Or steel. Sooner or later we shall have to take up an expression that
fragments of steel have fallen from the sky. If fragments not of iron,
but of steel have fallen upon this earth--
But what would a deep-sea fish learn even if a steel plate of a wrecked
vessel above him should drop and bump him on the nose?
Our submergence in a sea of conventionality of almost impenetrable
density.
Sometimes I'm a savage who has found something on the beach of his
island. Sometimes I'm a deep-sea fish with a sore nose.
The greatest of mysteries:
Why don't they ever come here, or send here, openly?
Of course there's nothing to that mystery if we don't take so seriously
the notion--that we must be interesting. It's probably for moral reasons
that they stay away--but even so, there must be some degraded ones among
them.
Or physical reasons:
When we can specially take up that subject, one of our leading ideas, or
credulities, will be that near approach by another world to this world
would be catastrophic: that navigable worlds would avoid proximity; that
others that have survived have organized into protective remotenesses,
or orbits which approximate to regularity, though by no means to the
degree of popular supposition.
But the persistence of the notion that we must be interesting. Bugs and
germs and things like that: they're interesting to us: some of them are
too interesting.
Dangers of near approach--nevertheless our own ships that dare not
venture close to a rocky shore can send rowboats ashore--
Why not diplomatic relations established between the United States and
Cyclorea--which, in our advanced astronomy, is the name of a remarkable
wheel-shaped world or super-construction? Why not missionaries sent here
openly to convert us from our barbarous prohibitions and other taboos,
and to prepare the way for a good trade in ultra-bibles and
super-whiskeys; fortunes made in selling us cast-off super-fineries,
which we'd take to like an African chief to someone's old silk hat from
New York or London?
The answer that occurs to me is so simple that it seems immediately
acceptable, if we accept that the obvious is the solution of all
problems, or if most of our perplexities consist in laboriously and
painfully conceiving of the unanswerable, and then looking for
answers--using such words as "obvious" and "solution" conventionally--
Or:
Would we, if we could, educate and sophisticate pigs, geese, cattle?
Would it be wise to establish diplomatic relation with the hen that now
functions, satisfied with mere sense of achievement by way of
compensation?