There was just friendly interest and wonder among all those people, then.
"What they reminded me of," Irma said later, "was some kind of simple natives on a lost island, being shown a mirror for the first time—before they think of black magic. Is that what we all are, basically, at first? Simple? Trusting?"
"That's a good question," Jan commented.
And so it was for months more. But all the elements of catastrophe were present. Earth was a crowded but beautiful place. Technology had done much to give it an idyllic mood, and to shelter its inhabitants in cotton-wool. But that same technology that could build so miraculously, still held a devilish potential, if it served minds motivated by hate and fear. Need one even remember, here, the asteroids that were the fragments of Planet X, or the glassy, fused-down ruins of Mars, still slightly tainted with radiations of nuclear fusion and fission?
The drives of intellect, of whatever origin, seem always to have a sullen, combative streak, constructive in one sense, since it is the force that brings peoples up from nothing. But the stubborn taking of sides also harbors deadly danger.
Almost unobtrusively at first, the threatening clouds began to gather throughout the world. At our busy and expanding lab, Bowhart, who, with Scharber, had been crewman aboard the Intruder, came to represent one phase of the opposition to the Great Change.
I remember what he said to me one day, his earnest face serious, his brow crinkled with the effort to be reasonable:
"Charlie, I could be all wrong. But for some time I've been thinking. Already there are twenty thousand once near-dead people who have been changed over; not to mention five thousand others who were in good health. Part of me admires the humanitarian angles here. But then there's that feeling of a slow, creeping invasion, so far unopposed. I can't exactly put my finger on just what makes it horrible; but at night I wake up sweating cold all over. Maybe I've got a blind spot in my head. All I know is that most everything about this remarkable duplication of humanity goes against the instincts in my slow Neanderthal guts. No, don't argue, Charlie. I've heard all of Dr. Lanvin's counter-points, and I just can't feel right about the whole thing. So I'd be a hypocrite if I worked in this lab any longer. I'll leave today, with the best of wishes to you and yours, and Dr. Lanvin. Tell him, will you?"
"All hail, Bow," I said, shaking his hand. "Thanks for the honesty. I know what you mean. I've felt it all myself, even though I don't quite agree."
Scharber, his former buddy, was also present in my office. They shook hands almost formally, now. For Scharber had moved all the way to the other side of the fence. He'd become the thrilled, eager kind.