Return to Earth

Enlightened intelligences can feel only contempt for that debasing emotion, pity, the virtues of which Henry so often tried to impress upon us. It results in perpetuating types that retard the race. The thinkers bred and trained it out of us ages ago. Yet now, as I gazed at Henry, jerking along awkwardly beside me, resembling a moving slat split half-way up, his non-luminous eyes moist with ecstatic anticipation, I experienced a pure wish without rational source or consequences. I wanted to help him because he coveted so passionately the empty and purely selfish triumph he anticipated. Perhaps something in that heavy atmosphere aroused resistance in the lower nerve-levels--a friction generating that deceptive warmth. I felt what must have been pity! Henry's next words enhanced it.

"Just wait till I tell them!" he exulted. "What they did for that bird that flew across the Atlantic--what was his name? Oh, Lindbergh! That won't be a circumstance to what they'll do for me. I tell you I'll have a king's welcome!"

"Do you think that?" I inquired as we moved along a crudely paved highway, low, rocky cliffs on either hand. "Or do you only hope for it?"

In Henry, feeling characteristically blazed into resentment, another useless emotion long ago bred out of us.

"Listen," he said peevishly; "these are my people. I'll be teaching you from now on, and you've got plenty to learn, I'm telling you."

I was busy extracting from my instrument carrier my memory sounder. I concentrated upon tuning it to vibrations of eighteen of Henry's years before.

"That may be true," I replied after a few responses. "I came with you to be taught. Nevertheless, you are going to need quite a bit of help."

"Not on your life!" Henry's tone grew more boastful. "You're going to be hollering for help from your Uncle Dudley before we're here much longer."

"Wait!" I commanded, pitching my voice to the tone level that Henry, however unwillingly, was always compelled to obey. My strange weakness dropped from me. I turned away and drew from my instrument carrier my distance control and focussed the levitator ray upon the ship far up the now invisible mountain slope. I made sure that the control functioned and set it at stationary. Finally I turned upon the ship the G-ray, this time at full strength.

"I am ready to witness your 'king's welcome'," I told Henry.

It is fortunate that the structure of Henry's brain renders it impossible for him to read a memory sounder, else he might have foreseen, as I did, his little comedy working itself out to the denouement that, without my interference, was inevitable. Yet, at the last, I did interfere a little, but only to hasten the outcome and shorten our useless stay.

Henry halted and waved his hand. "Look! Ain't that a sight for the sore eyes now?" He exhaled noisily. "Grand!" he muttered. "God's own country!"

We stood within a sort of natural gate-way of tumbled rock whereby the highway passed through the cliffs. Beyond lay the main thoroughfare of the town, floored with asphalt, lined with pedestrian ramps of concrete, depots of trade on either side built solidly to this spot and here abruptly ending.

A dozen of Henry's steps, one glide on my part, took us into the midst of the industrial section, a place cluttered by wheeled vehicles traveling on the ground. There were no landing-stages. The race has made small progress with air travel.

Henry's pale eyes glowed as he led the way toward a gaudy hut half hidden among glaring signs. There were chairs and tables of uncouth shape scattered about a graveled space beyond the pedestrian ramp. Henry pulled out two chairs at one of the tables. Mine faced the door of the little building; when he was seated, his back was toward it.

"Lemon ice-cream soda," he shouted to a long narrow male who popped out of the doorway. "And squirt a little phosphate in it.

"He's a waiter," Henry informed me as I eyed the white apron which the creature wore over a lot of other clothing.

I studied Henry's costume. Our garment-makers had carefully followed his instructions, but compared with the beings we had passed, his appearance justified the waiter's astonished stare before he re-entered the hut to prepare the stuff Henry had ordered.

Henry leaned back in his chair with a deep sigh of content.

"Lord!" he exulted. "How my mouth has watered these eighteen years for a good old lemon soda! I wish it was safe for you to try one."

The waiter, returning with a sickly-appearing, yellow liquid in a transparent drinking-vessel, displayed marked agitation at Henry's ejaculation and at his whispered asides to me. He set down the drink and scuttled back into the shop, reappearing a moment later with a rotund male I judged was the proprietor. They looked directly toward the chair into which I had climbed, but as they evinced no special agitation, I knew I had nothing to fear from them. I was tempted to extract from their minds the subject of their whispered conversation, but a powerful vibration from the aura detector in my carrier informed me that the first crisis in Henry's little drama was approaching.

It came in a weird chariot propelled by combustion, inside a metal motor, of a fluid taken from the earth, which is called gasoline. A female sat in the chariot, grasping tightly a wheel by which she guided it, her set face reflecting the difficulty and danger of controlling the crude affair. Henry leaped to his feet, almost overturning the table.

"I know that woman!" he cried. He was trembling like an excited beast. "It's ... we used to go together before----" He caught the female's eye and shouted, "Rachel! Hey! Rachel!"

The female glanced at him at first casually. Then as the shock of recognition exploded in her primitive mind, unfurnished with any of the psychological buffers bred into us through ages of selective race culture, she whitened. The vehicle, forgotten, careened into the pedestrian ramp. The primitive motor spluttered and ceased.

Henry perceived her recognition and was glad, but gladness turned to dismay as she reddened and worked frantically at the noisy starting-mechanism. Then fear darkened his thoughts as the female made the clumsy machine leap backward, her mind hurling contempt upon him. The machine snorted, belched from its rear end a cloud of filthy vapor, and disappeared around the corner of an intersecting street.

Henry sank back into his chair. Already the fear that had clouded his mind was fading as emotion kindled anew. By a reasoning entirely sentimental he foresaw success as the possible outcome of his next encounter with a being of his race--because he hoped for it!

I inquired, "Was that a king's welcome?"

"She's still mad at me," Henry muttered. "I had a date with her the night I----" He hushed and stared moodily into his glass. "I wonder if she's married."

"She is," I informed him, "and the young she has produced number four." I went so far as to prompt his mind to thought. "She holds no recollection of that engagement. She is agitated by another memory, more vivid, one stirring emotions of repugnance toward you. It is connected with the world war."