Time and the Riddle: Thirty-One Zen Stories (58 page)

“Then you dream well, Miss Shawn,” Smith nodded. “You have places like this on your planet, parks, playgrounds. This is a park, a playground for children. That's why no one lives here. It's a place for children to come to and play and learn a little about life and beauty—you see, in our culture, the two are not separate.”

“What children?”

“The children of the Galaxy,” Smith nodded, waving a hand toward the sky. “There are a great many children—a great many playgrounds and parks, not unlike this one. Today, it is empty—tomorrow, five million children—they come and they go, even as they do in your own parks—”

“Our own parks,”. Briggs was thinking bitterly.

“No, I am not sneering, Pilot Briggs. I am trying to answer your questions and your thoughts—and to connect these things with what you know and understand.”

“You're telling us that the Galaxy is inhabited—by men?”

“Why not by men? Can you really believe that man is an accident on one planet in a billion? Wherever there is life, in time man appears—and he lives now on more than a half a million planets—in our galaxy alone. And he makes places like this place for his children.”

“And who are you?” Carrington said. “And why are you here alone?”

“How would you think of me?” Smith wondered. “We don't have a government in your terms. We don't have nations. I could call myself an administrator—we have a good many. And I was sent here to meet you and talk to you. We have been watching you for a long time, tracing you—yes, we've watched the earth too, for a long time.”

“Talk to us—” Frances Rhodes said softly.

“Yes.”

“About what?” Briggs demanded.

“About your sickness,” Smith replied sadly.

8

An hour had passed. They sat silently, looking at Smith, and he watched them, and then Briggs said,

“For heaven's sake, don't pity us. We don't ask for pity—not from you or any of your breed of supermen.”

“Not pity,” Smith told them. “We don't have pity—it's a part of yourselves, not of us. Sorrow is a better word.”

“Spare us that too,” said Gene Ling.

“Carrington refused to allow anger or impatience to disturb his own reasoning. He felt a compulsion to demonstrate to Smith that he could reason dispassionately, and he said quietly and firmly,

“You see, Smith—you ask a great deal when you ask us for an admission of our own insanity. You pointed out, quite properly, I think, that we were egotistical and unscientific to believe that man was limited by nature to one obscure planet on the edge of the Galaxy. I hold that it is just as unscientific for you to claim that of all the races of man on all the planets, only the people of Earth are mentally sick, emotionally unstable—yes, insane, the one word you were kind enough not to use—”

“Carrington, you're wasting your time,” Briggs said sourly. “He can read our thoughts—all of them.”

“Which doesn't change any of my arguments,” Carrington said to Smith. “You mention our wars, our history of mass slaughter, our use of atomic weapons, our record of murdering and destroying each other—but these are the particulars and wasteful errors of our development—”

“They are the specifics of your development,” Smith nodded reluctantly. “I hate to repeat that no other race of man in all the universe pursues murder as his major occupation and force of development—yet I must. Only on Earth—”

“But we are not all murderers,” Frances Rhodes protested. “I am a physician. If you know Earth so well, you know the history of medicine and healing on Earth.”

“A physician who carries a gun in a holster at her side,” Smith shrugged.

“For my protection only!” she cried.

“Protection? Against whom, Miss Rhodes?”

“We didn't know—”

“I'm sorry,” Smith sighed. “I'm sorry.”

“I told you it's no use,” Briggs snapped. “He reads our thoughts. He knows. God help us, he knows!”

“Yes, I know,” Smith agreed.

“Then you must know that people like ourselves are not murderers,” Carrington persisted, his voice still calm and controlled. “We are scientists. We are civilized people. You speak of how we are ridden with superstition, with gargantuan lies, with a love of the obscene and the monstrous. You mention half a billion Earth people who vocalize Christianity while none of them practice it. You talk about the millions we have slain in the name of freedom, brotherhood and God. You talk of our greed, our meanness, our perversion of love and sex and beauty—don't you realize that we know these things, that our best and bravest have struggled against them for ages?”

“I realize that,” Smith nodded.

“He reads our thoughts,” Briggs repeated stubbornly.

“We are scientists,” Carrington continued. “We built this starship that brought us here. We lay in its hull for five endless years—that the frontiers of space might be conquered. And now, when we discover a universe of men—men talented and wonderful beyond all our dreams and imaginings, you tell us that this is barred to us forever—that we must live and die on our own speck of dust—”

“Yes, I am afraid it must be that way,” Smith agreed.

“Everything but pity,” said Laura Shawn.

Smith opened his robe, let it slip off his body to the ground, and stood before them naked. The women instinctively turned their heads away. The men reacted in shocked disbelief. Smith picked up his robe and clothed himself again.

“You see,” he said.

The five men and women stared at him, their eyes full of realization now.

“In all the universe,” Smith said, “there is only one race of man that holds its bodies in shame and contempt. All others walk naked in pride and unashamed. Only Earth has made the image of man into a curse and a shame. What else must I say?”

“Do you intend to destroy us?” Briggs asked harshly.

Smith looked at him with regret. “We don't destroy, Briggs. We don't kill.”

“What then?”

“You have something we don't have,” Smith said softly, gently. “We had no need of it, but you had to create it—otherwise you would have perished in your sickness. You know what it is.”

“Conscience,” Gene Ling whispered.

“Yes—conscience. It will help. Go back to your starship and plot your course for home. And then you must make the decision to forget. When you make that decision, we will help you—”

“If we make it,” Briggs said.

“If you make it,” Smith agreed.

“Hold out some hope,” Laura Shawn begged him. “Don't send us away like this. We came across—we were the first—”

“You weren't the first,” Smith said, the sadness in his voice unbearable. “There were others from Earth, but each time they destroyed each other and the knowledge too. You weren't the first and you won't be the last—”

“Can we hope?” Laura Shawn pleaded.

“All men hope,” Smith said. “More than that—I don't know.”

9

The starship circled the beautiful planet, and the seven people of Earth sat in the wardroom. Gluckman and Phillips had been told of the encounter, and by now they had all discussed it into silence and weariness. Only Briggs had said nothing—until now, and now he said,

“Why can't we remember that he reads our thoughts? He knew.” “I'm selfish,” Laura Shawn whispered through her tears. “It is easier to give up all it might mean to mankind than to give up my own memories.”

“Of three days of childhood?” Briggs said bitterly. “To hell with that! To hell with this damned utopia! To hell with the stars! We'll make an atmosphere on Mars and drain the poison gas from Venus! To hell with him and his gardens! We have a job of work! So set your stinking course for home, McCaffery—and the rest of you to bed. There's another day tomorrow.”

That was the virtue of Briggs; for he more than any of them knew how right Smith was, and he wept his own tears into his pillow for hours before sleep came. In the morning, he was better. By then, the starship had flung itself a hundred million miles in the direction of home, and that gave Briggs a good feeling.

Like the others, he remembered only a wasteland of burning suns, and in all the galaxy, no other planets than those of the Solar System. Like the others, he knew that he was returning to a place unique and precious in its singularity—Earth, the sole habitat of man.

27
The Mind of God

“H
ow do you feel?” Greenberg asked me.

“Fine. Lousy, Frightened. A little sick, a little stupid, empty in the stomach. Nauseous. I think I could throw up at will. But mostly afraid. Otherwise I'm fine.”

“Good.”

“Why is it good?”

“Because you're facing fully and acknowledging your sensations. That's very important at this moment. If you told me you were filled with noble resolve and without fear, I would be worried.”

“I'm worried,” I told him. “Damn worried.”

“There's no contract, no commitment that's binding,” Zvi Leban said slowly, his cold blue eyes fixed on me. I never saw him as the Nobel Prize winner, the brilliant physicist so often compared to Einstein and Fermi; to me he was an Israeli, the kind I respect but do not particularly like, cold as ice and full of an implacable will that appears to partake of neither courage nor cowardice, only resolution. “The door's open.”

“Zvi—stop that,” Dr. Goldman said quietly.

“It's all right,” said Greenberg. Greenberg was many things, M.D., psychiatrist, physicist, philosopher, businessman—all of it crowded into a fat, easygoing, moonfaced man of sixty-one years who never raised his voice and never lost his temper. “It's quite all right. He has to face everything now, his fears, his hopes, his resolutions, and also the open door. The fact that he can walk out and there will be no recriminations. You understand that, don't you, Scott?”

“I understand it.”

“We have no secrets. A project like this would be meaningless and immoral if we had secrets from each other. Perhaps it's immoral in any case, but I am afraid I have lost touch with what men call morality. We had our time of soul-searching, seven years of it, and then we came to our decision. The Sabbath of our soul-searching, I may say, and it's done. Finished. You were and are my friend. I brought you into this in the beginning, and then you placed yourself squarely in the center of it. Zvi was against you, which you also know. He thought it should be a Jew. Goldman and I thought otherwise, and Zvi accepted our decision.”

“I'd like to close the door,” I said. “I would not have come today if I had not made up my mind. I'm going through with it. I told Zvi that I had no hate left. The hate has washed out. I had to be truthful about that. Zvi regards it as a lack of resolution.”

“You never married again,” said Goldman.

“I don't quite know what that means.”

“There's no point to this discussion now,” Zvi said. “Scott is going through with it. He's a brave man, and I would like to shake hands with him.”

He did so with great formality.

“You've thought of some questions?” Goldman asked. “We still have an hour.” He was a thin wisp of a man, his brilliance honed down to knife-edge. He had an inoperable malignancy; in a year he would be dead, yet his impending doom appeared to arouse in him only curiosity and a vague sadness. They were three unusual men indeed.

“Some. Yes, I've thought of some that I haven't asked before. I don't know that I should ask them now.”

“You should,” said Goldman. “You go with enough doubts. If you can clear up a few of them, so much the better.”

“Well, I've been” brooding over the mathematics of it, and I still can't make head or tail of them, but I'm afraid an hour's no good for that.”

“No.”

“Still one tries to translate into images. I suppose the mathematicians never do.”

“Some do, some don't,” Zvi said, smiling for the first time. “I have, but it impeded my work. So I gave it up. Just as there are no words for things we do not know, so there are no images for concepts outside of our conceptual experience.”

“Specifically, Scott?” Greenberg asked me.

“It always comes down to breaking the chain. Then the result is entirely different. For example, this project would not take place. We would not be standing here in a stone warehouse in Norwalk, Connecticut. We would not have planned what we planned. The necessity would not face us.”

“Conceivably.”

“Then would I take the chance of destroying you—and thousands, perhaps millions of others now alive?”

“There,” said Zvi, “is where the conceptual and the mathematical part. The answer is no, but there is no way I can explain.”

“Can you explain to yourself?”

Zvi shook his head slowly, and Greenberg said, “No more, Scott, than Einstein could visualize to himself his proposition that space might be curved and limited.”

“But I can visualize,” I protested. “Nothing as complicated as Einstein's proposition, but I can visualize sending me back twenty-four hours. At this time yesterday, the four of us were here, sitting at this same table. I was drinking a scotch and water. What then? Would there have been two of me, identical?”

“No. It would simply be yesterday.”

“And if I had a bottle of wine in my hand instead of a glass of scotch?”

“Then you propose the paradox,” Goldman said gently, “and so our powers of reason cease. Which is why we do not test the machine. My dear Scott—you and I both face death, and that too is a paradox and a mystery. We are physicists, mathematicians, scientists, and we have discovered certain coordinates and from them developed certain equations. Our symbols work, but our minds, our vision, our imagination cannot follow the symbols. I may brood over a death that is inevitable, the maturation of a malignancy within me; you, as a far braver man, accept the likelihood of death in your own undertaking. But neither of us can comprehend what faces us. Do you think of yourself as a good Christian?”