"I guess I believe you," said Harlow's voice when the time was up, "but it would be hard to swallow if it hadn't been for Jackson. I want to ask you two things. First, is there any question in your mind about what would happen to homo sap if this state of mind spread? Second, what do you think we can do about it? Over."
"One," said Samson promptly, "no. Once you've heard the Word, and understood it, you know there isn't anything more important than spreading it to other people. We would become Kassids—meaning that the Word would come before everything else—meaning in turn that we'd stop being the masterful mayflies who boss this half of the galaxy. We might not even stay where we are. In fact, there would be a lot of changes, some big, some small, but they would all add up to this: the human race as we know it would cease to exist ... and we can't have that, can we? The universe may belong to the angels, but we're men. You can believe that I'm not telling you this just to put your mind at rest about Jackson. We've never had any serious opposition in the six hundred years we've been spreading out, but this is it. These are the kids that can finish us with one hand tied behind their backs."
He paused. "It occurred to me a long time ago, when I was a student, that if anything ever did fold us up, it wouldn't be a gang of monsters breathing pure fluorine and squirting death rays from every tentacle, it would be an idea. You can kill monsters, but you can't kill an idea. From Genghis Khan to Hitler, not one of the real conquerors—the guys who just wanted to grab everything in sight—hung onto a-half-credit's worth of what they got. But the Roman Empire was an idea; so was Islam, Christendom, Communism and Anticentrism.
"Two, I don't know what we can do about it. I'll tell you some things we can't do. We can't make war on the Kassids. If we did, everything we've got in this Slice, from shipyards to outhouses, would be buried under crowds of howling neuters in about two seconds. I don't think we can quarantine them, or ourselves, forever. There isn't anything they want in the universe, except to spread the Word, so I don't see how we could make any kind of a deal with them."
He took a deep breath. "Let me tell you what else I found out, and maybe something will occur to you. I said before that the idea is complicated. That's why ethics go up with intelligence, maybe. And that's why the races we've met, that remember the Kassids, aren't Kassids themselves. They're not bright enough. That explains something that's had us wondering for the last six centuries—why there isn't a single race in our part of the galaxy that rates higher than a fairly bright twelve-year-old on our scale. There isn't any correlation between sexual reproduction and intelligence, as my wife and some others would have you believe. It's simply that the others grasped the idea—became Kassids. Eventually the Kassids had done all the proselytizing they could. That was roughly fifteen thousand years ago. Either they missed us altogether, or we weren't much better than an ape's cousin at that stage; otherwise they made a clean sweep of the galaxy. Do you know what happened then? Do you know where they went?" He paused for breath again. "They went to the nearer Magellanic Cloud, and that's where they've been all this time. Some of the forms I saw are from there. The same thing happened—eventually they absorbed all the intelligence there was. So they came back, hoping some had grown in this galaxy—and they found us." He sighed. "Over."
Harlow's voice came back. "Sounds stinking. Anything else?"
"One more thing," Samson told him. "This slip of plastic they handed me as a souvenir. They gave me a verbal translation, and I remember it word for word. It's a dictionary entry: 'Man, noun. A pentagonal, dipolar, monoplane dominant of intelligence 96'—that's on their scale with the average Kassid race at 100—'native of District so-and-so.' The significance of it, from their point of view, is the '96.' It's the first time they've been able to make an entry over 75 in the last twelve or fourteen hundred years."
He frowned. "When I first got back and Midge neutralized the drugs, I thought of it, and it seemed to me there might be an answer there. A definition describes the observer as well as the thing observed. That seemed like a brilliant thought to me at the time, but I can't see any help in it now." He blinked unhappily. "All it seems to say is that they've got a superficial and oversimplified system of classification, meaning that physical structure isn't important to them—which we know already ... my guess would be, incidentally, that the one who talked to me was picked because the Kassids thought I'd feel at home with it. It had five extremities, although none of them was a head; it had a top and bottom and it faced in one direction. Ergo, it looked just like a man. Over."
Midge said thoughtfully, "It's funny. If they were so geometrical about it, why didn't they say bisexual?"