Clifford Simak - A Choice of Gods

"I was fortunate. I materialized in an open field— materialized is not the word, of course; there is no word for it. It's insane that a man can do a thing and still have no word for what he does. Do you happen to know, Jason, if anyone has actually figured out what actually happens when we go star-traveling?"

"No, I don't," said Jason. "I would think not. Martha might know better than I do. She keeps up a running conversation with the stars. She hears all the news."

"There have been those who've tried," said Martha. "They have gotten nowhere. That was earlier. I don't think anyone has bothered for a long, long time. They just accept it now. No one wonders anymore about how or why it works."

"Perhaps it's just as well," said John. "But, the situation being as it is, I could have muffed it. I could have arrived at a place that teemed with people and someone might have seen me appearing out of nothing or I, seeing humans in numbers for the first time in centuries, or somehow recognizing them as the people who had been taken, might have rushed into their arms, elated at having finally found them, although I was not looking for them. It was the last thing in my mind.

"But I arrived in an open field and at some distance I saw other humans, or what I thought were humans—farmers working with big powered agricultural implements. And when I saw the implements, I knew that if they should be humans, they'd not be humans of our kind, for we've had nothing to do with powered machines of any sort for millennia. The thought crossed my mind that if the creatures undeniably were humans, they might be the ones who were taken from the Earth and my knees went wobbly at the thought of it and I was filled with a great elation. Although I told myself that would be most unlikely and the only other alternative was that I'd found another race of humanoid creatures and that was unlikely, too, for in all the galaxy no one has ever found another human race. Or have they? I've been gone so long my information is much out of date."

"No one has," said Martha. "Many other creatures, but no humanoids."

"There was, too, the fact that they had machines. And I told myself that made the possibility even of less likelihood. For we've found new technological races and of those the technology so weird that in many cases it was impossible for us to grasp the principle or the purpose of it. To find another humanoid race with machine technology seemed to me absurd. The only answer could be that here were the People. Realizing this, I became somewhat cautious. We might be of the same blood, but there was five thousand years between us and I reminded myself that five thousand years might have made them as alien as anything we've found in space. And we've learned, if nothing else, that first contact with aliens must be managed adroitly.

"I will not try to tell you now all the things that happened. Later on, perhaps. But I rather think I managed very well. Although I guess, it was mostly luck. When I went up to the farmers I was mistaken for a wandering scholar from another of the three planets the human race inhabits—not quite right in the head and concerned with things no normal man would think worth consideration. Once I caught the drift of it, I went along with them. It covered up a lot of slips I made. My slips seemed no more than eccentricities to them, I think it may have been my clothing and my language that made them think I was a wanderer. Luckily, they spoke a sort of English, but changed considerably from the language that we speak. I would imagine that back on the old Earth of five thousand years ago our language, as we speak it now, would not be readily understood. Time and changing circumstance and sloppiness in speech brings about many changes in the spoken word. Under the guise of their mistake, I was able to get around enough to find out what was going on, to learn what sort of society had developed and some of their long-range planning."

"And," said Jason, "it turned out not so pretty."

John gave him a startled glance. "How would you know that?"

"You said they still had a machine technology. I think that might be the key. I would guess they continued, once they got themselves sorted out, in about the same way they were going before they were snatched off Earth. And if that is the case, the picture would not be a pretty one."

"You are right," said John. "It took them, apparently, not too long to get themselves, as you say, sorted out. Within a few years after finding themselves, in a twinkling, on another planet, or on other planets, rather, in an unguessed part of space, they got their bearings and became organized and went on pretty much the way they had left off. They had to start from scratch, of course, but they had the technological knowledge and they had brand-new planets with untouched raw materials and they were very quickly on their way. And what was more, they have the same life expectancy, the same long life that we have. A lot of them died in those first few years while they struggled to get themselves adjusted, but there still were a lot of them left, and among those were people with all the skills that were needed to develop a new technology. Can you imagine what might happen if a skilled, trained engineer or a well-grounded, imaginative scientist lived for many centuries? The society did not lose needed skills by death, as had been the case before. Geniuses did not die, but continued being geniuses. Engineers did not build and plan for a few years only and then die or retire, but kept on building and planning. A man with a theory was given as many centuries as he needed to develop it to its full potentiality and retained the youth that was needed to continue with it. There is a great drawback to this, of course. The presence of men of great age and vast experience and in positions of importance would tend to have an inhibiting influence upon younger men and would make for a conservatism that would be blind to new ideas and in the end would stall all progress if it had not been recognized and compensated for. The People had the sense to recognize it and to build some compensatory features into the social structure."

"Were you able to arrive at any idea of their time table? How swiftly did they get started again and

how they may have progressed?"

"Roughly. Nothing definite, of course. But say a hundred years to get themselves established as a viable society, perhaps three hundred to rebuild an approximation of the kind of technological setup they had here on Earth. And from there they built on the basis of what they had, with the advantage of being able to drop a lot of ancient millstones they carried around their necks. They build from scratch and to start with there was no need to struggle with the obsolescence they were burdened with on Earth. Well before a thousand years had passed the groups living on the three different planets—all within less than a light-year of one another—knew about the others and in a very little time spaceships had been developed and built and the human race was together once again. The physical contact and the commerce this made possible gave the technology a new shot in the arm, for during those thousand years or so they had been apart each had developed their technology a little differently, had gone probing in different directions. And also they had the resources of three planets rather than of one and that must have been a distinct advantage. What happened was the melding of three separate cultures into a sort of superculture that still had the advantage of having common roots."

'They never developed parapsychic powers? No sign of them at all?"

John shook his head. "They are as blind to them as they had been before. It's not only time that's needed to develop them, for now each of them, all of them, have as much time as we have. It must be that what is needed is a different outlook, a lifting of the pressures that a particular brand of technology imposes not only on a race, but on each human being."