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"My dearest friend Ziyanho, you are the attraction!" Olaf grinned, and climbed straight away into the steaming mud hole where he embraced Ziyanho.
He motioned us to follow and introduced us as we climbed into the mud.
"Our lady here is from Earth," he said to him. "She likes to hear about your great experiment..."
"The Quian affair?" his face became lifeless.
"You don't want to hear about what we did to Quian planet and Gribbork," he said to Wendy, as she was last to enter the mud bath.
"No Mr. Ziyanho," I replied, "my wife and I would love to hear whatever you have to tell us."
"Wife?" He replied.
I was rather shocked at myself when I realized that I had replied in Wendy's stead, as though she couldn't speak for herself. This had never been my way. I immediately apologized, but before I could say too much, Olaf came to the rescue. "Wendy and James must hear your story," he repeated. "They feel they must help the people on Earth save the planet from a potential nuclear war. They've been struggling with this thing for more than half a century. It's become worse instead of better, much worse, as you may know. They fear for their children that still live there."
"My friends, you may call me Zy," Ziyanho said as if this would take the seriousness away of a subject he didn't want to deal with anymore. He turned to Wendy, shaking his head, "Believe me, you don't want to hear that story." He said nothing more after that, but let himself slide deeper into the mud.
"These two have been pressuring us to intervene at the Earth and save humanity from itself," Olaf replied to Zy's silence. He spoke in a serious manner.
Zy shook his head, looking at Olaf. "It's always the same, isn't it?" he said to Olaf. Then he turned to Wendy and myself. "It was like that with us too," he said. "I wish to God that somebody had stood up against us back then, and made us stop and think."
"The Earth is in a much more terrible mess today," I said to him, "then it had ever been. Somebody must help. If you have any experience in this sort of thing, you've got to tell us. Something needs to be done!"
Olaf looked at Zy and shook his head, still without the slightest sign of any smile or a grin. "Yes, we had experience," he sighed. "It's another type G situation, a bit more advanced than the one we had at Quian, or on Gribbork."
"Please sir!" said Wendy; "our children are still there. They have chosen to remain on Earth, aiming to sort things out. What is a mother to do in such a case, but to help them," added Wendy.
"What do you mean by, our, children?" replied Zy. He emphasized the word 'our.'
I stood perplexed in the hot mud and couldn't say a thing, ashamed to the core of my being for what she had said. I new that I would have spoken the same words myself, in the same way as she had.
"If you feel responsible for them then you had better get 'your' children out of there," said Zy, "that's the only responsible thing you can do if you feel you must control them."
"We would bring them out, except they refuse to leave," I said to him. I explained to him again that they wanted to stay and help save their civilization.
"The children have noble motives, no doubt!" he said to Wendy, "and so have you, but are you not wrong?" Zy sat up now. Great gobs of mud were dripping from his shoulders. "Noble motives won't change anything if the children don't have the scientific foundation to confront the root of the problem with which they can change the political platform for creating the necessary policies. Hitler, too, had noble motives, and so had we when a fellow scientist from Quian asked us to help his civilization to survive. The rest, you may guess." Zy said that he had told us already much more than we wanted to hear.
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Stories
about
Healing
from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche
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