"But the note!" he exclaimed.
"A simple matter! It was written on a material made entirely of separate molecules. A small charge of energy held them together for a brief period of time. The charge leaked out and the material merely separated into its constituent molecules."
The utter impossibility of the situation was striking home. The evidences of a superior culture were unmistakable. These people were his. .
"Aliens, Mr. Dalgreen — I suppose you could call us that. Yes, I can read your mind quite clearly. That is why you are here today. A thought receiver in Arthur Di Costa's study informed us of your suspicions when you first walked in. We have been following you ever since, arranging your visit here.
"I'll tell you what I can, Mr. Dalgreen. We are not of Earth; in fact, we come from beyond your solar system. This office is, to be very frank, the outpatient ward of a sanitarium."
"Sanitarium!" Brent shouted. "This is the office only. . then where is the sanitarium?"
The girl twirled her pencil slowly, her piercing stare seeming to penetrate his eyes — into his brain.
"The entire Earth is our sanitarium. Mixed in with your population are a great number of our mentally ill."
The floor seemed to tilt under Brent's feet. He clutched the edge of the desk. "Then Di Costa must be one of your outpatients. Is he insane?"
The girl spoke quietly. "Not insane in the strictest sense of the word, he is congenitally feeble-minded; his case is incurable."
Brent thought of the brilliant Di Costa as a moron, and the inference shook his mind. "That means that the average IQ of your race must be—"
"Beyond your powers of comprehension.” she said. "To your people Di Costa is normal, really far above average.
"On his home planet he was not bright enough to take his place in that highly integrated society. He became a ward of the state. His body was altered to be an exact duplicate of Homo sapiens. We gave him a new body and a new personality — but we could not change his basic intelligence. That is why he is here on Earth, a square peg in a square hole.
"Di Costa spent his childhood on his home planet, living in an 'alien' environment. These first impressions drive deep into the subconscious, you know. His new personality has no awareness of them — but they are there, nonetheless. When he is painting, these same impressions bypass his conscious mind and operate directly on his thalamus. It takes a keen eye to detect their effect on the final work. May I congratulate you, Mr. Dalgreen?"
Brent smiled ruefully. "I'm a little sorry now that I did. What are you plans for me? I imagine they don't include a return to my earthly 'asylum'?"
The girl folded her hands in her lap. She looked down at them as if not wanting to look Brent in the eye when she made her next statement. However, he wasn't waiting for it. If he could overpower the girl, he might find the elevator control. Any chance was worth taking. He tensed his muscles and jumped.
A wave of pain swept through his body. Another mind — strong beyond comparison — was controlling his body!
Every muscle jerked with spasmodic activity, halting his plunge in midair. Crashing to the desk he lay unmoving; every muscle ached with the fierce alien control. The redhead looked up — eyes blazing with the strength she had so suddenly revealed.
"Never underestimate your opponent, Brent Dalgreen. I adopted the earthly form of a woman for just this reason. I find your people much easier to handle. They never suspect that I am. . more than what they see. I will release your mind from my control, but please don't force me to resume it."
Brent sank to the floor, his heart pumping wildly, his body vibrating from the unnatural spasm.
"I am the director of this. . sanitarium, so you see I have no desire to have our work exposed to the prying eyes of your government. I shall have to have you disposed of."
Brent controlled his breathing enough to allow him to speak. "You. . intend to… kill me then?"
"Not at all Mr. Dalgreen; our philosophy forbids killing except for the most humane reasons. Your physical body will be changed to conform to the environment of another of our sanitarium planets. We will of course remove all the radiation damage. You can look forward to a long and interesting life. If you agree to cooperate you will be allowed to keep your present personality."
"What kind of a planet is it?" Brent asked hurriedly. He realized from the girl's tones that the interview was almost at an end.
"Quite different from this one. It is a very dense planet with a chlorine atmosphere." She pressed a stud on her desk and turned back to her typewriter.
Brent had a last, ragged thought as unconsciousness overcame him. He was going to live. . and work. . and there must be some fine greens to paint on a chlorine planet. .
The Ever-Branching Tree
The children had spread up and down the beach, and some of them had even ventured into the surf where the tall green waves crashed down upon them. Glaring from a deep blue sky, the sun burned on the yellow sand. A wave broke into foam, surging far up the shore with a soundless rush. The sharp clap-clap of Teacher's hands could easily be heard in the sunlit silence.
"Playtime is over — put your clothes back on, Grosbit-9, all of them — and the class is about to begin.”
They straggled towards Teacher, as slowly as they could. The bathers emerged dry from the ocean, while not a grain of sand adhered to skin or garment of the others. They gathered about Teacher, their chatter gradually dying away, and he pointed dramatically at a tiny creature writhing across the sand.
"Uhggh a worm!" Mandi-2 said and shivered deliciously, shaking her red curls.
"A worm, correct. A first worm, an early worm, a protoworm. An important worm. Although it is not on the direct evolutionary track that we are studying we must pause to give it notice. A little more attention, Ched-3, your eyes are closing. For here, for the first time, we see segmentation, as important a step in the development of life as was the development of multicellular forms. See, look carefully, at those series of rings about the creature's body. It looks as though it were made of little rings of tissue fused together — and it is."
They bent close, a circle of lowered heads above the brown worm that writhed a track across the sand. It moved slowly towards Grosbit-9 who raised his foot and stamped down hard on the creature. The other students tittered. The worm crawled out through the side of his shoe and kept on.
"Grosbit-9, you have the wrong attitude," Teacher said sternly. "Much energy is being expended to send this class back through time, to view the wonders of evolution at work. We cannot feel or touch or hear or change the past, but we can move through it and see it about us. So we stand in awe of the power that permits us to do this, to visit our Earth as it was millions of years ago, to view the ocean from which all life sprung, to see one of the first life forms on the ever-branching tree of evolution. And what is your response to this awe-inspiring experience? You stamp on the annelid! For shame, Grosbit-9 for shame."
Far from feeling shameful, Grosbit-9 chewed a hangnail on his thumb and looked about out of the corners of his eyes, the trace of a smirk upon his lips. Teacher wondered, not for the first time, how a 9 had gotten into this class. A father with important contacts, no doubt, high placed friends.
"Perhaps I had better recap for those of you who are paying less than full attention.” He stared hard at Grosbit-9 as he said this, with no apparent effect. "Evolution is how we reached the high estate we now inhabit. Evolution is the forward march of life, from the one-celled creatures to multicelled, thinking man. What will come after us we do not know, what came before us we are now seeing. Yesterday we watched the lightning strike the primordial chemical soup of the seas and saw the more complex chemicals being made that developed into the first life forms. We saw this single-celled life triumph over time and eternity by first developing the ability to divide into two cells, then to develop into composite, many-celled life forms. What do you remember about yesterday?"