a bare floor, fingers yellow to the second knuckle with cigarette-stains, saying, “Do this without preconceptions, Vassily. Ask the questions when you get there.” Behind him, through the window, the white towers of Alma-Ata turned to gray by winter overcast.
Sheklov said, “One thing I was told I should ask you as soon as I arrived. What’s a `reb’?”
“Reb?” Turpin echoed in an astonished tone. “Why why, a reb is a good-for-nothing, a dropout, a parasite. Someone who refuses to work and lives by scrounging. They come in two sexes: ‘johnny reb’ for a boy, ‘jenny reb’ for a girl. Why?”
“You mean they’re beggars?” Sheklov groped.
“I guess so. Most of them don’t even have the get-up and-go to turn thief. You see them all the time on the Cowville shore of New Lake; there’s some sort of colony over there. Just sitting! Just staring at the water and the clouds.”
“Meditating?” Sheklov suggested.
“They use the word for an excuse. I don’t believe it.”
He seemed to feel very strongly about rebs, Sheklov noted. He pondered a while, then murmured, “A kind of saddhu?”
“What?”
“Saddhu. An Indian holy man. Lives by begging.”
“Nothing holy about a reb!” Turpin rasped. And, suddenly conscious of the ferocity of his tone, added, “What in the world made you ask about rebs?”
“Curiosity, that’s all,” Sheklov lied. “Of course, back home we don’t have people like that.”
Turpin gave a satisfied nod. That, Sheklov deduced, must be one of the things that was still sustaining him after a quarter-century: the belief that what most offended him in the society of his adopted country was elsewhere unknown. The grass is always greener-as it were.
Whereas 1 . . .
Looking down as the superway crossed a tall viaduct, he spotted another of the isolated townships that it bypassed: this one brand-new, sparkling in the morning sun, alive with cars like multi-colored maggots as the breadwinners of the community left for work. It raced rearward, dwindled, was followed by another: lush, luxurious -but mass-produced, people and all.