I did not try too painfully hard to learn much about the principles of space travel. The most my brain could take in of her explanation was something like: "Rocket, then phototropism." Now that makes scant sense. So far as I know, phototropism—movement toward light—is an organic phenomenon. One thinks of it as a response of protoplasm, in some plants and animal organisms, most of them simple, to the stimulus of light; certainly not as a force capable of moving inorganic matter.
I think that whatever may be the principle she was describing, this word phototropism was merely the nearest thing to it in my reservoir of language. If I did know the physical principles which brought them here, and could write them in terms accessible to technicians, I would not do it.
Here is a thing I am afraid no hypothetical reader of this journal would believe:
These people, as I have written, learned their method of space travel some twelve million years ago, yet this is the first time they have ever used it to convey them to another planet. The heavens are rich in worlds, she tells me; on many of them there is life, often on very primitive levels. No external force prevented her people from going forth, colonizing, conquering, as far as they pleased. They could have populated a whole Galaxy. They did not, because they believed they were not ready. More precisely—
Not good enough!
Only fifty million years ago, by her account, did they learn, as we may learn eventually, that intelligence without goodness is worse than high explosive in the hands of a baboon. For beings advanced beyond the level of Pithecanthropus, intelligence is a cheap commodity—not too hard to develop, hellishly easy to use for unconsidered ends. Whereas goodness is not to be achieved without unending effort of the hardest kind, within the self, whether the self be man or angel.
It is clear even to me that the conquest of evil is only one step, not the most important. Goodness, she tried to tell me, is an altogether positive quality; the part of living nature that swarms with such monstrosities as cruelty, meanness, bitterness, greed is not to be filled by a vacuum when these horrors are eliminated.
Kindness, for only one example. Anybody who defines kindness only as the absence of cruelty doesn't understand the nature of either.