“You must realize,” said C, “that we get so few of you. Out of a few of the groups we may get one, almost never two, as is the case with you. Out of the most of them, we get none at all.”
“They go fumbling off in all directions,” said A. “They go bolting off, seeking sanctuary in the apple-blossom world or they become entranced with the translators or they—”
“By translators,” Mary said, “you mean the machines in the city that keep crooning to themselves?”
“That is our name for them,” said B. “Perhaps you can think of a better name.”
“I wouldn’t even try,” said Mary.
“There’s Chaos,” Lansing said. “That must gobble up a lot of them. Yet you threw me a rope at Chaos.”
“We threw you the rope,” said A, “because you tried to save the robot. At the risk of your own life, never hesitating, you tried to save the robot.”
“I thought he was worth saving. He was a friend of mine.”
“He well might have been worth saving,” said A, “but he used poor judgment. Here we have no place for those who have poor judgment.”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re getting at,” said Lansing, angrily. “I don’t like the way you sit in judgment. I don’t like anything about the four of you and I never have.”
“As we go,” said D, “we are getting nowhere. I grant you the privilege of the animosity that you bear us. But we cannot allow petty bickering to sway us from the need to talk with one another.”
“Another thing,” said Lansing. “If the talk promises to be of any length, we do not propose to stand here before you like supplicants before a throne. You at least might have the decency to provide us a place to sit.”
“By all means, sit,” said A. “Drag over a couple of chairs and be comfortable.”
Lansing walked to one side of the room and came back with chairs. The two of them sat down.
The creature that had been sleeping in the basket came strolling across the floor, sniffling as it came. It rubbed affectionately against Mary’s legs and lay down on her feet. It gazed up at her with eyes of liquid friendliness.
“Can this be the Sniffler?” she asked. “It prowled about our campfires, but we never caught a glimpse of it.”
“This is your sniffler,” said C. “There are a number of snifflers; this one was assigned to you.”
“The sniffler watched us?”
“Yes, it watched you.”
“And reported back?”
“Naturally,” said C.
“You watched us every minute,” Lansing said. “You never missed a lick. You knew everything we did. You read us like a book. Would you mind telling me what is going on?”
“Willingly,” said A. “You’ve earned the right to know. By coming here, you have earned the right to know.”
“If you’ll only listen,” said B, “we shall attempt to tell you.”
“We’re listening,” said Mary.
“You know, of course,” said A, “about the multiplicity of worlds, worlds splitting off at crisis points to form still other worlds. And I take it you are acquainted with the evolutionary process.”
“We know of evolution,” Mary said. “A system of sorting out to make possible the selection of the fittest.”
“Exactly. If you think about it, you will see that the splitting off of alternate worlds is an evolutionary process.”
“You mean for the selection of better worlds? Don’t you have some trouble with the definition of a better world?”
“Yes, of course we do. That’s the reason you are here. That’s the reason we have brought many others here. Evolution, as such, does not work. It operates on the basis of the development of dominant life forms. In many cases the survival factors that make for dominance in themselves are faulty. All of them have flaws; many of them carry the seeds of their own destruction.”
“That is true,” said Lansing. “On my own world we have developed a mechanism which enables us, if we wish or blunder into it, to commit racial suicide.”
“The human race, with its intelligence,” said B, “is a life form too finely tuned to be allowed to waste itself — to commit, as you say, racial suicide. It is true, of course, that when, and if, the race dwindles to extinction, a successor will arise, some other life form with a survival factor greater than intelligence. What that factor might be, we cannot imagine. It would not necessarily be superior to intelligence. The trouble with the human race is that it has never given the intelligence it possesses the opportunity to develop to its full potential.”
“You think you have a way to develop that full potential?” Mary asked.
“We hope we have,” said D.
“You have seen this world you now are on,” said A. “You have had the opportunity to guess at some of its accomplishments, at the direction in which its technology was trending.”
“Yes, we have,” said Lansing. “The doors that open on other worlds. A better concept than world-seekers in my world have come up with. Back home we dream of starships. Only dream of them, for they may not be possible. Although, come to think of it, on Jurgens’s world Earth was empty because its people had gone out to the stars.”
“Do you know,” asked C, “if they ever got there?”
“I assume they did,” said Lansing. “But no, I don’t know they did.”
“And there are what you call the translators,” said Mary. “Another way to travel — to travel and to learn. I suppose you could utilize the method to study the entire universe, bring back ideas and concepts the human race might never have dreamed of on its own. Edward and I were only caught on the edges of it. The Brigadier rushed in and was lost. Could you tell us where he went?”
“That we cannot do,” said A. “Used improperly, the method can be dangerous.”
“Yet you leave it open,” Lansing said. “Callously, you leave it open, a trap for unwary visitors.”
“There,” said D, “you have hit exactly on the point. The unwary are eliminated from consideration. In our plan we have no use for those who act as fools.”
“The way you eliminated Sandra at the singing tower and Jurgens on the slopes of Chaos.”
“I sense hostility,” said D.
“You’re damned right you sense hostility. I am hostile. You eliminated four of us.”
“You were lucky,” A told him. “More often than not an entire band is eliminated. But not by anything we do. They are eliminated by the faults within themselves.”
“And the people at the camp? The refugee camp near the singing tower?”
“They are the failures. They gave up. Gave up and ‘hunkered down.’ You two did not give up. That’s why you are here.”
“We’re here,” said Lansing, “because Mary always believed the answer lay within this cube.”
“And by the force of her belief, you solved the riddle of the cube,” said A.
“That’s true,” said Lansing. “Being true, then why am I here? Because I tagged along with Mary?”
“You’re here because, along the way, you made the right decisions.”
“At Chaos I made a wrong decision.”
“We don’t think you did,” said C. “A matter of survival, while important, is not always a correct decision. There are decisions that can ignore survival.”
Sniffler, resting on Mary’s feet, had gone fast asleep.
“You make moral decisions,” said Lansing, angrily. “You’re great decision makers. And with such certainty. Tell me, just who the hell are you? The last survivors of the humans who lived upon this world?”
“No, we’re not,” said A. “We can’t even claim that we are human. Our home is on a planet on the far side of the galaxy.”
“Then why are you here?”
“I don’t know if we can tell you so you’ll understand. There’s no word in your language that adequately expresses what we are. For the want of a better term, you might think of us as social workers.”
“Social workers!” said Lansing. “For the love of Christ! It has come to this. The human race has need of social workers. We’ve sunk so low in the galactic ghetto that we need social workers!”
