Dickson, Gordon - The Alien Way

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THE ALIEN WAY
Copyright © 1965 by Gordon R. Dickson
e-book ver. 1.0
CHAPTER ONE
. .. Turning in his sleep, Jason Barchar rolled over so that the weight
of his head was upon the right side of his skull, under which the
receiver had been implanted. The area was still tender, even two months
after the operation, so that he rolled a little further, until he was
almost on his stomach, and went back to dreaming about the bears.
He was dreaming that he was again out on the hillside in the Canadian
Rockies, where he had actually been six years before. He was lying very
still in the spring sunlight, with the wide-angle binoculars at his
eyes, looking down into a small natural meadow with only a few birch and
spruce scattered through it. The stiff, broken stalks of winter-killed
grass among the new growth pricked his wrists where his leather jacket
had pulled back to expose the skin, and his elbows were sore from
contact with the rock under the damp surface skin of earth, but he paid
no attention. Below there were about two- dozen of the bears, and the
spring fury of mating and battles was on them. The brown and black cubs
were mostly already up in the trees, and the females were hanging back.
But just below him, in the weedy lists of a little open arena, two males
stalked each other, up on hind legs, necks arched snakelike and heads
thrust forward in rage.
They were lost in their rages. They did not see him up on the hillside,
or the females hanging back, or the cubs in the trees, and they did not
care. There was nothing left for either of them but the other bear
facing him. They were almost formal and completely honest, in their
advancings and their shuffling retreats. Jase's heart beat with theirs.
It was what had made him a naturalist-which like all important work was
a way of thinking, not just the application of a lot of book knowledge
as people thought-and thinking that did not understand things like this
spring fighting of the bears.
They thought the urge to fight, the fighting and the winning or losing,
was a simple matter of automatic instinct and easy reflex. But it was
not so. There was custom to it, and a complex of experience operating on
the part of each combatant. There was desire, and decision, and courage
required from each bear. There was hope and fear, and the need to tell a
bluff from a true threat. There were many factors entering into each
situation in the meadow, each combat-and no two combats were ever alike.
So Jase dreamed that he watched and learned from the bears. While the
hum of the insects in his dream blended with the hum of the
air-conditioner in his bedroom window, and in the window of his living
room beyond. The whole dark, brickwalled apartment in the stifling,
rainy June night was a cool cave of isolation set off from the
unsleeping, night-time streets of Washington, D.C., outside, where the
cabs rolled all night long over the glistening asphalt, past the traffic
signals and the neon signs of restaurants.
In the sleeping apartment, nothing moved. The air-conditioners hummed.
The bedroom was shadowy. The distant light of a street lamp glowed
faintly through the drawn blinds and touched the opposite wall beyond
the bed with two ghostly faint rectangles of light. They seemed on the
verge of merging, so uncertain they were, and pale.
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Jase's clothes lay lumped on the chair by the bed. The carpet beneath
the chair was a plane of darkness, reaching toward the open doorway and
through it into the larger space of the living room. There the walls
were lit by three more ghosts of windows. The light showed bookshelves
and a glass case crammed full of the study skins of small animal
specimens, carefully sewn, preserved with borax, and tagged. The number
of them piled in the case made them look like a horde of prisoners. Pent
by the invisible glass walls as the bears were pent by invisible
instinct and desire. On the bookshelves, filling the walls of the room
from floor to ceiling, the faint light through the blinds barely showed
some of the titles: P. Chapin, Preparation of Bird Skins for Study; H.
Hediger, Wildgere in Gefangenschaft; K. P. Schmidt, Corollary and
Commentary for Climate and Evolution, magazine pages extracted and
bound; W. K. Gregory, Evolution Emerging ....
On the desk full of papers the still-uncashed last paycheck made out to
Jason S. Barchar by the newly formed Wildlife Studies Section of the
U.S. Department of the Interior lay shadowy and still. It was a
half-paycheck, since Jase had been on sabbatical leave the last two
months. Under the check was a birthday card two weeks old on which was
scribbled, "With no apologies whatever to A. A. Milne-Hippy Pappy
Bithunday, love, Mele."
Isolated, dark, the apartment slumbered-all but the receiver, the ,tiny
microdevice implanted under Jase's skull, with its hair-thin wire
reaching into certain areas of his brain. Unsleeping, unisolated, the
receiver reached outward through a tight, invisible channel of collapsed
space to a cold, dark fragment of earth, manufacture, so far distant
that it was just being touched just now by the same sunlight that had
shone on those condemned in the Salem Witch Trials in 1692.
Close now, approaching-though he did not know it-that fragment in a
vessel no larger than a thirty-five-foot motor launch on earth, came
another dreamer. A dreamer who had never breathed spring mountain air,
or the damp air of a Washington night, or any earthly air. Neither
stuffed and preserved study specimen nor human book nor neon restaurant
card could have spoken to him intelligibly. No birthday card would have
made sense to him, no signed check supported him, no brown bears' battle
stirred him inwardly.
Still-he dreamed also. He sat with his hands on a sloping table covered
with studs and switches. His hands, like his body, were covered with
black fur. But his flesh was warm. A vital fluid, driven by a heart-like
pumping organ, flowed through veins in his body, refreshed by oxygen
from an atmosphere that Jase also could have breathed.
His mind moved on its own desires. He felt heat, and cold, desires, and
fear, and the necessity of making decisions. There was courage in him,
and hope.
And now, approaching the fragment he did not know was there, as Jase
slumbered back in the humming stillness of his Washington apartment, the
other dreamer dreamed. A dream of a white palace with many levels below
ground but only three above in the light of a star he had not yet found.
And on the topmost level, the mothers of his sons, and his sons-straight
and strong and honorable and dreaming as he did then.
But it was a waking dream he dreamed. And it was the dream of Founding a
Kingdom.
CHAPTER TWO
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Therefore it happened that before the sleeper woke, Kator Secondcousin,
cruising in the neighborhood of a Cepheid variable down on his charts as
47391L, but which the sleeper would have called Ursae Minoris or
Polaris, the Pole Star, suddenly found himself smiled upon by the Random
Factor that all seek.
Immediately, for although he was merely a Second-cousin, it was of the
family of Brutogas, he grasped the opportunity that offered itself and
locked the controls. Before him shone his chance of Founding his
Kingdom. Therefore he planned carefully and swiftly. He fastened a
tractor beam on the drifting artifact presented by the Random Factor. It
was a beautiful artifact, even in its fragmentary condition, fully five
times as large as the two-man scout in which he and Aton Maternaluncle,
of the family Ochadi, had been making a routine sampling sweep of debris
from the galactic drift.
Kator locked it exactly in the center of his viewing screen and leaned
back in his pilot's chair. A polished bulkhead on the left of the screen
threw back his own image, and he twisted the stiff, catlike whiskers of
his round face thoughtfully and with satisfaction as he reviewed the
situation with all sensible speed.
The situation could hardly have been more convenient. Aton Maternaluncle
was not even a connection by marriage with the family Brutogas. It was
true that he, like the Brutogasi, was of the Hook persuasion,
politically, rather than Rod. But on the other side of the summing up,
the odds against the appearance of such a Random Factor as this to two
individuals on scientific survey were astronomical.
It cancelled out Ordinary Duties and Conventions automatically. Aton
Maternaluncle-had he been merely an observer outside the situation
rather than the other half of the scout crew-would certainly have
approved of Kator's attempt to integrate the Random Factor positively
with Kator's own life pattern. "Besides," thought Kator, watching his
own reflection in the bulkhead and stroking his whiskers, "I am young,
and my best years of life are before me."
He got up from the pilot's chair, loosened a connection in the body of
the internal ship's recorder, and extended the three-inch claws on his
stubby fingers. He went back to the sleeping quarters behind the pilot
room. On a larger ship the door to it would never have been unlocked.
But on a small ship like this the scouts must endure their work without
benefit of a Keysman. Aton was sleeping on the lower bunk, his back
turned.
Skillfully, Kator drove his claws into the spinal cord at the base of
Aton's round, black-furred skull. Aton sighed and lay silent. He had
felt nothing, Kator was certain. The stroke had been swift and sure.
Kator pulled the heavy body from the bunk, carried it tenderly to the
airlock, and released it into the wastes of outer space. He returned to
the recorder, tightened the loose connection, and recorded the fact that
Aton had attacked him without warning in a fit of insanity, knocking the
recorder out of commission in his attack. Finding Kator alert and
resisting, the insane Aton had then leaped into the airlock and
committed suicide by discharging himself into the airlessness of the
void.
It was true, thought Kator, gratefully, reflecting on his ancestry as he
finished recording the account While others think, I act! had been the
motto of the original Brutogas. Kator stroked his whiskers in
thankfulness to his forefathers.
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He suited up in his spaceclothes. A little over hall an hour later in
the time-equivalents of Kator's people, who called themselves the Rural,
Kator had a close-line magnetically fastened to the explosion-ruined
hull of the artifact and was hand-over-hand hauling his spacesuited body
along the line toward the hull. He reached it without difficulty and set
about exploring his find by the headlight of his spacesuit.
It had evidently belonged to a people very much like Kator's own kind.
The doors were the right size, the sitting devices Kator could have sat
in comfortably. Unfortunately, most of the original material of this
obviously space-going vessel had been blasted away by an explosion of
the collapse field that had destroyed it. This was important, highly
important, for the type of faster-than-light drive system used by
Kator's people also utilized a collapsed universe theory, and contained
a field such as this one, which in exploding had left rainbow-colored
streakings on the ruined walls of the artifact.
Of course, nearly everything not bolted down aboard the artifact had
been expelled outward and lost into space as a result of the explosion.
. . . No, discovered Kator-not everything. He discovered a sort of hand
carrying case with a semicircular handle wedged between the legs of one
of the sitting devices. Kator unwedged it and took it back to the scout
with him.
After making the routine safety tests on it, Kator got it open. The find
within was magnificent. Several items of what appeared to be something
like cloth-shaped like a one-piece, continuously solid, thin,
all-covering body harness set-if you could imagine such a thing. There
was no provision on it for fastening either honors or weapons.
Nevertheless, there were honors present, in various shapes and sizes of
metal in the box, mostly ring-shaped and of a size to fit perhaps
fingers or arms. And what was evidently a writing utensil of soft red
wax with a sharpened point and a screw device to project it from its
case.
Enclosed in a clear wrapping material of plastic properties and
artificial construction were two oddly shaped containers, which perhaps
were foot protectors. Soil still adhered to the bottom of them, and
Kator's breath paused in his lungs as he discovered it. He detached the
earth, carried it to a microscope to examine it minutely.
The Random Factor had not failed. Amid the crumbling soil he discovered
and separated out the tiny dried form, the body of a dead organic
creature. -
A dirtworm it was, almost indistinguishable from the primitive form of
the dirtworms at home.
Kator lifted it carefully from the dirt with a specimen clamp and sealed
it into a small cube of transparent preservative material. This, he told
himself, slipping it into his harness pouch, was his. There was plenty
of material in the rest of the artifact for the examiners to work on
back home, to discover the location of the race that had built the
artifact. This small form, the earnest of his future Kingdom, he would
keep close by him. And if the Random Factor continued to associate with
the situation, there could be a use for it ...
Kator logged his position and the direction of drift the artifact had
been taking when he had first sighted it. He headed himself and the
artifact in tow toward Homeworld, and lay down himself on Aton's bunk
for a well-earned rest.
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As he drifted off to sleep, he began remembering some of the sweeps he
and Aton had made together in the scout ship before this, and regret was
like a hollow pain within him until the shades of slumber came to soften
it.
They had never been related, it was true, even by the marriage of the
most distant connections., But Kator had grown to have a deep friendship
for the older Ruml, and Kator was not the sort who made acquaintances
easily.
Only, he thought, drowning sorrowfully in the well of sleep, when a
Kingdom beckons, what can you do?
CHAPTER THREE
The sleeper woke and found himself weeping. For a moment he lay without
moving, face buried in the pillow he clutched under the maple headboard
of the bed in the shadowy room. He could think only of the fact that
Aton was dead, that he had killed him.
Then, gradually, the undeviating, comforting hum of the air-conditioner
began to intrude upon the memory of Aton. The softness of the strange
thing that was a pillow next to his face, the yielding, flat surface
that was the bed beneath his horizontal body, began to make themselves
known as things he recognized as belonging to a place where there was no
empty space, no artifact, and no Founding of Kingdoms. Remembrance of
another life woke in the back of the, sleeper's brain and flooded once
more through his consciousness. Wiping his face on the thin white sheet
that covered him, the sleeper sat up in bed.
He was in his own bedroom. On the nightstand beside him the yellow,
luminous figures and hands of his alarm clock glowed in a circle of
obscurity that was the clock's face. It was one-twenty-three in the
morning. He reached out, fumbling for the black shape of the phone on
the bedstand, behind the clock. His sleep-clumsy fingers knocked the
receiver from its cradle before they closed on it. But he got it to his
ear, pulled the cradle forward into the dim light from the windows, and
dialed Mele's number. It rang, and rang again ...
"Hello--" It was her voice, sleep-fogged, suddenly answering.
"Mele ..." he said, and his voice seemed to have trouble getting out of
his throat. "It's me. Jason. I'm through. I connected just now, while I
was sleeping."
"Jase-" She seemed to be waking up to the information at the other end,
fumbling for a moment. Her voice came suddenly, stronger. "Jase? Are you
all right, Jase?"
"Yes." He wiped his face with a shaking hand clumsily and breathed
deeply. It was ridiculous to feel like this, under the circumstances.
But he did.
"Your voice sounds strange. Jase, are you sure you're all right?"
"Yes," he said. "It's just something that happened at the other end.
That's all."
"What?"
"I'll tell you later." He was getting control of himself now. Even to
his own ears his voice sounded more in control, stronger and more
sensible. Businesslike. "I'll get dressed right away and come down to
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the Foundation. You'll phone the Board?"
"Right away .... You sound better now."
"I feel better," he said. "I'll get dressed and packed now. Ill be
leaving in about fifteen or twenty minutes. I'll take a cab. Want me to
pick you up on the way?"
"Do that." Her voice came back. It was a bright, warm voice now that it
was waking up, and he loved it very much. 'I'll call the Board people
now and phone you back as soon as I have. 'Bye, sweetheart."
"Good-bye ... sweetheart," he answered and heard the phone click down at
her end of the line. He hung up himself and got out of bed. Standing in
the lower half of his pyjamas in the dark room, feeling the furriness of
the rug underfoot and the wind of the air-conditioner chilling his
perspiration-damp chest, he came all the way awake.
He palmed the switch on his bedside table that turned on the lights of
the room. The sudden, yellow brightness of them made the disordered bed,
the familiar walls seem to jump out at him harsh and unnatural. He shook
his head to get rid of the last of the feeling of being in the mind of
Kator Second-cousin-but did not succeed. Taking fresh shorts and T-shirt
from the dresser drawer, he walked through the door to the bathroom,
opposite the door to the sitting room, which still lay dark.
He showered, and the hot water revived him. He began-and he was awake
enough now to smile at the thought-to feel human again. He left the
shower, lathered, and began shaving automatically. He was beginning to
forget he was anything but a normal, earthbound zoologist in his
twenties.
But as he rinsed off the lather, the shock returned. And with it the
fear he had been pretending was not there. He lifted his face dripping
from the water in the bowl and confronted it suddenly in the dark depths
of the mirror with the fluorescent bulbs on either side of the mirror
harshly lighting it. --And for a second he did not know it.
It was not merely strange to him. It was alien as the face of some
unknown animal.
It was a lean face, he saw, and dark. It was narrow-boned and long. The
bones were slight for a body his height, and the skin was brown from the
constantly being outdoors that was part of. his work as a zoologist and
naturalist. His black hair, disordered now, curled down on a high
forehead from which it was already beginning to retreat slightly. Below
that forehead his eyebrows were black as jet and straight across as the
bar of a gate.
Below these again, his eye sockets were deep, so that his brown eyes
were shadowed normally. Women-not Mele-had told him on occasion that he
had beautiful eyes. The term had always jarred on him. It sounded as if
they were saying that his eyes gave him a look of softness. Now, in the
pitiless light of the fluorescents, there was nothing beautiful about
the eyes he saw. Their color was hard-like brown, weathered granite-but
he remembered the literal jet blackness of eyes reflected from a
polished metal bulkhead.
He turned sharply away from his image, walked swiftly back into the
bedroom, and began dressing. When he was dressed, he pulled the gaudy
plaid shape of a pullman bag from under his bed and began packing. As he
did, the phone rang.
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He picked it up before its first ring was finished. "Hello."
"Jase?" asked Mele's voice.
"Yes," he said. "I'm dressed and just getting packed now. I'll get a cab
and be at your place in twenty minutes anyway. . . . Wait upstairs,
though. If there's any delay, I want to be able to get you on the
phone."
"You can call me if I'm in the lobby. The night clerk's always at the
desk there. Just ask him to call me to his phone."
"Oh, yes." He rubbed the fingertips of his right hand across his
forehead. "Of course. I wasn't thinking. You called the Board?"
"Yes. They'll all be there but Wanek. He's on the west coast. --Jase?"
she said. "How do you feel now?"
"Fine," he said. He made himself smile into the phone. "Just fine."
"All right. I'll be waiting for you."
"All right. Good-bye."
"'Bye."
She hung up. He called a cab, was told one would be at the front of his
apartment house in five minutes, and finished packing his bag.
When he got downstairs and stepped out through the front door of his
apartment, die cab-a yellow skimmer-was already waiting at the foot of
old-fashioned granite steps. The air was still muggy with dampness and
heat, but the street and sidewalks were drying back to their normal
dullness. He maneuvered the pullman bag into the rear seat with him.
"Four-twelve North Frontage Road," he said.
"Right," said the driver. The cab whined more loudly and pulled away
from the curb. They whined down the night-time street. From the back
seat Jase could see hair in need of a haircut curling out from under the
cap the driver wore, and he felt a moment's distaste, as at the sight of
some uncared-for and messy animal. He looked away, out the open window
of the cab and watched the lights of Washington sliding by, instead.
When they stopped at last before the wide, twin glass doors through
which he could see the lobby of the resident hotel where Mele lived, he
could see her standing inside. She was wearing a light blue summer dress
that fitted closely on her tall, slim figure with its brown, hair. She
had white gloves on her hands, and her gloved fingers held a slim purse
of a lighter blue than the dress. She did not wait for him to get out of
the cab and come in to get her but came directly out at the sight of the
cab.
He opened the door for her, looking up at her. And she stepped down and
in to settle on the seat beside him. A faint scent of cologne-which he
did not find distasteful but strange-entered the cab with her. She sat
straight, her back barely touching the seat, and her eyes looked
comfortingly into his.
"Twelfth and Independence Avenue," he told the driver, without turning
to look at him. Mele kissed him. Her lips felt cool and strange, as the
smell of cologne had seemed strange to him.
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The cab pulled away from the curb once more. She moved over to sit close
to him, slipped an arm through his, and held his right hand with the
hand of the arm she had slipped through his. They sat close together
without talking. He felt strangely like a man who has been ill for a
long time and is now recovered, but who continues to feel the habits of
his sickness clinging to him. The memory of being Kator
Secondcousin-from the moment when Kator picked up the earthworm body
that infected him with the virus-sized mechanisms making contact between
him and Jase possible-stayed wrapped around Jase like a sheet. Like a
sheet of plastic, transparent, but through which all the world with
which he was familiar seemed blurred and distorted.
Mele was not only his observer in this experiment; she was the woman he
intended to many. She loved him. But now, feeling her beside him,
touching, close as she was, she was made somehow removed and strange.
And there was nothing he could do about it. From here the experiment
plunged into an unknown area. And there was no going back.
CHAPTER FOUR
They stopped before the wide steps and heavy bronze doors of the
granite-fronted building that was the headquarters of the Foundation for
the Association of Learned and Professional Societies. Jase paid off the
cab, took his bag, and with Mele mounted the steps and rang the bell.
The night janitor, Walt, let them in.
"They're all here already," Walt told them. 'They're in the Library,
waiting for you."
Jase and Mele went down the wide, green-carpeted hall, past the foot of
the curving stairs with their wide polished balustrade of dark and on
down a narrowed hallway to the point where" it turned to the right. They
turned and passed the first closed door to their left and entered the
second. They stepped into a lighted room, walled in by bookshelves
reaching to the ceiling and equipped with tracked ladders, one on each
side of the room.
In straight chairs that looked out of place near the over-stuffed
furniture elsewhere around the room, the eight members of the Board sat
about a polished table at the far end of the room. Beyond them the tall
green drapes had been drawn across the high windows looking out on the
walled garden of the Foundation.
Jase and Mele went forward and took seats at the table.
"Here you are," said Thomybright.
Jase looked around at them. He was coming out of it, he thought. Here,
in this familiar room where the whole thing had been planned and decided
on, the business with Kator was taking on proper perspective. The eight
men he looked at-none younger than their mid-thirties, and at least one,
Wilder, as old as the mid-sixties-had all the look of men who have
climbed hastily out of bed in the middle of the night. Their hair stuck
out over the ears. Most of them needed a shave, and not all had their
ties straight or shirt buttons buttoned.
They were all good men, top men in the sciences. Jase knew them all.
James Mohn had taught him biology at Wisconsin as a sophomore-for a
moment the sharply pitched streets and wooded campus at Madison rose in
Jase's mind's eye, and then vanished. William Heller had aided him in
getting his present position with the Department of the Interior. And so
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forth. But only two of the eight were important at this moment. One was
Joe Dystra, and the other was Tim Thomybright. In his early fifties,
heavy-bodied and powerful, Dystra dominated the table just by sitting at
it. Across from him, the slim, forty-year-old, half-bald Thomybright
looked frail and unimportant.
But this was an illusion. Tim was hard as tool steel. As Secretary of
the Board, he headed up most of its decisions: He and Joe Dystra
complemented each other. Like everybody else in the room-with the
exception of Mele, who was Librarian here at the Foundation-Tim and Joe
were scientists. But both bulged outside their fields, which was
psychology for Tim and physics for Joe. Tim had a flair for politics,
Joe a literal genius for business and organization. And they were both
drivers.
"You're still in contact, Jase?" Dystra asked now, the hard fat of his
face looking bunchy from lingering lines of sleep. Jase nodded.
"I still feel . . . different," he said. Thornybright held up his hand.
"I'm going to turn on the recorder," the thin psychologist said. "The
sooner we get started the better."
He put his hand on the square, polished wood mount rising slightly from
the table top in front of his chair, and everybody in the room heard the
click as it was turned on.
"All right," said Thornybright, "this recording is being made on the
third of June at-" He glanced at his watch. "Two-oh-eight A.M. It is the
forty-sixth meeting of the Board for Independent Foundation Action, of
the Foundation for the Association of Learned and Professional
Societies. Present are Lester Wye, Joseph Dystra, William Heller ..." he
ran on to list everyone about the table.
"... Miss Mele Worman, Foundation Librarian and Observer for our Subject
connected with Bait Thirteen, Jason Lee Barchar," he wound up. "The
reasons behind the action of the Foundation in allowing members to
volunteer for the founding of this Board and this project are a matter
of record. However, now that we've come to a point of decision, I think
it'd be wise to recap." He glanced about the table. "Accordingly, I move
that a rough outline of events leading us to this moment should be
dictated to the recorder now by the Secretary, before this meeting
proceeds any further."
He paused.
"Second," said Dystra.
"All in favor?" Thornybright looked around the table and a chorus of
ayes responded from all but Mele, who had no vote.
"Motion carried unanimously," said Thomybright. He reached into the
inside pocket of 'his snorts coat and took out several sheets of typed
paper, which he unfolded. He began to read from them.
"This Board," he read, in a brisk, dry voice, "was founded a year ago by
volunteer members of the Foundation to invite other volunteers to join
in an independent effort financed by the Foundation to protect our world
of earth against possible contact and destruction by one or more
inimical alien races originating elsewhere in our galaxy. The basis for
fearing such contact is to be found in the Report on the Likelihood of
Alien Contact, issued five years ago after nearly ten years' work by
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Gordon%20R%20Dickson%20-%20The%20Alien%20Way.txt (9 of 118) [11/1/2004 12:02:39 AM]
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Gordon%20R%20Dickson%20-%20The%20Alien%20Way.txt
members of this Foundation and its constituent societies and
organizations. This report, made at Foundation expense and published for
public information, was compiled for the purpose of awakening the
Government of the United States and all other concerned governments of
this planet to a situation brought about by the construction of vessels
capable of reaching the neighboring star systems at speeds in excess of
the speed of light -utilizing the Collapsed Universe Theories of Joseph
Dystra, a member of the Foundation and of this Board."
Thomybright paused and cleared a slight hoarseness from his voice with a
dry rattle of his throat.
"These vessels," he went on, "were put into service and have been in
service for nearly a dozen years now, in spite of strong warnings by
this Foundation. The Foundation, it may be repeated at this point, was
originally founded twenty-three years ago to coordinate the opinion of
those in all countries of the world engaged in pure scientific research
and development The purpose behind its founding was to bring to public,
and particularly governmental, attention the fact that almost since the
beginning of the twentieth century, technological development has been
using up the reservoirs of pure, basic or disinterested research and the
search for knowledge, faster than these reservoirs have been refilled."
"He paused to clear his throat once more.
The reason for this situation, the Foundation has been pointing out for
the twenty-three years since its founding, lies in the fact that
economic competition and public interest have made available large sums
of money for the application of scientifically trained people and
scientific facilities to immediate technologically profitable problems.
So that, while the public standard of technological living has been
growing apace, the world fund of new knowledge out of which this
technological advance was made possible has been dwindling."
He paused and turned to the second sheet of those in his hands.
"The recommendation of this Foundation," he read on, "from the first has
been that the governments of this world counter this situation by making
available a large fund and organization which can compete in facilities
and salaries offered with private industry. So that those qualified to
engage in pure research may be enabled to do so. In the past
twenty-three years the Foundation has implemented this point of view
with no less than six major reports, fully documenting the steadily
worsening situation and setting forth those measures which must be taken
to repair it. In spite of this--"
Thornybright broke off and reached under the table for a glass of water.
He sipped at it, put it back, cleared his throat, and continued to read.
"In spite of this, and in spite of the fact there has been a great deal
of public and even governmental support for such action in all of the
major governments of the world, no such funds and organization have been
provided."
Dystra grunted, grimly. Thornybright glanced at him and then went on.
"With the putting into use of the Collapsed Field Theory Drive and the
penetration of space vessels of human origin beyond the immediate star
systems within a fifty-light-year radius from our Sun, the situation, in
the opinion of this Foundation, has become critical. As the Report on
the Likelihood of Alien Contact stated three years ago, such contact has
become-in the light of present scientific knowledge-a statistical
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/G...n%20R%20Dickson%20-%20The%20Alien%20Way.txt (10 of 118) [11/1/2004 12:02:39 AM]
摘要：

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Gordon%20R%20Dickson%20-%20The\%20Alien%20Way.txtTHEALIENWAYCopyright©1965byGordonR.Dicksone-bookver.1.0CHAPTERONE...Turninginhissleep,JasonBarcharrolledoversothattheweightofhisheadwasupontherightsideofhisskull,underwhichthereceiverhadbeenimplanted.Theareawa...

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