One of the strange evolutions which seems to have followed the Collapse and which has developed in the centuries since is the rise of special human faculties and abilities. There are many stories of certain personalities who possess these abilities, some of them surpassing all belief although as to the truth of them, there is none to say.
On the shelves at this university is an extensive literature on the possibilities of the paranormal and, in fact, some case histories that would appear to indicate the realization of such possibilities. It is only fair to point out, however, that a great part of this literature is theoretical and in some instances controversial. On a close examination of the pre-Collapse literature (which is all we have, of course), it would appear reasonable to conclude that there are enough convincing instances reported of the psychic or the paranormal to lend some substance to a belief that some of the theories may be correct. Since the Collapse, although there has been no documentation upon which a judgment can be founded, it appears that a greater concentration of paranormal and psychic phenomena has been observed than was the case before. One must realize, certainly, that none of these reports can be subjected to the kind of critical examination and survey as was possible in the past. For this reason, that none of them is weeded out, they may appear to be more frequent than they really are. Each instance, once it is reported, becomes a story to be told in wondering amazement and with no great concern as to whether it be true or not. But even taking all this into account, the impression still holds that this type of phenomenon is, indeed, increasing.
There are those at this university, with whom I've talked, who feel that this increase may be due, in part at least, to the lifting and the shattering of the physically scientific and technological mold which prior to the Collapse encased all humanity. If a man (or a woman), these colleagues of mine point out, is told often enough that something is impossible, or worse, is foolishness, then there is a lessening of the willingness to believe in it, or to subscribe to it. This might mean that those pre-Collapse people who had a bent toward the psychic or the paranormal may have squelched their own abilities or (much to the same point) any dedicated belief in their abilities (for who would fly in the face of impossibility or engage in foolish practices?), with the result that any progress in the field was thwarted. The end result would be that an entire field of human endeavors and abilities may have been sidetracked, if not eliminated, in the face of the technologically minded dictum that they were either foolish or impossible.
Today no such dictum remains. Technological thinking was at least discredited, if not entirely wiped out, with the destruction of the machines and the social systems they had built. Which, after a century or two, left the human race free to carry out that foolishness which before had been frowned upon, if not, indeed, proscribed, by a technological mentality. It may be, too, that the present situation created a climate and environment in which non-technological thinking and approaches to human problems have a chance to thrive. One wonders, thinking of it, what the world might have been if the science that man had subscribed to had not been almost exclusively a physical and a biological science and if, in such a case, technology had not come about. The best situation, of course, would have been if all sciences and the ideas deriving from them had been allowed equality, so that all could work together and interact. The way it turned out, however, was that the arrogance of one way of thought served to strangle all other ways of thought…
They traveled up the river, moving in daylight now since there were two of them to watch the prairie—either Cushing or Rollo scouting the bluff tops, on lookout for war parties or for other dangers. In the first few days they spotted several bands; none of these were interested in the river valley, but were moving eastward. Watching them, Cushing felt a pang of worry about the university, but told himself it was unlikely it would be attacked. Even if it were, its high wall would hold off any attacker except one that would be more persistent than a nomad band.
The Minnesota River, up which they moved, was a more placid stream than the Mississippi. It meandered through its wooded valley as a lazy man might walk, not exactly loitering, but in no hurry either. By and large it was a narrow stream, although at times it spread out through low-lying marshes and they were forced to make their way around.
To begin with, Cushing fretted at tile slow time they' were making. Alone he could have covered twice the ground in half the time, but as the days went on and no more war bands appeared, the urgency fell away. After all, he realized, there was no time limit imposed upon the journey.
Having shed his fretfulness, he settled down to enjoying the trip. During the years at the university, he somehow had forgotten the exhilaration of the free life that he now followed once again: the early, foggy chill of mornings; the climb of the sun up the eastern sky; the sound of wind among the leaves; the V-shaped wake traced by a swimming muskrat; the sudden beauty of a hidden patch of flowers; the hooting of the owls once dusk settled on the river; the whicker of raccoons; the howling of the bluff top wolves. They lived high on the hog: fish from the river, squirrel and dumplings, plump fried rabbit, an occasional partridge or duck.
"This is better eating, laddie boy," said Meg, "than chewing on that chunk of jerky you carry in your knapsack."
He growled at her. "There may come a time," he said, "when we'll be glad to have the jerky."
For this was the trip's easy part, he knew, the fat time. When they had to leave the river valley and strike west across the plains, they would face hard going.
After a few days Rollo's Shivering Snake came back again and danced around him. It was an elusive and ridiculous thing, a tiny pinch of stardust shimmering in the sunlight, shining with a strange light of its own in the darkness of the night.
"Once I thought it was a friend of mine," said Rollo. "A strange thing, you might say, to look upon a little shimmer of light as a friend, but to one who has been alone and friendless over many centuries, even such an unsubstantial thing as a sparkle in the sunshine can seem to be a friend. I came to find, however, that it was a fair-weather friend. When I was pinned beneath the tree, it deserted me and did not come back till now. During all those days, I could have used it; had it been there, I could have told myself that I was not alone. Don't ask me what it is, for I have no idea. I have spent many hours puzzling out some sort of rationalization so I could put an explanation to it. But I never found one. And don't ask me when it first attached itself to me, for the time runs back so far that I would be tempted to say it was always with me. Although that would not be right, for I can recall the time when it was not with me.
The robot talked incessantly. He ran on and on, as if all the years of loneliness had dammed up a flood of words that must now come out.
"I can recall what you term the Time of Trouble," he told them, sitting around the meager campfire (meager and well hidden, so it would not show too great alight), "but I can throw no great understanding on it, for I was in no position to know what the situation might have been. I was a yard robot at a great house that stood high on a hill above a mighty river, although it was not this river you call the Mississippi, but another river somewhere in the East. I'm not sure I ever knew the river s name nor the name of those who owned the house, for there were things a yard robot would not have been required to know, so would not have been told. But after a time, perhaps some time after it all started, although I can't be sure, the word came to me and other robots that people were smashing machines. This we could not understand. After all, we did know that everyone placed great reliance on machines. I recall that we talked about it and speculated on it and we found no answers. I don't think we expected any answers. By this time the people who lived in the house had fled; why they fled or where they might have gone we had no way of knowing. No one, you must understand, ever told us anything. We were told what to do and that was all we ever needed to know. We continued to do our familiar and accustomed tasks, although now there was no one to tell us what to do, and whether we did our tasks or not did not really matter.