“Steam-engine time is a fallacy. It’s neither right nor wrong. The race moves forward because of individuals who throw off homeostasis and step out of their culture. It prepares them to take the risk which it cannot take. They are expendable. They may go in the wrong direction and be destroyed. This is of no concern. What matters is the one or two individuals who find a better way. They come back and battle the homeostasis to prove they’ve found it. Sometimes they haven’t the courage to win this battle and the race has to wait for a better man, who can change the homeostatic setting of our institutions. This may be wasteful, but we get a picture of the alternative when dictatorships break up all homeostasis and substitute their own control.”
“We hoped you would see it this far — and want to go on,” said Nagle. “We pushed you pretty hard. Because we knew Dodge was getting set to attack, we more than tripled the natural fear-level control ordinarily used. We couldn’t wait for weeks, we had to have you now.
“Wolfe was sure it had cost you your sanity after that first run. I was a little worried, too, but I knew from your actions that you had to have a great deal of courage or you would not even be alive. I was certain you had faced death somewhere and had licked it positively and deliberately — at terrific cost to yourself.
“The threatened miscarriage was it. You were already so near death that only an organism of extreme determination could have fought its way back. I knew you could take almost anything.”
“Expendable — almost from the very beginning!” said Montgomery with only the faintest trace of bitterness.
“Yes,” said Nagle, “all of us. You’ll find that a billion years ago the race began to prepare you for this moment. It wants us to take an assignment — if we’re willing to accept it. A certain avenue is to be explored. Maybe it’s a blind alley and all our work will end in failure. But we’ll go down it alone. We can afford to take the risk. The race cannot. If we find it’s a good way to go, the race benefits. If we make an error, the race will pass us by, being saved from going the way we have gone.
“It’s a lonely business, but would you have it any other way?”