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"Can't these people see us?" I asked Heisenberg as we searched through the ship for a central weapons cache. "Are we invisible to them?"
"Of course not!" he laughed. "You can see me, can't you? But that's because of the Bohr Miller effect. A primitive person can align its perception only to a single subset of reality at one time. They can't be on both sides of the threshold and multiplex themselves into many different, sometimes opposite spheres of experience. For them, this can't be done, at least not by any process that I am aware of they have within their grasp. Still, they can see us. They just can't recognize what they see. We might be just an imaginary shadow to them, or a thought, or a dream, something for which they have no reference in their 'real' world."
"So, they can't see us, can they?" I asked again.
Heisenberg just nodded and let it be with that.
Since we couldn't find a central weapons cache that we might sabotage, we kept looking around for a way to disable the ship itself. That too, seemed futile. Every engine was a completely self-contained unit with its own individual power and control cable going to the bridge, and even those cabled were doubled up for every engine. There was simply nothing we could do to stop those ships. The only remaining option that we had, was to disable the crew, to take the crew away from the ship as a diversion, to some nice, comfortable place that will get them to take their minds off their planned deeds.
"These guys need a holiday, anyway," I joked. Those words a kind of slipped from my lips as we entered the common room that apparently doubled as a mess hall. "A week in Hawaii would do wonders for them," I said jokingly. Everyone that we saw looked glum. They slouched in plastic seats at metal tables. Some were playing a game akin to checkers. Others just sat around and stared. One person was asleep. He slept in the same room, stretched out on the floor, making loud snuffing noises.
The people that we saw were without exception bald headed, with ears like ours, only smaller.
"Hawaii!" Heisenberg repeated. His face lit up. "I know just such a place for them, where they would be delighted to be."
I followed Heisenberg to the bridge.
We were hardly on the bridge for a minute when a great commotion broke out. A planet appeared in the distance, it grew larger rapidly. It was right in front of us.
Heisenberg grinned.
"A vacation?" I asked.
Heisenberg nodded and kept on grinning. "Watch this!" he said.
The person, who appeared to be the captain, turned into a fountain of short bursts of commands, bellowed into a microphone that was mounted over his chair. He sounded like a sports announcer during a last minute effort by an opposing team to swing a game to victory from a standoff. The old flying battle tank was racing towards the planet. A siren sounded. All personnel on the bridge scrambled to their seats. The call to battle stations was relayed throughout the ship. One could hear the shrill over the monotone wail that erupted the engines ere being ignited. With the most fearsome creaking noise coming from all joints of its hull the ship veered off barely above the blue haze of the planet's atmosphere.
"Look!" shouted Heisenberg, pointing to the right.
A small fighter craft had appeared from under the horizon.
"That isn't small...." I commented.
Whoosh it passed over us.
Again our hull creaked as the ship turned up sharp, and at the same time veered ninety degrees to the left. The fighter craft came into sight again. It turned skyward. We were chasing it upside down, turning skyward all in the same maneuver. The fighter changed course immediately, executing a tight loop away from us, than back towards us as though he intended a midair collision. We went into a roll to avoid him. He just missed us by a hair.
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