The general blanked out. He turned from the screen. Travis was laughing happily.
"Miles, did anybody ever tell you you were a genius?" he asked. "That last jolt you gave them was perfect. Why didn"t you tell us about it in advance?"
"I didn"t know about it in advance; I didn"t think of it till I"d started talking to them. No cream or sugar for me."
"Cream," Edith said, lifelessly. "Why did you do it? Why didn"t you just tell them the truth?"
Travis asked her to define the term. She started to say something bitter about Jesting Pilate. Miles interrupted.
"In spite of Lord Beacon, Pilate wasn"t jesting," he said. "And he didn"t stay for an answer because he knew he"d die of old age waiting for one. What kind of truth should I have told them?"
"Why, what you started to tell them. That Beta moves in a fixed orbit and can"t get any closer to Alpha--"
"There"s been some work done on the question since Pilate"s time,"
Travis said. "My semantics prof at Command College had the start of an answer. He defined truth as a statement having a practical correspondence with reality on the physical levels of structure and observation and the verbal order of abstraction under consideration."
"He defined truth as a statement. A statement exists only in the mind of the person making it, and the mind of the person to whom it is made. If the person to whom it is made can"t understand or accept it, it isn"t the truth."
"They understood when you showed them that the planet is round, and they understood that tri-dimensional model of the system. Why didn"t you let it go at that?"
"They accepted it intellectually. But when I told them that there wasn"t any chance of Kwannon getting any closer to Alpha, they rebelled emotionally. It doesn"t matter how conclusively you prove anything, if the person to whom you prove it can"t accept your proof emotionally, it"s still false. Not-real."
"They had all their emotional capital invested in this Always-Cool Time," Travis told her. "They couldn"t let Miles wipe that out for them.
So he shifted it from this world to the next, and convinced them that they were getting a better deal that way. You saw how quickly they picked it up. And he didn"t have the sin of telling children there is no Easter Bunny on his conscience, either."
"But why did you tell them that story about the Oomphel Mother?" she insisted. "Now they"ll go out and tell all the other natives, and they"ll believe it."
"Would they have believed it if I"d told them about Terran scientific technology? Your people have been doing that for close to half a century. You see what impression it"s made."
"But you told them--You told them that Terrans have no souls!"
"Can you prove that was a lie?" Travis asked. "Let"s see yours.
Draw--_soul_! Inspection--_soul_!"
Naturally. Foxx Travis would expect a soul to be carried in a holster.
"But they"ll look down on us, now. They"ll say we"re just like animals,"
Edith almost wailed.
"Now it comes out," Travis said. "We won"t be the lordly Terrans, any more, helping the poor benighted Kwanns out of the goodness of our hearts, scattering largess, bearing the Terran"s Burden--new model, a give-away instead of a gun. Now _they"ll_ pity _us_; they"ll think _we"re_ inferior beings."
"I don"t think the natives are inferior beings!" She was almost in tears.
"If you don"t, why did you come all the way to Kwannon to try to make them more like Terrans?"
"Knock it off, Foxx; stop heckling her." Travis looked faintly surprised. Maybe he hadn"t realized, before, that a boss newsman learns to talk like a commanding officer. "You remember what Ramon Gonzales was saying, out at Sanders", about the inferior"s hatred for the superior as superior? It"s no wonder these Kwanns resent us. They have a right to; we"ve done them all an unforgivable injury. We"ve let them see us doing things they can"t do. Of course they resent us. But now I"ve given them something to feel superior about. When they die, they"ll go to the Place of the Gone Ones, and have oomphel in the sky, and they will live forever in new bodies, but when we die, we just die, period. So they"ll pity us and politely try to hide their condescension toward us.
"And because they feel superior to us, they"ll want to help us. They"ll work hard on the plantations, so that we can have plenty of biocrystals, and their shoonoon will work magic for us, to help us poor benighted Terrans to grow souls for ourselves, so that we can almost be like them.
Of course, they"ll have a chance to exploit us, and get oomphel from us, too, but the important thing will be to help the poor Terrans. Maybe they"ll even organize a Spiritual and Magical a.s.sistance Agency."
THE END