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What amazed Martin, as he said later, was the fact that an automated probe could actually function flawlessly for seven years in the hostile environment of space, perform a complex mission along the way, and navigate itself back to a rendezvous with the ship at a closing speed of over twice the speed of light. Seeing its pictures of rocks, mountains, craters, cities, agricultural fields, all scanned onto the screen before us, totally amazed Martin when he joined us for the 'unveiling.'
The theater was crammed to the last square inch of floor space when the unveiling began. Within fifteen minutes, the computer had selected the data of Gamma .8 as the most promising, and given it high priority for transmission. We saw pictures of fields that looked like they had been carefully cultivated. When we saw the first traces of a city, everyone cheered and yelled. There was no peace for at least fifteen minutes.
By this time the screen changed and a television broadcast appeared. The voice had been electronically translated into English. Bohr was beside himself. The language of other civilizations had always been a problem for him. The broadcast was in color and showed erect entities not so much different than we were. Their hair was not as dense, their skin darker, and their eyes were similar to those of the Chinese.
The show that we saw appeared to be a detective story. There were people peering around corners and through windows, there was a chase scene by bicycle. We didn't see any cars. Was this from the present time, or a movie from the past? The question turned out to be one of the main questions that surfaced.
The outside scenes showed an elegant, modern city. We saw tall buildings lavishly constructed with generous use of plate glass and some kind of marble. Only the mode of transportation didn't fit. Everything that moved seemed to be out of step with the city's modern architecture. We saw buggies in the streets instead of cars, drawn by animals akin to oxen. The only modern piece of transportation that we saw was one lonely electric streetcar.
"Something is wrong," Martin agreed with Bohr. "You can't construct these giant glass castles with oxen drawn transportation."
"Maybe they ran out of oil?" I suggested.
"Nonsense," said Bohr. "They can only have run out of their soul. Oil isn't everything. Anyone can harvest nuclear fusion if enough effort is expended. But if you let go of your soul, you will find this effort too expensive, and you'll die. The most potent killer in the universe is a primitive lifestyle. I've seen it over and over."
"Yap!" Martin agreed.
"It's not going to be a picnicking, landing down there," said Werner Heisenberg. "Look at their faces, they don't look happy, they don't even look alive."
"The light is gone out in them," said Martin.
"You're wasting your effort going down there, trying to learn something," said Bohr to me in his usual straightforward manner, with the captain sitting two rows in front of us.
The captain turned around to us, "that is all nonsense! Open your eyes! I see a rich society there. I see no beggars. I see no one in sloppy clothes, or starved or destitute sleeping on street corners. The city looks clean, not overcrowded, there is peace and order. And the lack of cars; that's wonderful! I'd prefer animal carts a thousand times over the gasoline driven, air poisoning traffic we used to have."
The captain turned back again, not waiting for an answer. Bohr didn't give him one either.
"A society is like a star," Bohr whispered to me. "If they haven't accumulated enough gravity within themselves, mentally, they'll reach a threshold where the structure falls apart on which most people's livelihood depends. On Earth we called this the Empire Period, a four thousand year period of poverty and war. Without technologies and vast industries, entire cultures tend to vanish. So tell me, what do you expect to learn from them when you have refused for millennia to learn the lesson of their fate from your own history? Mankind could have stood on the moon in 200 AD if it hadn't been for the weight of empires dragging it down. That is what you will face at Gamma Point Eight. The young ther won't remember how things once were, or they may regard it as not important to them. Poverty has become a religion to them all, like with your captain who rather sees clean streets than people in them, or orderly stagnation on his ship, instead of your excitement with living and with freedom and caring."
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Stories about
Sex
from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche
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