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"And the old people won't tell you anything either," added Odessa. "They likely never knew what hit them."
"You should look for a society that had enough inner strength to survive and prosper," Bohr came back. "You should look for a society that had enough strength in itself to get past the threshold of the empire period, the small-minded period that is rich in poverty syndromes. That is what I see you are clinging to right now inside this ship. I know several societies of the caliber that you should be looking for, from which you could learn a great deal. There is one in particular that I have named planet Odessa, or planet 'O' for short. Even I could learn a lot from those people if I were to be able to decode their language."
"Ah, I see, you have a plan for this ship," said Natalia.
"Well, shouldn't it be used the best way possible when an entire civilization is at stake?" Bohr came back, whispering, unabashed.
"We can have the ship in orbit above planet 'O' within seconds," said Martin. "We could...."
"Do you really believe these people will let you have their ship," Odessa interrupted, "especially when they're so close to the goal that they waited five years for, which, at the moment, looks quite wonderful in their eyes?"
Nobody answered Odessa for a very long time. Monotonously the broadcast continued. Most of the people around us, however, seemed to be exited. The detective-show was followed by a sort of news cast that showed the city again. The picture was the same. It also showed some scenes of the countryside, a tumult of manual labor harvesting a grain crop.
"We could call for a vote on the ship," I suggested to Bohr. He didn't answer.
One thing I figured out about Bohr, when apparently he felt that I had asked a stupid question to which I should know the answer myself, he never bothered to respond. At first I was annoyed, now I respected that. I didn't really want to be taught. However, I also found that I could rely on him, questioning me, should I come up with a wrong conclusion.
"I guess you can't impose a democratic decision on something that pertains to the very depth of one's existence," I came back.
Bohr still didn't answer, which meant that I was either completely right or would soon realize my error.
"We must let the little children have their wish," said Bohr after a long, long silence, as though he had to re-think his plan.
"Going to Alpha Centauri will still take another nine months," I commented, "while humanity back home is at the threshold of nuclear war, economic chaos, and a rapidly spreading disease that may over-power the human race."
As neither Bohr nor Martin answered, it dawned on me that the concept of time had no validity with them as they had amply demonstrated. So I dropped the subject, puzzled by what would be happening now. One thing that I realized by then, was that time was always of utmost importance to whom it had significance, whom it had captured as slaves or had blinded with its limits so that they could not see the substance of the world that is found apart from it.
Bohr and Werner went home after their disappointing encounter with the captain. They called him an explorer that traveled the universe with his eyes and his mind closed. Martin and Odessa remained for a while to "keep an eye on things," as they said.
Bohr might have wished that he had stayed, too. Hardly eight hours had passed when a complete language training package had been produced, with written text, video, and computer generated sound pattern as a pronunciation aid. A half a day earlier no one on ship, except us, knew that these people existed. Now, with the aid of computer assisted translation, we would have been able to converse with them in their own language. At the projected time of our landing on the planet the entire ship's business would be conducted in Gamma .8 language, as a final training effort. I suggested to Martin that the efficiency of our electronic information processing technology would impress even someone like Bohr.
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