"What harm would that do? If such beings exist, and if they could come here, why couldn't we go there too—wherever it is—and wouldn't that enrich our lives? Of course I'm not a Thinker—" I had a fleeting vision of Nipar and the pitcher of mastonyi!—"but I'm a Real Man and I can see no reason why it would hurt us to find we are not alone in the universe."
"No," said Myrwan dryly. "You are not a Thinker, my friend. We enjoy here a completely stable civilization. It is the best of all possible social systems. We do not want it disturbed."
"I see," said Marnag, and several others nodded. I confess that a heretical idea crossed my mind—that any such disturbance might well dethrone the Thinkers first of all—but I suppressed it. Myrwan went on:
"And that is where the phph pebbles come in. In the course of my researches on these previously unknown waves, I began to wonder what, if anything, had initiated the interest of outsiders in our planet, assuming that outsiders exist. Certainly we had made no move toward trying either to reach or to communicate with any putative dwellers on other planets. There had been no major changes on our planet that could have enlisted the attention of outside astronomers, even granting that they have telescopes as powerful as our own.
"Only one thing, so far as I can ascertain, has ever left this planet for outer space. And that was the phph pebbles.
"We call them pebbles. To beings who might consider us giants—and if there really are intelligent beings in other worlds they might well be of an entirely different size from us, though no less dangerous for all that—they might seem huge meteors. Suppose that, though most of them would undoubtedly burn up and all of them be considerably reduced before they struck another planet as meteorites, some of them at least might still be sufficiently large to be analyzed chemically? And suppose that where they struck there existed beings capable of analyzing them?"
This was getting a little deep for anybody not a Thinker to take in. Several Council members raised their hands plaintively and so indicated.
"All right, I'll try to make it plainer," Myrwan said. "Let us pretend that instead of the little fragments of space debris that fall harmlessly in the annual meteor showers here, we were pelted with enormous chunks of matter, perhaps causing major damage to property and life. Wouldn't We immediately undertake an intensive study to determine whence they came, and of what, precisely, they consisted?
"And if We found that these residual meteorites contained material indicating their origin in an inhabited world—still worse, in a world sufficiently evolved to entail the possibility or probability that its highest life-forms might be intelligent or even civilized—wouldn't we take steps at once to investigate? Moreover, wouldn't we be outraged to the point where our primary object would be to avenge ourselves?