Sense of Obligation

you now took all this training and wasted it on some rustic farm.'

'You give me very little credit. I plan to teach—'

'Forget Anvhar!' Ihjel cut him off with a chop of his hand. 'This world will roll on quite successfully whether you are here or not. You must forget it, think of its relative unimportance on a galactic scale, and consider instead the existing, suffering, hordes of mankind. You must think what you can do to help them.'

'But what can I do—as an individual? The day is long past when a single man, like Caesar or Alexander, could bring about world-shaking changes.'

'True—but not true,' Ihjel said. 'There are key men in every conflict of forces, men who act like catalysts applied at the right instant to start a chemical reaction. You might be one of those men, but I must be honest and say that I can't prove it yet. So in order to save time and endless discussion, I think I will have to spark your personal sense of obligation.'

'Obligation to whom?'

'To mankind of course, to the countless billions of dead who kept the whole machine rolling along that allows you the full, long and happy life you enjoy today. What they gave to you, you must pass on to others. This is the keystone of humanistic morals.'

'Agreed. And a very good argument in the long run. But not one that is going to tempt me out of this bed within the next three hours.'

'A point of success,' Ihjel said. 'You agree with the general argument. Now I apply it specifically to you. Here is the statement I intend to prove. There exists a planet with a population of seven million people. Unless I can prevent it, this planet will be completely destroyed. It is my job to stop that destruction, so that is where I am going now. I won't be able to do the job alone. In addition to others I need you. Not anyone like you—but you and you alone.'

 

'You have precious little time left to convince me of all that,' Brion told him, 'so let me make the job easier for you. The work you do, this planet, the imminent danger of the people there—these are all facts that you can undoubtedly supply. I'll take a chance that this whole thing is not a colossal bluff and admit that given time, you could verify them all. This brings the argument back to me again. How can you possibly prove that I am the only person in the galaxy who can help you?'

'I can prove it by your singular ability, the thing I came here to find.'

'What ability? I am different in no way from the other men on my planet.'

'You're wrong,' Ihjel said. 'You are the embodied proof of evolution. Rare individuals with specific talents occur constantly in any species, man included. It has been two generations since an empathetic was last born on Anvhar and I have been watching carefully most of that time.'

'What in blazes is an empathetic—and how do you recognize it when you have found it?' Brion chuckled, this talk was getting preposterous.

'I can recognize one because I'm one myself—there is no other way. As to how projective empathy works, you had a demonstration of that a little earlier, when you felt those strange thoughts about Anvhar. It will be a long time before you can master that, but receptive empathy is your natural trait. This is mentally entering into the feeling, or what could be called the spirit of another person. Empathy is not thought perception, it might better be described as the sensing of someone else's emotional makeup, feelings and attitudes. You can't lie to a trained empathetic because he can sense the real attitude behind the verbal lies. Even your undeveloped talent has proved immensely useful in the Twenties. You can outguess your opponent because you know his movements even as his body tenses to make them. You accept this without ever questioning it.'

'How do you know—?' This was Brion's understood, but never voiced secret.

Ihjel smiled. 'Just guessing. But I won the Twenties too, remember, also without knowing a thing about empathy at the time. On top of our normal training, it's a wonderful trait to have. Which brings me to the proof we mentioned a minute ago. When you said you would be convinced if I could prove you were the only person who could help me. I believe you are—and that is one thing I cannot lie about. It's possible to lie about a belief verbally, to have a falsely based belief, or to change a belief. But you can't lie about it to yourself.'

'Equally important—you can't lie about a belief to an empathetic. Would you like to see how I feel about this? 'See' is a bad word—there is no vocabulary for this kind of thing yet. Better, would you join me in my feelings? Sense my attitudes, memories and emotions just as I do?'

Brion tried to protest, but he was too late. The doors of his senses were pushed wide and he was overwhelmed.

'Dis ...' Ihjel said aloud. 'Seven million people ... hydrogen bombs ... Brion Brandd.' These were just key words, land marks of association. With each one Brion felt the rushing wave of the other man's emotions.

There could be no lies here, Ihjel was right in that. This was the raw stuff that feelings are made of, the basic reactions to the things and symbols of memory.

DIS ... DIS ... DIS ... it was a word it was a planet and the word thundered like a drum a drum the sound of its thunder surrounded and was

a wasteland a planet

of death a planet where

living was dying and

dying was very

better than

living

crude barbaric

backward miserable

dirty beneath

consideration

planet

DIS

hot burning scorching

wasteland of sands

and sands and sands and

sands that burned had burned

will burn forever

the people of this planet so