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When the huge work was complete, including that of preparing the ship internally for gravity change, the time had come to implement the deceleration process. This meant that once again everyone was taking the elevator to level zero, to the great auditorium. At level zero, however, nobody walks anymore, everyone floats. We sort of floated out of the elevator, bumped into each other or against the ceiling. The trick was to come close to an empty seat and take hold of it. They could have issued us magnetic shoes, except this way, it was more fun.
Strapped into our seats, we spend the next half-hour watching a movie. After that the captain made a speech on the historic importance of the occasion. Half an hour into his speech I felt the retro-engines ignite and building up power for retarding the ship. That's when Bohr showed up. He suddenly appeared on the stage. He obviously had searched the galaxies, or at least the costume archives of Hollywood, for a suitable attire. He wore a glittering golden suit of the kind Alvis Presley might have once worn at the height of his concert career.
Bohr's timing was excellent. Only on rare occasions such as this, was the entire crew brought together into one place. He got everyone's attention without fail. Before the captain apparently realized what happened, Bohr was addressing the assembly. He addressed the people right in the middle of the captain's speech, informing them about the insanity of the intended landing.
"There isn't anything there to see, except a remnant of a civilization that has failed itself. Sure you have seen clean cities, all spaciously laid out and uncrowded. I say, what you saw were ghost towns that had been created by millions of deaths. You saw the end-result of a dying civilization. Can you expect to learn anything new from those who have failed themselves? The Earth is awash with examples of this sort. Just look at its present civilization. The economies are driven by greed, moving constantly towards greater and greater accumulations of wealth. The paradox is that the very people, on whose backs this wealth was gauged out of the living of humanity, admire the wealthy as though they are heroes. They admire them for their skills in stealing the lifeblood out of them. While people generally abhor violations of human rights, they tend to condone them in their own midst. Even slavery, over which wars have been fought to put an end to it, is far from gone. It is being celebrated. The problem is that people willingly enslave themselves to the most relentless masters if that is their only hope for survival. All this they call human nature. By listening to a mentality they mistakenly regard as their own inner voice, which they have not yet discovered, they condemn themselves. The people at Gamma .8 have gone the same route. The only difference is that they have succumbed to their illusions and stopped defending themselves. They have stopped to stand up for their rights. What you will see is a 'neutron star' of pure mental hell, a concentrated fascism that contains all the fundamental mistakes left unresolved over the centuries. And you want to learn from them?"
Bohr suggested that if we were lucky enough not to be killed we stood an excellent chance to be hypnotized by this mentality, and so suffer a tragic net loss while we wanted to gain insight.
Instead of landing on Gamma .8, Bohr suggested that he should take all of them, together with the ship, to a highly advanced civilization, a civilization that has not collapsed itself. He spoke of planet 'O,' known to us, as planet Odessa, which he said, was a worthy match for the best humanity had brought forth, which was embodied in this ship. He assured us that the intelligence behind the ship's technology represents a giant step by humanity beyond limits. He called it a fitting stepping stone towards a more worthy goal, meaning by that the exploring of the world of planet 'O' where people had moved beyond the threshold of those mental limits that now threaten to shut down humanity. He admitted that he himself was still in many ways caught in the web of these self-imposed mental snares in which humanity has entangled itself, but....
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Stories
about
Healing
from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche
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