"I wanted to find out if you'd had your soul saved."
Samson grinned weakly. "Is it likely? Harlow--get this. The Kassids
aren't invaders in the usual meaning of the term. They haven't got any
mind-rays or insidious hypnotic powers, and they aren't interested in
taking over anybody's property. That's the first thing. Second, they're
not a race and they're not an empire. I saw at least twenty different
life-forms aboard their ship, and I learned enough to know that they
were all Kassids. That would seem to account for that business in the
legends about their being able to change forms. The local lads thought
the same thing about us at first, remember, on account of our having
two sexes. Over to you."
"An interesting conundrum," Harlow commented, fourteen minutes later.
"They're neither a race nor an empire. What are they? Over."
"They're an idea," said Samson grimly. "The idea is a pretty complex
one, and I don't think I got all of it, luckily. The effect of that
arnophrene, at a guess, was to drop my I.Q. about forty or fifty
points. But I can tell you what it is: it's a completely convincing
argument--on the emotional _and_ logical levels--why you should never
break the peace or stop loving your neighbor. If you're thinking that
you've heard arguments like that before, and we're still the same old
robbing, raping and fire-setting crew, you're wrong. _You haven't
heard this one._ I'm telling you that I only got the fringe of it, and
it made me want to bawl. Once you've heard it--_if_ you've got the
intellect to take it completely--you'll never forget it for a minute,
and you won't find any loopholes. You won't backslide, and you won't be
a Sunday believer. You'd sooner cut your throat."
"Over," added Midge quietly.
Samson smiled at her and waited for Harlow's reply.
"I guess I believe you," said Harlow's voice when the time was up, "but
it would be hard to swallow if it hadn't been for Jackson. I want to
ask you two things. First, is there any question in your mind about
what would happen to homo sap if this state of mind spread? Second,
what do you think we can do about it? Over."
"One," said Samson promptly, "no. Once you've heard the Word, and
understood it, you _know_ there isn't anything more important than
spreading it to other people. We would become Kassids--meaning that the
Word would come before everything else--meaning in turn that we'd stop
being the masterful mayflies who boss this half of the galaxy. We might
not even stay where we are. In fact, there would be a lot of changes,
some big, some small, but they would all add up to this: the human race
as we know it would cease to exist ... and we can't have that, can we?
The universe may belong to the angels, but we're men. You can believe
that I'm not telling you this just to put your mind at rest about
Jackson. We've never had any serious opposition in the six hundred
years we've been spreading out, but this is it. These are the kids that
can finish us with one hand tied behind their backs."
He paused. "It occurred to me a long time ago, when I was a student,
that if anything ever did fold us up, it wouldn't be a gang of monsters
breathing pure fluorine and squirting death rays from every tentacle,
it would be an idea. You can kill monsters, but you can't kill an idea.
From Genghis Khan to Hitler, not one of the real conquerors--the guys
who just wanted to grab everything in sight--hung onto a-half-credit's
worth of what they got. But the Roman Empire was an idea; so was Islam,
Christendom, Communism and Anticentrism.
"Two, I don't know what we can do about it. I'll tell you some things
we can't do. We can't make war on the Kassids. If we did, everything
we've got in this Slice, from shipyards to outhouses, would be buried
under crowds of howling neuters in about two seconds. I don't think we
can quarantine them, or ourselves, forever. There isn't anything they
want in the universe, except to spread the Word, so I don't see how we
could make any kind of a deal with them."
* * * * *
He took a deep breath. "Let me tell you what else I found out, and
maybe something will occur to you. I said before that the idea is
complicated. That's why ethics go up with intelligence, maybe. And
that's why the races we've met, that remember the Kassids, aren't
Kassids themselves. They're not bright enough. That explains something
that's had us wondering for the last six centuries--why there isn't a
single race in our part of the galaxy that rates higher than a fairly
bright twelve-year-old on our scale. There isn't any correlation
between sexual reproduction and intelligence, as my wife and some
others would have you believe. It's simply that the others grasped
the idea--became Kassids. Eventually the Kassids had done all the
proselytizing they could. That was roughly fifteen thousand years ago.
Either they missed us altogether, or we weren't much better than an
ape's cousin at that stage; otherwise they made a clean sweep of the
galaxy. Do you know what happened then? Do you know where they went?"
He paused for breath again. "They went to the nearer Magellanic Cloud,
and that's where they've been all this time. Some of the forms I saw
are from there. The same thing happened--eventually they absorbed all
the intelligence there was. So they came back, hoping some had grown in
this galaxy--and they found us." He sighed. "Over."