The little creatures that brought them up from beasthood.”
Seevers paused, staring up at the sunlight beyond the high basement window.
He was talking to himself again, quietly:
“You can see them turn away and silently go back… to wait for their collapsing sun to reach the critical point, the detonating point.
They’ve left their last mark—a dark and uncertain benediction to the cosmos.”
“You’re a fool, Seevers,” Paul grunted suddenly.
Seevers whirled, whitening.
His hand darted out forgetfully toward the young man’s arm, but he drew it back as Paul sidestepped.
“You actually regard this thing as desirable, don’t you?” Paul asked. “You can’t see that you’re under its effect.
Why does it affect people that way?
And you say I can’t be objective.”
The professor smiled coldly.
“I didn’t say it’s desirable.
I was simply pointing out that the beings who sent it saw it as desirable.
They were making some unwarranted assumptions.”
“Maybe they just didn’t care.”
“Of course they cared.
Their fallacy was that we would open it as they would have done—cautiously.
Perhaps they couldn’t see how a creature could be both brash and intelligent.
They meant for us to read the warning on the shells before we went further.”
“Warning… ?”
Seevers smiled bitterly.
“Yes, warning.
There was one group of oversized symbols on all the spheres.
See that pattern on the top ring?
It says, in effect—‘Finder-creatures, you who destroy your own people—if you do this thing, then destroy this container without penetrating deeper. If you are self-destroyers, then the contents will only help to destroy you.’” There was a frigid silence.
“But somebody would have opened one anyway,” Paul protested.
Seevers turned his bitter smile on the window.
“You couldn’t be more right.
The senders just didn’t foresee our monkey-minded species.
If they saw Man digging out the nuggets, braying over them, chortling over them, cracking them like walnuts, then turning tail to run howling for the forests—well, they’d think twice before they fired another round of their celestial buckshot.”
“Doctor Seevers, what do you think will happen now?
To the world, I mean?”
Seevers shrugged.
“I saw a baby born yesterday—to a woman down the island.
It was fully covered with neuroderm at birth.
It has some new sensory equipment—small pores in the finger tips, with taste buds and olfactory cells in them.
Also a nodule above each eye sensitive to infrared.”
Paul groaned.
“It’s not the first case.
Those things are happening to adults, too, but you have to have the condition for quite a while.
Brother Thomas has the finger pores already.
Hasn’t learned to use them yet, of course.
He gets sensations from them, but the receptors aren’t connected to olfactory and taste centers of the brain.
They’re still linked with the somesthetic interpretive centers.
He can touch various substances and get different perceptive combinations of heat, pain, cold, pressure, and so forth.
He says vinegar feels ice-cold, quinine sharp-hot, cologne warm-velvet-prickly, and… he blushes when he touches a musky perfume.”
Paul laughed, and the hollow sound startled him.
“It may be several generations before we know all that will happen,” Seevers went on. “I’ve examined sections of rat brain and found the microorganisms.
They may be working at rerouting these new receptors to proper brain areas.