The Project Gutenberg eBook of Definition, by Damon Knight

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Title: Definition

Author: Damon Knight

Release Date: September 18, 2022 [EBook #69009]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ***

DEFINITION

By DAMON KNIGHT

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Startling Stories, February 1953.

Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that

the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Man, n. A pentagonal, dipolar, monoplane dominant, of intelligence 96, native of District 10039817. Unabsorbed.

It is a truism that a human being can get used to very nearly everything. The hardy Eskimo, lying belly-down on a plain of ice that stretched unbroken to the sky, probably spent little of his time in meditating upon the vastness and inscrutability of the Universe ... he was thinking of his dinner. And Charles Samson, seven hundred years later, looked past his long nose at a scene of equal majesty—our galaxy, viewed from a ship in mid-arc—in a similar frame of mind.

It was approximately sixteen hours, galactic time; a trifle later according to Samson's stomach. He had played a vicious game of handball with his wife an hour and a half before, and now he was hungry.

The Eskimo, although a patient man, might have reflected that it was unreasonable of this particular seal to wake up and look around him at this precise moment. Samson, equally virtuous, told himself that his wife might have chosen a more opportune time to experiment with her cookery. Midge had conceived an idea for a soufflé such as had never before been seen by Man, and had accordingly been adding new circuits to the autochef for the past eighty-five minutes.

If she ran to form, the soufflé—which would be a triumph, in spite of seventeen separate miscalculations—would be served in about twenty minutes more. Samson would have preferred an artless slab of steak now.

These, it may be considered, were picayune thoughts to occupy a brain which had been interminably trained and tested, stocked with a fabulous assortment of knowledge, and then sent out, with one other human mind for company, to patrol a hegemony ten billion times as vast as Caesar's.

At the moment, however, there was nothing world-shaking for it to do. Charles and Midge, like a thousand other teams of trouble-shooters assigned to the volume of space known as Slice 103, earned their pay by intense, difficult, and sometimes dangerous labor which averaged three months out of the year; the rest of their time was spent in traveling from one assignment to the next, or simply in drifting, waiting for something of importance to turn up.

Two days ago, for example, they had been halfway along a leisurely arc between the Hilkert system and the observatory settlement on de Broglie II, when Slice H.Q. had buzzed them and told them to change course for Kenilworth IV—an isolated and obscure one-man post out on the perimeter of the Slice. Tomorrow, as likely as not, another message would inform them that the trouble, whatever it was, had simmered down. Then they would blast into a new arc, and it would be six days, at least—even if another wild-goose chase did not intervene—before they touched ground. Meanwhile, they amused themselves as well as they could....

As for the stars, which lay spread out to the infinity beyond the inch-thick vitrin of the ship's veranda window, the trouble with them was that they were always the same. Maugham records that when he first saw the Taj Mahal, he felt an ineffable surprise and joy; but on the following day, it was only a beautiful building. He had seen it before.

Samson had been in space for something over half his lifetime. Accordingly, when the communicator bell rang, it shattered no meditations on the relations of Man to Nature; on the contrary, Samson, uncoiling himself and walking through the doorway into the lounge, carried with him the firm mental image of a ham sandwich, with relish and mustard.

"Let's hear it," he said.

Obediently, the communicator uncorked a quiet male voice: "Harlow calling the Samsons. Acknowledge if you're awake, will you? Over."

Midge appeared at the opposite end of the room, brushing a strand of black hair back from her forehead. "We read you, Harlow," said Samson. "Go ahead. Over." The light-tube which encircled the ceiling, having turned pink at Harlow's "Over," glowed spectrum-white again at Samson's, indicating that the communicator was ready to receive.

"Something?" said Midge, coming forward.

Samson waved his hand at her, palm down, in a gesture that meant "Shut up and listen." Simultaneously, Harlow's voice began again: "I'll give you the story, anyhow; you can pick it up from the cube later if you're not reading me now. Kids, this Kenilworth thing is a lot bigger than it looked two days ago. It may be even bigger than I think it is now, in which case we'll all have to start digging hidey-holes. It's all yours—I haven't got anybody else within two weeks' run of the place. So listen."

There was a pause and a click, which Samson identified as the sound of Harlow's teeth gripping his ever-present pipe. Then, "Here's the call I got from Jackson, the Kenilworth deputy. That was three days ago. I don't think there's anything in it that I missed, but I'll let you decide that. It came in at three-oh-five hours G.T."

A younger voice said excitedly, "Jackson, Kenilworth IV, calling Harlow, Slice 103 H.Q. Urgent. Harlow, hold onto your hair. The Kassids are back. Over to you."

Harlow's recorded voice, sounding sleepy, answered: "Better hold onto yours. Who are the Kassids, and what if they're back? I didn't even know they were gone. Over."

"Who are the Kassids! Just the big medicine men of Slices 42, 43, 102 and 103, is all! See your manual, page 9581 et seq. They landed on KenilFour ten days ago; I just got the message. It seems the local boys told them about me as soon as they got past the language difficulty, and they're anxious to meet me. I'm going over there now—call you back in about six hours. Over."

"Give them a big, juicy kiss for me," said Harlow. "Clearing."

His voice began again immediately: "You can look up the Kassids in the manual; I had to. They're a legend, a group of legends, fifteen thousand years old. At that point, my opinion was either that a gang of backwoods Messiahs were passing themselves off as 'Kassids' in hopes of gain and glory, or else that some of Jackson's charges were playing a big fat joke on him. So I rolled over and went back to sleep. The only thing is, Jackson never called back.

"I waited twenty-four hours and then alerted you. It still didn't look big. Jackson might have crash-landed somewhere and broken his leg. Or he might have got hold of some local antiquities and forgotten to eat, sleep, breathe or say his prayers. Nothing else happened until several hours ago. Then this came in, from an experimental organics outfit on Loblich VII."

The Samsons listened to a high, exasperated voice complaining that a maniac named Jackson had landed at the station, 'preached a kind of a sermon,' and taken off again with seventeen of the group's twenty-two members. The group was now hopelessly undermanned; eight years' work would be ruined unless H.Q. sent them trained replacements sooner than immediately.

Harlow demanded more information. What had Jackson's 'sermon' consisted of, exactly?

"He talked about Love," said the organics man irritably. "And Peace—and a Message for the Universe. Stuff like that. If you ask me, the man's insane. And if you want to know why three-quarters of this outfit dumped their work and walked out with him, don't ask me. When do we get those replacements?"

There was another pause, punctuated by the click of pipestem against teeth. "Now that," said Harlow, "began to seem a little smelly. If you'll look at the tank, you'll see that Loblich is the nearest human settlement to Kenilworth, and it's a long jump—Jackson must have blasted at maximum to get there in two and a half days. But from Loblich to any of three well-settled systems is just a hop.

"So I got the signal pattern of Jackson's ship out of the files and had a warning broadcast to all the patrol centers in 103 and adjoining Slices. I also started a call going out to Jackson at twenty-minute intervals. He didn't answer it. That was all, until fifteen minutes ago.

"Jackson turned up in a landing orbit around Xavier III. The local patrol put a beam on him and warned him not to land. But instead of shunting into a parking orbit and waiting for instructions, as he was told, Jackson headed for open space under full drive.

"The patrol burned him out of the sky. There was nothing left to pick up."

This time the pause was longer. "If he had landed," Harlow's tired voice said finally, "and if he'd got anything like the same percentage of response in a larger group, this thing would already be too big to stop. I tell myself that." The Samsons could hear his teeth grating against the pipestem. "All right, that's all I can give you," he said after a moment. "Land on KenilFour, get in touch with these Kassids, talk to them and find out what this is all about and how they do it. I've got two cruisers and a battleship on the way from the naval station in Kleinmuller, and if it turns out that they'll do any good, they'll be there in fifteen days. But we've got to have more information. And just incidentally, don't let them sell you whatever they sold Jackson. If you do, I can't offer you any guarantee you won't end up the way he did." There was a thump, and then a gargling noise that meant Harlow was sucking on an empty pipe. "Take every precaution you can think of," he finished. "Keep in continuous touch after you land. Over."

"Check, Papa," said Samson. "Clearing."

Samson, who was tall, beefy and blond, looked at Midge, dark and apparently fragile, who was curled into a very small ball among the cushions on the other side of the room. "Did you know Jackson?" he asked.

She nodded soberly. "A very good boy," she said.

"M-hm. You got that manual?"

"Here." She put the cube into the reader set into the table in front of her, and began scanning for page 9581. Samson walked over and sat beside her.

There was a good deal about the Kassids, also known as the Akassa, the Ksits, the Karsis, the Krassit, the Karss and the Krathis. All the older races in this section of the galaxy had legends about them. It was not particularly surprising that Harlow had had to look them up; they were just one item among the tangled mass of folk-legend and myth that had been gleaned from a thousand inhabited worlds.

Nobody, said the manual, knew whether the Kassids had been a historic culture or a widespread myth. They were magicians, or demigods, or, as Jackson had put it, big medicine men; they were purer and nobler than anybody else, they knew more about everything, they could change their shapes at will, et cetera. The fact that more than five hundred planets had the same or similar legends proved nothing, because all the races in question, dull as they were, had had limited interstellar travel millenia before the arrival of Man. Most of the legends agreed that the Kassids had gone away, amid weeping and wailing from the lesser tribes, some fifteen thousand years ago.

But now they were back—and something they had done to Jackson had made him leave his post, and caused seventeen other people to leave theirs, and had got them all killed.

"I won't say I like it much," Midge said. "How are you fixed for ideas?"

"Information first," said Samson didactically; "ideas after." He added, not to Midge, "Take a message."

The light-tube glowed pink.

"Charles Samson to Head Librarian, Lubyanka Central Archives. Urgent. Request all available material on the Kassids, K-A-S-S-I-D-S. Don't digest it—put it straight through on facsimile. Over to you."

He clipped a fresh cube into the receiver in the center of the room. After twenty minutes, a female voice said, "Information coming through. Over." The recording light glowed; Samson turned on the reader and glanced at the page of type that appeared on the screen. "I read you. Thanks. Clearing."

"Coffee, chef," said Midge resignedly. "And two ham sandwiches." She came over and sat beside Samson. "Hold that page till I finish it."

Samson was a man with an open mind, a faculty which served him well in dealing with the weird and wild inhabitants of many planets in Slice 103, but which, it occurred to him, was not just the thing wanted for the task in hand. He kept his misgivings to himself, however, and aided by numerous steaming pots of coffee served up by the ship's autochef, bored his way determinedly through the twenty tubes of surmise, conjecture and hearsay provided by Lubyanka Archives. Midge, who had a female-superiority complex, sat and took it alongside him, cube for cube.

When they had finished, as Midge took the trouble to remind him, they had learned next to nothing that wasn't in the Slice 103 manual. "A total loss, wasn't it?" she demanded.

"Sure. Just a precaution; there might have been something in there that the manual skipped. If it doesn't rain one Sunday, do you give up wearing waterproofs?"

Midge's expression indicated that the question deserved no answer. "You've had your information—now have you got any ideas?"

"Well," said Samson reflectively, "Harlow seems to think there's some kind of compulsion involved, maybe hypnotic. I don't see how we can exclude the possibility, even though that kind of contact between alien minds is supposed to be impossible. But I've got a hunch that's not it. I think maybe they simply talked to Jackson—they convinced him—and he did the same to the seventeen that followed him."

"In my own fumbling way," said Midge, "I got that far three hours ago. Because if it was compulsion of any kind, why did it only work on seventeen out of twenty-two? I even made a stab at answering another little technical question—why didn't Jackson use the communicator?"

"That's easy enough," said Samson. "If you got a call from somebody you didn't know, and he started spouting pseudo-religious propaganda at you, would you listen quietly until he was finished, or would you cut him off and complain to the Privacy Commission? And if he'd called anybody who knew him—you or Harlow, for example—we would have smelled something. Jackson might have found himself cut off before he ever left Kenilworth, if he'd tried that. He couldn't take the chance."

"But if you don't mind," Midge said coolly, "what I meant by my question was, have you got any ideas about what we're going to do?"

"Sure. I'll go in there doped to the eyebrows. I'll use—"

"Wait," said Midge. "Please. You said, 'I'll go in?'"

"That's right. I go in; you stay in the ship and watch. You also listen, but through a whisper mike—you'll hear everything I say but not what the other fellow says. In other words, I go over the cliff, you hold my legs. Catch on?"

Midge said nothing.

"As I was saying, I'll use antihypnotics, and you might as well give me a good dose of countersuggestion, too, but those are just playing it safe. What I'm counting on to do the stunt is arnophrene."

"Arnophrene!" Midge stared at him.

"Sure. In heavy dosage, the stuff inhibits your ability to add two and two. You can follow an argument, in pieces, and even make reasonably intelligent replies, but you can't hang onto it long enough to put it all together. In other words, if they convince me of anything, it'll be on the order of 'Your nose is on the front of your face'... I'll be sick as a dog afterwards, of course, and I may not remember much of what they feed me. But you can hold my head, and drag the information out of me under hypno if you have to. Remember to be careful what you ask for, in that case—we want to know who these people are and what they're up to, not what they think about the Great Spirit."

Midge kept looking at him somberly. "I don't like it," she said.

"I don't like it either. Neither will Harlow, if he has to get me burned down for trying to save souls ... although, come to think of it, I can think of ways to play it smarter than Jackson did. Make a phony report, duck out somewhere along the line between here and H.Q., and then find me a nice uninhabited planet to hide on for a while. Pirate another ship later, maybe; wear a false beard." He sighed. "But, come to think of it again, I guess all that has occurred to Harlow, too."

He looked at Midge. "What'll you do if I should get sold before you can yank me out of there?"

Her eyes were steadier than her husband's. "Follow you down and buy myself a tambourine," she said. "What did you think?"

Midge's small hands were painfully tight on the edge of the control panel. On the screen before her, reproduced with excellent fidelity in spite of the transmitter's peanut size, appeared whatever Samson was seeing: at the moment, the interior of a bronze-green room and two of the roly-poly, stumpy-legged tentacled autochthons of Kenilworth IV. She could see Samson's hands, whenever he happened to raise them; she could not see his face.

On a smaller screen to the left was a view from a pickup in the ship's hull—a grassy plain, seen from above, with a huge, black, lozenge-shaped spaceship and a cluster of the little KenilFour air-cars.

Samson's voice remarked, "They say the Kassid is coming now."

Midge wanted to say something encouraging and affectionate, but her voice stuck in her throat.

After a moment, a doorway dilated at the end of the pictured room and something hopped in. For the benefit of the listening Harlow at H.Q., Midge began to describe it. "About a meter and a half tall—must be an oxygen breather, I can't see any mask—it's a uniped. Moves partly by hopping, partly by contracting its foot. Rather thick trunk and four limbs besides the foot, two at the very top, two where the trunk joins the leg. A lot of flabby fingers, can't tell how many. Three eyes in a horizontal line, vertical mouth under them. No clothes. Whole thing a dull tan color, with dark pa—"

A doorway dilated and something hopped in.

She broke off, as Samson began to speak. He was evidently replying to the Kassid's speech of welcome. "I'm very happy to be here. My people have heard great things of you from your pupil, David Jackson."

Another long pause, during which Midge said, "Dark patches, apparently at random—no pattern. I would guess the thing to be recently evolved from an undersea stage, tail altered to a foot. Don't know whether there are any exterior organs on the other side—there, it turned around for a minute. No organs. Now the KenilFours are leaving...."

Samson said, "That's why I came."

Another pause, and then, "Yes, thank you." Something that ran on a great many thin, twinkling legs brought in a low stool and ran out again. The interview went on, a meaningless sequence of short questions and comments by Samson, each followed by a long silence. "Yes, of course, that's true." ... "I see" ... "How clear that is now" ... "But in the case of war" ... After a while, Samson's speech began to grow a little thick. He stumbled over occasional words, but always recovered.

After a long time, Samson said, "The word will be spread. My government will want to know about your needs and your history, so that we can receive you properly. Will you show me through your ship, and tell me something about yourselves?" The view turned toward the doorway, approached it and went through into a long corridor.

Midge closed the sending circuit between herself and Samson. "Charlie, are you all right?" she whispered. If he was acting, she told herself miserably, it was a magnificent performance. Under the fuzziness of his speech was something else ... an awe, a quiet joy.

"All right, Midge," said Samson's voice quietly, naturally. "Don't worry."

A long succession of rooms: control chamber, power plant, a garden with plants unlike any that Midge had seen before, star charts, transparent tanks full of murky fluid ... Samson's hand, and a narrow strip of something being put into it. Patterns of dots on the strip. Samson's voice: "What does it mean?" Then more corridors, more rooms. Finally Samson's voice again, weak and hollow. "Feeling rocky, Midge. Coming out."

It was Harlow's voice asking, "How is he now?" The "now" was an irony, since even at second-order speeds, his voice had taken fourteen minutes to reach them, and he would not hear the answer for another fourteen.

Samson, in orange pajamas, very pale, said, "Ready to talk, Papa." He looked at the ceiling. "Don't think I need the hypno. I can remember most of it. Fuzzy—a dreamlike quality to it—but I think it's almost all there."

"I've already had you under hypno," said Midge quietly. "As soon as I got you inside."

Samson turned his head to look at her. "So? What for?"

"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."

Harlow's voice came back. "Sounds stinking. Anything else?"

"One more thing," Samson told him. "This slip of plastic they handed me as a souvenir. They gave me a verbal translation, and I remember it word for word. It's a dictionary entry: 'Man, noun. A pentagonal, dipolar, monoplane dominant of intelligence 96'—that's on their scale with the average Kassid race at 100—'native of District so-and-so.' The significance of it, from their point of view, is the '96.' It's the first time they've been able to make an entry over 75 in the last twelve or fourteen hundred years."

He frowned. "When I first got back and Midge neutralized the drugs, I thought of it, and it seemed to me there might be an answer there. A definition describes the observer as well as the thing observed. That seemed like a brilliant thought to me at the time, but I can't see any help in it now." He blinked unhappily. "All it seems to say is that they've got a superficial and oversimplified system of classification, meaning that physical structure isn't important to them—which we know already ... my guess would be, incidentally, that the one who talked to me was picked because the Kassids thought I'd feel at home with it. It had five extremities, although none of them was a head; it had a top and bottom and it faced in one direction. Ergo, it looked just like a man. Over."

Midge said thoughtfully, "It's funny. If they were so geometrical about it, why didn't they say bisexual?"

Samson chortled. "You would—" he began, and stopped abruptly, with a stricken expression. "Wait a minute," he said. "Cancel the over. Everybody shut up, even you, Harlow. The Midget has said something."

Midge seemed to be trying to look indignant, pleased in spite of herself.

"Harlow, Midge," said Samson slowly after a time, "there's one other thing about life in this universe that's been puzzling us for the last six centuries. We know now that it has nothing to do with the intelligence level, but we still don't know why everybody else but us reproduces by simple division, budding, spores or conjugation—and in consequence, lives a damn sight longer than we do, almost long enough to make up for their low native intelligence. But just suppose that Earth really is a freak planet—suppose that even the Kassids have never run into a bisexual organism before. I didn't mention it to them, and I'm willing to bet Jackson didn't either. You know how tough it is to explain to a xeno—it generally takes ten days to convince them you're not kidding. And, Harlow—suppose that I go down there again, and take Midge along...."

When they re-entered the ship, Harlow's voice was saying, "Are you there, Charles and Midge? Speak up, dammit. Over."

The Samsons looked at each other, glassy-eyed. "With you in a minute, Harlow," Samson croaked, and lurched after Midge into the sick bay. Both of them were full of arnophrene—Samson's second dose within two hours, and an extra-heavy one for Midge.

They staggered into the living chamber again, some time later, and collapsed on opposite sides of the couch.

"Never again," said Midge faintly.

Samson wet his lips. "It worked, Papa. They swallowed it. I gave Midge enough of the stuff to make her about twice as disconnected as usual. I walked in with a long face and told them that the change had started in my absence. They wanted to know what change. I pointed to Midge, and we stripped for them. They may not be interested in shapes, but there was enough difference there to make them take notice. They called a conference, and probed and poked and x-rayed us. I told them the story of the caterpillar and the butterfly. Or the nymph and the waterbug, I should say. You're the ugliest and dumbest member of this family, Midge."

Midge made an inarticulate sound.

"I told them we're a two-stage organism," Samson said. "One stage builds all the tall buildings, writes all the novels, does all the high-class thinking. The other stage reproduces. I said we have a forty-thousand-year cycle, half to each, but the first stage always tries to retard the metamorphosis, because the second stage is so stupid that it ruins our civilization every time, and we have to start from scratch. I said I was awfully sorry, but the change had come earlier than we expected this time, and there was nothing we could do about it ... they're going off to the great nebula in Andromeda. Maybe they'll find sixteen quintillion brainy races there, and they'll never come back. The other way, at least we've got twenty thousand years to think up another gag."

He sighed. "All right, Papa. Over."

Fourteen slow minutes went by. Samson and his wife looked at each other and said nothing.

The Kassids had tried converting Midge, to see if she were as moronic as described. Midge had reacted properly, being so befuddled that she could hardly work her way through a sentence; but she had heard a faint echo of the Word.

Harlow said, "I don't know what to say to you, kids. You'll be remembered for this, both of you. A long time. History's been a dull subject for the last few centuries, but this will liven it up. I don't think anybody will hesitate to call it a major victory. Over."

Samson smiled, bitterly and sadly.

"That depends," he said, "on how you define 'victory'."

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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Definition, by Damon Knight

DEFINITION

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