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Olaf turned to Zy, "What shall we do with such shallow minded people? Shall we tell them about our experiences? Can they benefit from them?"
Zy nodded. "We have no choice Olaf. Remember it was you who entered the Gribbork affair and what preceded it into their ship's logbook. It's public record now. You can't keep it a secret any longer.
"I suppose you are right," Olaf replied. "If they are sensitive enough to what we are saying, they may gleam something of the fundamental principles that we believe to understand, finally. And if not..."
Here I interrupted Olaf with a protest. "You are not being fair," I protested and almost raised my voice, but lowered it instead. "You know that we have moved miles ahead. Look at my association with Natalia, then Jill, then Cira. Do you have any idea what stands behind that in terms of breaking with tradition and looking at one-another honestly as human beings? You speak of agonies. There were great agonies involved in facing the dimensions of universal principles with fears in the back of the mind that irreparable harm might be done towards one-another. This happened time and time again. Do you think that any of that would have been possible without tremendously daring, agonizing, and deeply honest steps, very deep-searching steps along the way? And then just look at Wendy. I can't even begin to imagine by what miraculous moves in consciousness she has been able to move with us to the leading edge of where we are now, but she did it. All of this is unprecedented, Olaf. Tell me where you've seen the likes of it before? It has to count for something. We are certainly not like the little children anymore that you feel you have to protect from facing the still deeper challenges."
"All right then," Zy interrupted me. He turned to Olaf and nodded, then turned to me, "I just want you to be aware of the price you may have to pay. There is always a steep price involved with screwing up. It appears you are aware of that."
"Actually it started quite innocently," said Olaf. "One day, one of the most advanced scientists from the planet Quian arrived on Monar Aquilae where Zy and I had come from different parts of the universe for a science fair. Somehow the chap found out how we got there." Olaf explained that this wasn't difficult since he and Zy had made a great ado about it. He said they had both been boasting how they had become 'masters of the universe.' "That's when one of their top scientists implored Zy to help his people," said Olaf. Olaf turned to Zy. "I think we were in a bar, when it all began."
Zy nodded. He lifted himself out of the mud again. "Well, what did you expect of a bunch of greenhorns who had the universe in their pocket? We told him it would be a piece of cake. We jumped to the chance of putting our new mental technology to work. We felt as though we could do anything. We told the chap that we knew exactly how to handle a budding nuclear civilization, how to prevent the confrontation, how to put the people on the right track. We simply called all the great minds together that we knew and formed a think tank. We did this right here. We built the conference center for that."
Zy told us how he personally assembled two dozen men at his own place in the mountains. Initially it was for strategy sessions, a vigorous brain storming. Then came the task force assignments.
"God those were exciting days," Zy interspersed from time to time while he spoke about these sessions. Zy had suddenly lost all his seriousness, Olaf, too. They grinned like a couple of twelve-year-olds telling each other of their naughty tricks.
"It was fun only at first," said Olaf, correcting Zy when he mentioned again that those were exciting days.
"If I had only listened to you," Zy replied. He turned to Wendy and me. "Olaf told us right from the beginning that our project would never work. But who took Olaf seriously? You should have seen Olaf in those days, he was so frail, so little, so round in the face like a baby, and so funny at times. No one took him seriously. We didn't even take ourselves seriously. We thought we were the wisest of the wise! We didn't need any counsel. Not us! No!"
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