The Project Gutenberg eBook of The right side of the tracks

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Title: The right side of the tracks

Author: Albert Teichner

Illustrator: George Schelling

Release date: December 5, 2023 [eBook #72338]

Language: English

Original publication: New York, NY: Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, 1963

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/72338

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE TRACKS ***

The Nodarians weren't planning a revolt.

Nor had the planet been captured by aliens.

If they were obstinately silent, it was

simply because they now lived on ...

THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE TRACKS

By ALBERT TEICHNER

Illustrated by SCHELLING

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Amazing Stories May 1963.

Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that

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

For the last week they had been hovering a half-million miles out from the Terra-scale planet and now all fifty men aboard the Probe were agreed that it was time to land and investigate the place at closer hand. Even Dr. Stern, the perennial pessimist, felt the inhabitants still looked human through the electroscope. While hopelessly blurred by such distance magnification, these two-legged, two-armed beings showed nothing dangerously different from men on any other member planet of the Galactic Glia.

But why did these seeming fellow creatures want to be by themselves in total isolation?

Every schoolboy knows that each of the ten thousand human planets signals all the others once each galactic hour—even if there is no information to exchange except the carrier signal itself. Just as each neuron in a brain maintains some electrical contact with every other. From this infinite openness of pathways, the schoolboy will explain to you, comes the adaptability of both the individual mind and human civilization in general, the ability to concentrate everything on whatever problem is at hand.

Yet here was Nodar refusing to answer the universal signals for years at a time. There was something menacing about this non-conformity and Supreme Council had carefully considered all possibilities before dispatching the Probe. These had boiled down to a painful set of alternatives: either an alien species, commencing the building of an empire, had seized the planet; or the Nodarians, turned primitive for some unknown reason, were hiding behind the wall of silence to mount their own attack on the rest of the human universe.

"Alien seizure, my foot!" Commander Linder told the rest of the crew now. "Those are men down there, men working up some anti-social mischief we truly civilized people can't even imagine."

"Mischief? We just don't know that it is," Stern sighed through his grey, brush mustache. "Do we, Commander?"

"It can't be anything good," Linder snapped. The other officers nodded their agreement.

"Suppose they've become indifferent," Stern persisted, "and just want to be left by themselves?"

Linder gave a sour laugh as he moved down the catwalk, throwing one communication circuit after another to ON position. "I imagine they're going to play very coy before we wangle an answer out of them—but not because they're indifferent, Stern. It's impossible for people to be indifferent to their fellows—cooperation or hate, those are the two possibilities, and Nodar alone refuses to cooperate. Why should they be indifferent? What could they have to develop beside the universe of people around them?"

"I don't know," Stern conceded. "I don't even think my explanation's the likely one—yours is—but we do have to consider everything."

"In—dif—fe—rent," Linder repeated, provoking laughter from his crew. He whirled his bulky frame around with the usual surprising ease and snapped a receiving screen on. "Look at it again, look at what we've been picking up from them the last six days. I think they've known we're up here all along—deliberately pulling wool over our eyes."

To the tune of running squeaks and rumbles unshaped colors flowed across the screen mixed with equally shapeless flickers of black and white. "Certainly looks deliberate," said young Crawford who was Linder's second in command but not ordinarily one of the yesman chorus. "Doctor, as our Chief Semanticist, do you get any message at all out of that stuff?"

"No," he conceded again.

"The lack of a message," said the Commander, "there's your only message. A slap in our faces and a kick in our teeth!" His jaw tightened. "Even if it means our finish, we've got to go down there and find out what we can. Council will be receiving all our information on the fastest hyperspace beam unless and until Nodar cuts us off. Now let's get the job done!"

Stern was the first to applaud and every man there followed suit. They had spent a gruelling three months at speeds far beyond that of light and were impatient to be finished with the assignment. Their eyes gleamed with barely-suppressed anger as Linder started calling Nodar. "We are from Supreme Council. We wish to land. Our mission is charity but we insist on the right to land."

He had just begun to repeat the message when the prompt response came through, ungarbled. "Land any time. You have been out there one week, three hours, eighteen minutes, three seconds and never bothered to call us! You could have come in at any time."

"They have known all along!" There was a great outburst of indignation. "Those meatheads making fun of us!"

Linder held down the local sender at OFF while he turned to Stern. "A good sign for our safety, though, heh?"

"Yes," Stern agreed emphatically. "If they wanted to pull us into a trap they wouldn't be annoying us at this stage. They probably won't throw any obstacles in our way when we leave."

Linder nodded and pointed at Barnes. "Your team will keep communications open and we'll get data back to Terra as long as we can."

The stubby man saluted smartly and left with his five aides for Message Center.

"Go down to 18,000, sir?" Crawford asked. "18.9 should give us the best descent trajectory."

"First I'll notify them. We're dealing with a touchy bunch. An unannounced hyperdrive boom might send them into some nasty defense scramble." He spoke into his wrist microphone. "Hello, Nodar. Hello, Nodar. This is Commander Linder speaking, Linder of the Probe. We are coming down within the next two hours. This will necessitate a brief return to hyperspace and there—."

"We will anticipate the visual boom," chuckled a deep voice behind which interweaving lines of squeaks were running. "Our calculation for your best trajectory in normal space is for you to come back to it at 18.3846 thousand miles. You will then be square on our landing beam. Good luck."

"Maybe they've forgotten their galactic good manners," Stern smiled, "but not their navigation."

The Commander disregarded him. Shifting from normal space and back was always physiologically disruptive, if only slightly so each time, and every long voyager, according to his specific makeup, was allotted a limited number of such shifts before being retired from the service. A shame to use any of it up on such a short hop but from now on this diplomatic transaction had to be handled rapidly, so rapidly that Nodar could not anticipate every move.

He pressed the field-shift button.

A few minutes later they were back in normal space, coasting on Nodar's landing beam. "Doesn't make sense," Stern insisted. "The beam's perfectly clear yet every other signal we've picked up is a complete garble."

"I told you—they were just throwing sand in our eyes."

"But Barnes says the garbles were all ground-to-ground signals, thousands of different ones and none for us. They still know standard Galactese when they speak directly to us."

The Probe was down to 14 thousand, moving smoothly, and the Commander sympathetically patted the semanticist's shoulder. "There's no call on your specialty, that's what's worrying you. Mustn't go introspective on us now, eh?"

"I'm not sure I mustn't, sir," he stood firm. "But I won't."

"Good enough. In the final analysis the doing's what counts, I always say, not the thinking."

He leaned over the navigation screen, propping himself on his two stiffly outstretched arms, and Stern knew he was no longer there for Linder, not while the Commander concentrated on the problem of landing the Probe. Stern moved along the catwalk past the open doorway of the Message Center to the curving permaquartz window from which the descent could be studied. As he watched Nodar's features rise toward him, first silver blue, then breaking into broad continents of green and tan and brown with brilliant clusters of metropolitan lights here and there on the night side, he kept wondering about all those meaningless picture signals they had intercepted. On Terra there had been a dangerous cult of non-communication way back in the late twentieth century, at the very time man's greatest era was dawning. But that, everyone realized today, was due to neurotic fear of the grandeur—and responsibilities—ahead. Could a whole planet still go neurotic?

It was a terrible question and he brooded on it, wondering how ruthless the Council's treatment must be to bring this civilization back to normalcy. Certainly it was a question to keep from Linder as long as possible; his tendency toward prompt and decisive action had to be checked as much as possible.

Then they were landing, the anti-gravity jets letting the Probe sink slowly into the waiting cradle until it stood still against the usual manscape of one- and two-hundred story buildings. "Stern to the bridge," Linder called on the intercom. "You'd better be part of the landing delegation—just in case they really are in symbol trouble."

"Thank you, sir!" Stern replied, grateful, and hurried to the bridge.

There were eight men in this first group to leave the craft. They started across the vast and empty checkerboard area leading from the gantry to the sparkling Reception Center building. At least in one respect, despite three decades of increasingly erratic behavior, Nodar was following standard procedure; interstellar spaceports always were laid out in huge black and white squares. From the distance which was emphasized by this linear perspective a solitary figure was coming toward them square by square.

Stern was the first to pinpoint the thing making the official greeter's walk so peculiar. His arms, instead of moving to the rhythm of his advancing body, were swinging back and forth at separate rates of speed. As the figure came closer, the Commander muttered: "It looks as if he's playing some kind of gymnastic game by himself. I don't think he cares whether we're here or not—a fine greeting, I must say!"

Then they could see the smiling (or was it smiling?) face. "Something odd about his eyes too," Crawford said.

"No, the eyes are all right," Barnes insisted. "He's anatomically normal but you got that impression because only one side of his face is smiling and the other's kind of expressionless, almost bored!"

He was still striding toward them, a handsome man well over seven feet as planetary hospitality officials were supposed to be, and his left hand, the more-rapidly swinging one, was making elaborate arabesques in the air.

"Crazy habit," said the Commander, "never seen the likes of that before."

"The eyes are peculiar," Stern said in a low voice to the rest of the group, "and I'll tell you why. Every once in a while they blink out of step with each other."

"No," said Barnes, "I don't see anything like that. There—they just blinked together. And there, together ag—no, I'm not sure this time!"

But Barnes withdrew his aggressive stare and fell silent as the Nodarian came closer. Dressed in the same sheath garments as the visitors, he was now beaming at them on both sides of his face. "We are glad to welcome ancient brothers. My given name is Jackson," he said in a deep, full voice and extended the right hand to Linder who was resplendent in the gold sash of Space Commander, while his other hand continued to play gracefully up and around and down and under and up, moulding air to instantly vanishing shapes.

Linder, a little dubious, accepted the greeting. "We have been eager to visit here. Contact has been so infrequent and Glia's Supreme Council has wondered—." He stopped because Jackson's eyes had drifted away. The man seemed to be listening either to some vigorous mathemusic that had started up on the main building's PA system or some other music, much more languid, coming from another direction. "I said, Greeter Jackson, that contact has been so infrequent and—."

"Oh, I heard everything you said," the Nodarian nodded patiently, still not bothering to focus his gaze on him.

The Commander fumed at the indignity but remained silent. Stern hastily filled the gap. "I'm official semanticist for the expedition," he said, himself disconcerted by the brief flicker of something like disdain at one corner of Jackson's smile. "Well, I can see my services in that capacity won't be essential here—." "—certainly not," Barnes boomed. "—but I would like to say we have come here principally to ascertain whether you are in any difficulties which the combined resources of Glia's Council might help you face."

"We in any difficulties!" Jackson laughed. "We need no other planet's help. How could you help us?"

"I hardly call that a polite greeting!" Linder exploded. "Certainly not an appreciative one. Galactic practice states you people should signal every hour on a universal pulse line. Out of ten thousand settled zones yours is the only one in violation. And now you receive us with arrogance and—and—hand-circle waving!"

The left hand's movements slowed down but did not stop while Jackson's steel blue eyes settled, unnervingly blinkless now, on them. "No, I guess you're not ready for it," he cryptically announced. The smile came back, even warmer than before, but they were still a little shaken as he bade them follow. "One pupil," Stern whispered to the Commander, "one pupil was more dilated than the other!"

"Don't I have enough problems without your fantasies?" Linder came back crossly. "Cut it out."

"You heard what the Commander said," Barnes joined in, more menacing than his superior.

Stern considered the Message Center Chief with contempt. The broad-beamed runt was basking in his usual reflected-glory routine, cultivating the Commander's favor by encouraging his natural impulsiveness. A fine example of cooperation we can set for anyone else! he thought bitterly.

But, like the others, he was quickly distracted from personal problems by what became apparent as soon as they entered Reception's building. Inside, it had a rundown appearance, nothing you could precisely put your finger on but the paint seemed slightly faded, and chairs, lockers, tables, in fact all objects, had a very slightly worn appearance. This was something no other planet permitted to happen; Reception was the place travellers saw first and every normal planet wanted to make a good initial impression.

The people, though, there was the real reason for feeling that everything was sloppy, lax. Groups of officials and onlookers were milling about the great center hall area but they hardly seemed to notice their guests. Many of them had listening devices in their ears and their eyes wandered about even more outrageously than did Jackson's while everywhere there were hands making pointless gestures.

"Look at that computer!" Linder snorted, beside himself with disgust. "It must be half out!"

The eight men gaped at the machine, standard spaceport size, that covered one wall. Here and there dial plates had fallen away, revealing disrupted wire circuits. "In the name of Council," Linder snapped, "I'm telling you to get that Thinker fixed."

"Oh, it's in good enough shape," Jackson yawned. "We don't need the whole thing functioning."

"And I'm ordering you to need the whole thing! No wonder we haven't been receiving regular signals."

People within earshot were grinning and turning away. "Commander—"

"Linder. L-I—"

"No need to spell anything out for us ever, sir. As I said, we don't need the whole thing. We could fix it easily enough any time the necessity arose. But it never will again, I assure you."

"Let's go to your Central Headquarters so I can settle this with someone in authority!"

"There isn't anybody in authority." He considered the Commander's puzzled expression. "Because everyone is capable of authority."

Barnes roared with humorless laughter and waved his hand at a few men gaping toward a wall. "These characters capable of authority?"

A few briefly swung eyes toward them, then back to the wall. "You people certainly are not ready," Jackson sighed. "Well, come along anyway, I'll show you Central Headquarters, such as it is now."

They followed him into the street, gawking at an area robot control computer on the central island. It, too, had sections of broken plating with unattached wires crazily dangling.

"Some kind of robot revolt?" Crawford whispered to Stern.

"Looks like it could be," Stern agreed. "You can't adequately control thinking robots without area computers mediating their activities. But still—there's never been a robot revolt. Maybe something else peculiar explains—"

Jackson who had been listening to music on an ear set turned around and said, "Of course you can control them without area computers. I mean, we can. Anyway we don't need so many robots now."

Barnes was about to register another vehement protest but his chief shook his head and whispered, "No use, there's something the matter with this one. I'll have him disciplined as soon as I talk to the top people."

"Why are you turning this into a diplomatic prestige match?" Stern broke in, his voice even lower than the others. "There's something more important going on here. Didn't you notice what those types in Reception were gawking at?"

"Us!" Barnes snorted.

"No, there was some kind of smear of light flowing across the wall and every once in a while I thought I saw one or two words!"

"For the last time, Stern," and this time Linder's voice was loud enough to echo from a building across the narrowing street, "last time, Stern, no more morbid talk—more morbid talk—." The words, coming back like a kind of self-mockery, threw him off his verbal stride and he fell silent, satisfying himself with the chance to glare at the semanticist. Who the devil needed a symbol specialist on a mission like this anyway?

They turned into a huge plaza where the echo phenomenon ceased, but the same sloppiness attracted their attention as had been the case at the spaceport. The pavement approach to Nodar's Central Headquarters was evenly laid out but, wherever repairs had been made, there was no sign of an attempt to cover the patches up and maintain pleasing visual symmetry. "There'll have to be a Glia Expeditionary Force," Linder muttered, unable to remain silent in the face of such deliberate disorganization. "They're suffering from some weird disease. They'll need all the help every planet can send."

At this Jackson, who had not seemed to be listening, turned around and gave them all the most icy glance they had ever encountered. Then he nodded his head into an angelic smile. Linder, refusing to be cowed, strode to the insolent greeter's side and entered the building ahead of him. A few seconds later he whirled around and came back to the other seven who by now were just about to step into the place. "They've made some kind of movie madhouse of their planetary headquarters!" he muttered, stunned. "Come and see for yourselves."

They did. The hall they entered was monumentally vast like all planetary centers, to express the majesty and prestige of its function. It was partially darkened and hundreds of men and women were lounging about on chairs and sofas, talking to each other while looking at the wall at one end of the building. This wall was covered for several hundred yards with blobs rapidly sinking toward the floor and similar patches reappearing near the ceiling while words, mathematical symbols, three-dimensional color patterns and other disconnected symbols streamed in and out of the confusion to add the final touch of chaos. Many of the viewers were also eating and here and there were even young couples necking as they watched the wall.

Once in a while somebody seemed to look straight at the party that had entered but the glance was always brief. "This is the limit," Barnes said. "Commander, Council prestige is at stake here."

"No, let's try to stay calm," Stern insisted, "we're surrounded by potentially hostile people and—"

"Are you afraid?" Barnes taunted him.

"You know that's not it," the taller man came back. "I just think we ought to try to find some sense to all this."

"I think you are afraid," Linder broke in. "Fine analysis jobs our psychology people are doing these days! They're supposed to weed out every fearmonger before a hyperspace team takes off." He leaned toward Stern, all his frustrations finally achieving a point of focus. "You'll never get another expedition if we make it back. Get this straight—my job isn't primarily to protect our hides. It's to make obvious to our hosts that Glia Council is supreme everywhere, the one, ultimate institution for maintaining stability throughout the Galaxy."

Jackson, for the first time, was giving all of his attention to them. "You have a complaint, Commander?" he said. "Why not address it to me? Don't worry about being violently treated. We want you to get back to Terra with the news."

Arms akimbo, Linder faced the alien unflinchingly. "Space voyagers don't worry about their personal safety. I demand," his voice rose to a shout that reverberated unpleasantly through the soaring vault, "I demand we get the respect, the total attention, due to a delegation from Glia. We are not here in search of violence and you know it. Glia missions have always been peaceful and to help our fellows. But there is such a thing as carrying matters too far and you Nodarians are threatening to do it with your disrespect for what we represent!"

They were receiving many more glances, all filled with distaste, from members of the audience. But the glances remained brief and Barnes shouted in an equally stentorian voice, "We demand your attention! Contact must be resumed!"

Now some shouts echoed back at them. "You're boring us!" "Stop your yawnmaking!" "Nothing worse than an inferior level of intelligence!"

Jackson, never taking his hypnotic gaze from his guests, gracefully waved his hands and the Nodarians fell silent. Many of them returned to their former activities but about fifteen formed a circle about the visitors. "We are agreed?" the greeter said to his compatriots. They all nodded.

"Good." He turned to Linder and Barnes. "As I said before to you, you're really not ready yet for what we are hoping to tell you and we have our own work to continue, work that will never menace anyone. Some day, in fact, gratitude will ring from one end of the Galaxy to the other."

"But I don't see," Stern wondered aloud, "why you have to withdraw from contact with all the other planets if your plans are so innocuous."

"At this point," Jackson smiled, "it doesn't matter one way or the other so we have not bothered. Our isolation did minimize the danger of interference. We are not afraid of contact—we just don't need it now."

"Isn't that a rather selfish attitude?"

"Not at all. We're working to something which will, as I said, widen the scope of everyone everywhere. We don't threaten you and you cannot threaten us."

"Keep out of this, Stern." The Commander moved closer to the other man. "As for you, Jackson, I view this ingathering of your friends as a kind of threat."

Jackson grinned. "Yes, slightly. Your manners as a guest have been very bad. You have been childishly annoyed by what you cannot understand and you will be childishly treated, all of you except the man who has been talking a little more sensibly to me." With that he easily picked the Commander up, fell back into a chair and turned Linder over to give him a few sharp whacks. While Stern looked on helplessly, others grabbed Barnes and the rest, in each case administering a brief spanking. Even as the Nodarians spanked away most of them continued to look toward the movie wall for a further supply of irrationality.

A minute later the red-faced visitors were set back on their feet while most of their mild assailants walked away, each laughing on one side of his face or the other. Jackson held two empty palms toward them. "You see—nothing else. You are free to go."

Linder struggled to reassert his dignity. "This isn't the end of the matter."

"Of course not, Commander. Some day we'll reestablish the contact you so ardently desire. Very peacefully too."

"Council will not wait that long," Linder said over his shoulder as he stalked away.

They returned to the ship in silence and when those who had remained on board demanded to know what had happened Linder insisted they be told nothing. "The matter," he said ominously, "will be settled when we reach Terra. Stern, you're to keep silent too. Council is going to be very interested in finding out why you received such favored treatment."

"But, Commander, I think I have a slight idea what this is all about—"

"Not interested in your ideas," Linder said angrily, striding away. "Tell them to Council."

"I don't have the equipment in my cabin to work the analysis out."

"Silence!" Linder had turned at the door of Stern's cabin and was glaring at him. "I don't want to hear a word from you the rest of this voyage."

Stern sighed and calmly sat down at his desk to make some preliminary calculations. It would probably work out all right; after a few days in hyperspace Linder would come to him, more or less his old congenial self, and this prohibition would be quickly forgotten.

But it did not work out that way. Every time Stern started a conversation with the Commander or Barnes they stared unresponsively at him and even Crawford sometimes backed away, trying to exchange as few words as possible.

One day Linder approached the permaquartz window to find Stern, deep in thought, muttering to himself some ancient rhyme about Patty cake, patty cake, baker man. Oblivious to everything else about him, Stern was holding his right hand above his head and his left close to his stomach. The right hand, palm downward was moving in a clockwise direction while the other went anti-clockwise, but at the words Baker man the movement of both hands was abruptly reversed. For a while Linder watched these reversals, sometimes inaccurately changed into both clockwise or both anti-clockwise movements. Finally he said "Hmmph!" and strode away, leaving Stern standing there in confusion at discovering he had been observed.

Following this embarrassing episode, Stern tried several times to explain what he had been doing but was perfunctorily rejected in each attempt. The days hung heavily as more and more crew members, deciding to play it safe, imitated their chief and treated him like a pariah. Most even refused to exchange brief comments about the Probe's navigational progress across the Galaxy, the spaceman's polite equivalent of the landman's time-killing rehashes of the weather. Eventually Crawford alone was left among those indifferent to Linder's wrath and Barnes' prying.

"It's an utterly ridiculous situation," Stern protested one day when Crawford came by.

"I know it."

"What's he going to accuse me of when we reach Terra—secret communication with the enemy?"

"Practically. You'll be tried on suspicion of that possibility."

"And acquitted of it. He'll look plain silly after the hearings."

"I suspect that too. But don't forget he's been made to look very silly—a grown man getting spanked!"

"You went through the same indignity and still managed to be philosophical enough to talk to me."

"Stern, you didn't have to be philosophical at all. Frankly, even I feel puzzled by their discriminating against the rest of us like that."

Stern shrugged. "I think they realized I already had a tiny inkling of what was up while the rest of you, Linder and Barnes especially, were arrogantly rubbing them the wrong way. You see, if there's any condescending to be done, they're the ones who've earned the privilege now."

Crawford's brow wrinkled thoughtfully. "You do have some kind of inkling!" He considered the portable electromagnetic projector at Stern's elbow. "You were working that before I came in, weren't you?"

The older man strummed the arm of his chair. "It's not good enough for the final proof. I need the main projector in the Commander's quarters." He slammed the arm with sudden vehemence. "I've had enough—he's going to listen to me before it's too late for him! He's too good a spaceman to ruin his career the way he probably will if the hearing against me gets going. They'll put him down for an obstructive old fool and never let him make a solar system run again!"

Crawford considered him for a long second. "You're really serious, aren't you? What makes you so sure you could convince him?"

"I only suspect I can. But I'll need the projector for it."

"Well, I still don't see how, Stern. You ought to hear him talking about finding you playing some kind of kid's game, moving your hands like crazy. What do I say if he brings that up again?"

"All right." Stern rose from his chair, placed his left hand horizontally above his head, his right vertically against his stomach, and started reciting the nonsense words. Each time he came to baker man, he changed the rotational direction of one or both hands. Then he reversed the placement of the hands themselves. Unsmiling, after about a dozen changes, he said: "Now you try it, Crawford. No, I'm not kidding around. Every time I reach baker there'll be a change. If I say left baker man only your left will reverse its rotation. Or I may say right baker man. Or I may not indicate a hand and then you'll reverse rotation for both. Then when I say change baker man, put the right hand where the left is and vice versa and continue the same rotation as before the command—that is, if the right hand was above your head, going clockwise, when I say change, your left hand, as soon as it's shifted above your head, will turn clockwise."

Crawford hesitantly got up, crowding the little cabin until Stern sat down. He held his hands just as Stern had at the start of the exercise. "Makes me feel a little silly," he grinned, rolling his eyes upward to the raised hand.

"Maybe it is in itself—but not in its implications. Okay, Patty cake, patty cake, baker man. And now Patty cake, patty cake, left baker man. And Patty cake, patty cake, change baker man!"

As the last instruction was given, Crawford, hopelessly tangled, flailed his arms about. "Can't keep them turning in the right direction!" Annoyed with himself, he stopped altogether. "Let's start again. I'll get it yet."

"No, I think the point's been made. After a while you might learn to do it right but it would take practice."

"A matter of coordination, isn't it?" Stern nodded. "Then those hand-wrigglings of the Nodarians were actually purposeful exercises."

"Right. And now that they've mastered really complex maneuvers, the hand-wrigglings are probably games, too, a part of play."

"Why should they have bothered at all with something like that?"

"Because it's one tiny part of a much wider set of disciplines. They have made themselves totally ambidextrous, not a trace of left- or right-handedness left. Not just physical exercise and disciplines, though, all processes dealing with attention are involved."

Crawford's eyes widened. "That would mean both halves of the brain are equally used! They might be able to do twice the thinking we do."

"No, my friend, the difference is much greater because it has gone far beyond questions of handedness. Just tell the Commander what I've told you. And say the change probably extends to the very nature of consciousness itself but I'll need the best projector to prove that."

Crawford bewilderedly considered his two hands. "Complete control—can you beat that! The Commander'll have to listen all right."

After he was gone, though, Stern, gloomy and impatient, wondered whether the younger man's optimism was justified. Suppose the Commander refused and he had to wait more than three months, cooped up and in coventry, before he could find out whether he was right? This project had turned out to be one of psychology rather than semantics but everything, absolutely everything, would be affected if he—.

The intercom speaker grated in response to someone's breath. "Stern to Commander's quarters on the double!" shouted Linder.

Grinning with relief, he jumped up, at the same time unlocking a reel of magnetic tape from the projector housing. He hurried along the catwalk to the bow where the Commander was waiting, scowl and all.

"No time for apologetic chit-chat," Linder snapped. "Crawford here has spoken to me and I'm interested. Not convinced, just interested. What do you propose doing?"

"I need the projector to test out my wider conclusions, sir."

"You have one in your cabin, don't you? Your inventory statement should show you do."

"It can't project a reel at slow enough speed, sir. It wasn't designed for the kind of analysis I'm suggesting."

"Oh," he muttered half-mockingly, glancing toward Barnes, "so you have a reel with you?"

"Yes, and several more back in the cabin. They're blur pictures, garbles we picked up when we were hovering above Nodar."

"You're wasting the Commander's valuable time," Barnes shouted. "All nonsense if you ask me!"

"Only because you have a one-tracked mind." Stern laughed at his own remark. "That may turn out to be very funny in the next few minutes."

"Get on with it, Stern, before I change my mind," ordered the Commander.

"Yes, sir!"

He quickly slipped the reel onto the projector and, setting it for a very slow speed, turned the machine on. The screen showed the usual Nodarian television blur.

"There you are," Barnes said, "a complete waste of time!"

Disregarding him, Stern twisted the speed dial into slower and slower positions; all the while watching the screen. Suddenly, as projection speed came down to six percent of the speed at which it had originally been received, they all gasped. They seemed to be looking at the performance of some kind of drama with perfectly normal human characters but the figures were sufficiently transparent for another set of characters with another distinctive background to be seen behind them and these seemed to be acting out a separate drama. All the while equally transparent complex equations, charts and diagrams were pouring across the screen.

"That's what we find to be a blur!" observed Stern.

"They speed up their picture signal during transmission," Linder said, "and slow it down at the receiving end." He stopped, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. "No, that can't be it. In the Reception Center Building and at their Central, too, they were looking directly at such blurs!"

"Exactly, sir. They can see the components of what we find a blur—if we unscrambled the sound track squeaks we'd undoubtedly find the same thing there. The question is, How can they do it? and the answer is very frightening—and encouraging."

"You said something about a change of consciousness."

"A radical change. They've been developing it during their isolation period and there's no reason why they won't teach us when the preparatory period's over. They're developing a special kind of inward power that would make it silly for them to want primitive control over other men. They're the next stage in our evolution."

"ESP!" Barnes broke in. "They sensed our antagonism so they humiliated us."

"No, they saw your antagonism." Stern snapped off the machine. "They saw it because their powers of direct observation are so complete, catching every slightest, revealing movement of the face. Look, gentlemen, what have been the evolutionary stages until now? First, self-perpetuating and replicating crystals. Then conditioned-reflex life, followed by the growth of consciousness which in turn gave rise to the development of social consciousness. For the last few centuries we've been in this phase and it has given us the power to spread across the Galaxy and assure one common level of humanity everywhere. Individual and social consciousness interacting—what, we have wondered, would be the next stage to arise from it? But we have done everything to prevent the next stage because we feared any one planet developing along unique lines, lines that might end in a threat to the rest of us. Nodar deliberately isolated itself to be temporarily unique."

"What kind of consciousness could there be besides individual and social as we know them?" Crawford wondered uneasily.

"Nodarian—and if you had it your ten billion brain cells could store up so much knowledge you wouldn't need thinking machines, just purely physical robots!"

"Let's get down to cases," Linder said, for once politely restrained in his impatience.

"All right, Commander, here's a case. You're standing at the entrance of a darkened room which contains a thousand objects. A light flicks on and off, barely revealing the room's contents. Then you are asked to describe as much of the crowded room as you can remember seeing in that brief flash. Your description covers only a small percentage of the room's contents. The percentage may increase with practice but it will still be small."

"But haven't you really seen more than that?" Crawford protested. "Neurosurgery—"

"Certainly," Stern agreed. "If the neuro-surgeon manages to touch precisely the right point in your brain while you're under a local anaesthetic, you'll start describing details of that room you had not realized you had seen. That's unconscious knowledge and it's much vaster than what you consciously acquire. Still though, you find that, even with this additional description, you've only covered a small percentage of the facts about that room. Now, if you're permitted to look into such a mystery room for, say, five minutes, you have a chance to move your eyes from point to point, to become aware of more things—and the neuro-surgeon's work will show your unconscious knowledge has also grown from longer viewing. Conscious and unconscious knowledge feed each other."

"I can just barely follow you now," Linder protested. "This is getting awfully complicated."

"Because we're dealing with an awfully complicated—and important—phenomenon. I'll get to the big point in just a moment but, first, one more case—a little simpler to follow, I hope. You enter a well-lighted room. In one corner two men are seated, playing chess. In another corner two men are repairing a machine. When you look at the chess players the machine repairers are barely visible in the corner of your eye. If you concentrate on the chess situation, you learn close to nothing about the repair work. And when you concentrate on the repair work the chess game fades out."

"So what?" Linder demanded. "You merely move your eyes back and forth and follow both things if you want to!"

"Exactly the point I was hoping to make, sir. This constant moving back and forth gives us the impression that our conscious attention is on two things at the very same time. Actually, though, it's only one thing at a time. Now, imagine you lose interest in both situations while a radio starts playing some music. A second radio comes in with other music. By shifting attention back and forth you may manage to identify both but you're really not hearing either one very well. And imagine what would happen if a third stream of music started up at the same time!"

"That's right, you can only consciously follow one thing at a time," Crawford nodded. His eyes widened with horror. "They don't think that way at all! They were listening at the spaceport to musics and they see all these different things happening on the screen at the same time and follow it, don't they?"

"Which gives them the capacity to learn anything at tremendous speed," said Stern. "Take manually driving a ground vehicle. We learn one operation until we can do it automatically, unthinkingly, then we learn another operation to the same point, reinforcing our first knowledge with the new acquirement, and so on. For all practical purposes they could learn almost everything about such a matter at the same time, instantly!"

Stern stared at the star chart on the Command Room's wall, and wondered whether the inward side of man was equally vast.

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THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE TRACKS

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