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Meikl shook his head. "We don't know what is a transmittable |
determinant until after it's happened." He paused. "Suppose there's some |
very simple psychic mechanism behind the 'pioneer' impulse. We don't |
feel it, but our ancestors did, and we might have recessive traces of it |
in our kulturverlaengerung lines." |
A wingman coughed raucously. "To be blunt with you, Meikl... I think |
this is a lot of nonsense. The whole concept is far-fetched." |
"What, the kult'laenger lines?" |
"Exactly." The wingsman snorted. "How could things like that get passed |
along from father to son. If you people'd stop the mystical gibberish, |
and deal in facts...." |
"Do you regard parent-child rapport as a fact?" Meikl turned to stare |
absently out a viewing port at the trees. |
"You mean the telepathic experiments with infants? I don't know much |
about it." |
"Seventy years ago. On Michsa Three. A hundred parents were given |
intensive lessons and intensive practice in playing a very difficult |
skill game... before they became parents. They did nothing but play the |
game for three years. Then their babies were taken away from them at the |
age of one year. Brought up institutionally. There was a control |
group another hundred whose parents never heard of the skill game." |
"Go on." |
"So, when the children were ten years old, they did learning-speed tests |
on all two hundred." |
"Learning the game, you mean?" |
"Right. The children whose parents had learned it came out way ahead. So |
far ahead that it was conclusive. Sometime during pregnancy and the |
first year, the kids had picked up a predisposition to learn the |
patterns of the game easily." |
"So?" |
"So during infancy, a child is beginning to mirror the patterns of the |
parental mind probably telepathically, or something related. He doesn't |
'inherit it' in the genes, but there's an unconscious cultural |
mechanism of transmittal and it's an analog of heredity. The |
kulturverlaengerung and it can linger in a family line without becoming |
conscious for many generations." |
"How? If they hadn't taught the children to play the game...." |
"If they hadn't, it'd still be passed on as a predisposition-talent to |
the third and fourth and Nth generation. Like a mirror-image of a |
mirror-image of a mirror-image... or a memory of a memory of a |
memory...." |
"This grows pedantic, and irrelevant," the baron growled. "What are the |
chances of utilizing native labor?" |
"And whatten penance will we dree for that, |
Edward, Edward? |
Whatten penance will ye dree for that? |
My dear son, now tell me, O." |
"I'll set my feet in yonder boat, |
Mither, mither; |
I'll set my feet in yonder boat, |
And I'll fare over the sea, O." |
ANONYMOUS |
Phase-A had been accomplished, after six months of toil. Baltun Meikl, |
Analyst Culturetic of Intelligence Section stood on the sunswept hill, |
once forested, but now barren except for the stumps of trees, and |
watched the slow file of humanity that coursed along the valley, bearing |
the hand-hewn ties that were being laid from the opening of the mine |
shaft to the ore dump. Glittering ribbons of steel snaked along the |
valley, and ended just below him, where a crew of workmen hammered |
spikes under the watchful eye of a uniformed foreman. In the distance, |
the central ring of grounded ships dominated the land. Spacers and |
natives labored together, to lend an impression of egalitarian |
cooperation under the autocracy of the officer class. |
"How good it is for brethren to be reunited," Meikl's native interpreter |
murmured, in the facile tongue devised by Semantics Section for use by |
staff officers and Intelligence men in communicating with the natives. |
He stared at her profile for a moment, as she watched the men in the |
valley. Was she really that blind? Were all of them? Had they no |
resistance at all to exploitation, or any concept for it? |
Meikl had learned as much as he could of the socio-economic matrix of |
the static civilization of the present Earthlings. He had gone into |
their glades and gardens and seen the patterns of their life, and he |
wondered. Life was easy, life was gay, life was full of idle play. |
Somehow, they seemed completely unaware of what they had done to the |
planet in twenty thousand years. One of the elders had summed up, |
without meaning to, the entire meaning of twenty millenia, with the |
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