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"He'd become green with envy," said Martin.
Odessa laughed.
"Jokes aside," said Martin. "Our greatest problem is not being to communicate with other societies. Of course one can draw a lot of conclusions from what one sees, but without a machine of this caliber, one doesn't stand much of a chance to start a meaningful dialog."
"You mean you people don't know everything?" Natalia remarked.
"All we know, is how to bypass the laws of matter," said Martin.
"Actually we're not particularly smart and inventive when it comes to intelligent things. Being able to bypass some material limitations doesn't help much in extending one's genius. We are bound to the same basic method for investigation that you are bound to."
"We haven't crossed any threshold in this area yet," Martin added.
"We have a few advantages, though," Odessa admitted. "We don't have to expend any effort on our physical maintenance, which has put us a few steps ahead of you. Except we don't have the technological equipment to make use of this advantage to the fullest. The problem is that the more advanced a person becomes, the greater is the need for sophisticated high tech machinery to support the work the advantage enables. That's why Bohr has actually stopped doing research some years ago, out of sheer frustration."
"Then Bohr would love to have access to what this ship has to offer," I said to Odessa.
"He would come alive again," she replied.
"Haven't you noticed how boring he can be?" Martin added. "You should have seen him in the olden days! Bohr isn't his real name. We were all students of Niels Bohr in Copenhagen, at the Institute of Theoretical Physics, and we were great fans of Heisenberg who worked in Leipzig and sometimes at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. One day we wanted to hear a special lecture that Heisenberg was giving in Leipzig. We had heard some great stuff through the rumor mill coming out of Berlin that something big was going to be presented in Leipzig. We simply had to get to Leipzig, but it also looked like that the war was about to start. One of us started to fantasize, that if we reversed everything we had ever learned about the nature of matter, we might be able to leap over its hurdles and be in Leipzig and back all in the same day. How we got to the Amazon instead, on that day, nobody knows. All that anyone remembered was that our ideas became crazier and crazier as we joked with each other. It took us a whole week to get back from the Amazon, and then another year to figure out the scientific background behind what had happened to us." Martin added that he got dispelled once for a week, for giving a paper on the theoretical possibility of reaching beyond the threshold of matter into another sphere of reality. "The official judgment was that such 'pranks' were dishonoring the institution. There were a lot of pranks perpetrated in those days," he said.
"That's when you left the planet?" I asked.
"Oh no!" he said. "We started small, going to England at first, then to Africa and South America." He said that a tiger attacked him once. The tiger seemed to come out of no-where. If it hadn't been for Odessa he would be dead. "Exploring planets seemed safer," he said and grinned. "Once we found a planet that suited us, we simply stayed. Olaf called it Bohr's planet, since Niels Bohr had laid the foundation for the breakthrough that got us there. Somehow the name Bohr became attached to Olaf from that day on. Besides, the two were quite alike in many ways."
"That is quite an interesting tale," I said, "and you know how to tell it well! But, how goes the real story?"
"Hey, that was the real story, with one exception maybe! Sometimes we wished we had taken the train to Leipzig that day. We feel there are many things yet to be learned that we have no access to. We've worked ourselves into an disadvantage out of which you might be able to help us, for your own good, of course."
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Stories about
War
from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche
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