He threw up his head and laughed again, his laughter rolling across the plains.
“My God,” he said, “it will be wonderful. I can’t wait to see it.”
Now he let the thought creep in—the thought that until now he had firmly suppressed in a reluctance to allow himself even to think of a hope that might not be there.
The Team was made up of two alien beings, living representatives of another life form that had achieved intelligence and that must have formed a complex civilization earmarked by an intellectual curiosity. Intellectual curiosity would be, almost by definition, a characteristic of any civilization, but a characteristic that might vary in its intensity. That the Team’s civilization has more than its full share of it was evidenced by their being here.
It was just possible that the Team might be willing, perhaps even eager, to help mankind with its problems. Whether they could offer anything of value was, of course, unknown; but, lacking anything else of value, the alien direction of their thought processes and their viewpoints might provide new starting points for man’s own thinking, might serve to short-circuit the rut in which man was apt to think, nudging him into fresh approaches and nonhuman logic.
In the free interchange of information and opinion that would take place between the Team and the university, much might be learned by both sides. For although the university no longer could qualify as an elite intellectual community, the old tradition of learning, perhaps even of research, still existed there. Within its walls were men and women who could still be stirred by that intellectual thirst which in ages past had shaped the culture mankind had built and then in a few months’ time had brought down to destruction.
Although not entirely to destruction, he reminded himself. On Thunder Butte the last remnants, the most sophisticated remnants, of that old, condemned technology still remained. Ironically, that remnant was now the one last hope of mankind.
What might have happened, he asked himself, if man had withheld his destruction of technology for a few more centuries? If he had, then the full force of it would have been available to work out the possible answers contained in the data banks of Thunder Butte. But this, he realized, might not necessarily have followed. The sheer weight, the arrogant power, of a full-scale, runaway technology might have simply rejected, overridden and destroyed what might be there as irrelevant. After all, with as great a technology as mankind possessed, what was the need of it?
Perhaps, just possibly, despite all man’s present shortcomings, it might be better this way. As a matter of fact, we’re not so badly off, he told himself. We have a few things on which to pin some hopes—Thunder Butte, the Team, the university, the still-living robotic brains, the unimpeded rise of sensitive abilities, the Trees, the Snakes, the Followers.
And how in the world could the Snakes or Followers—? And then he sternly stopped this line of thought. When it came to hope, you did not write off even the faintest hope of all. You held on to every hope; you cherished all; you let none get away.
“Laddie boy,” said Meg. “I said it once before, and I’ll say it now again. It’s been a lovely trip.”
“Yes,” said Cushing. “Yes, you are right. It has been all of that.”
Clifford D. Simak, A Heritage of Stars
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