"You're silly, Charlie, why don't you switch over to the android level? What are you waiting for? Sure, I like to live in a house, too; but sometimes I sleep out in the rain or the snow just for the hell of it! Of course there's no real good in that kind of nonsense! But changed over, a man has an average of a twenty per cent increase in intelligence, simply on the basis of better energy and alertness! You may think that you feel good, but even if no trials come to demand superior stamina, you'll feel better; you'll do three times the work, and never tire at all! Why, even on Earth, according to reports that are relayed from starship to starship coming this way in a long string, humans as they were are almost gone. So what are you—a diehard, a stick-in-the-mud? Even—you?"
"Maybe it's the seventy-seven years lost, Doc," I josh back at him. "I've got to catch up, perhaps. Of course I recognize all the advantages. I've been through the mill. Just as with you, in my head, lodged against my upper skull and doing me no harm, the medics say, is a micro-android which my ego has inhabited, and which I almost never use now. I remember what it is like to be super, Doc. I grant that it is all the truth. But there's time. Just let me think some more."
Yeah, Jan and I think of all we've seen, that we never dreamed was there. Beauty, strangeness, vastness, smallness, wonder, knowledge. We've come a long awesome way.
You feel that you know a little more about the universe, and that you're warmly and humbly a little nearer to its ultimate Mystery, and are at peace. You know that the Great Change in man is right, and was intended.
We've been stubborn, and I'm not entirely sure why. I know that we and the others of the old flesh will yield to progress sooner or later. Maybe we've been clinging sentimentally to the past of man. But deep down, I believe I know the real reason. We're slow, we're human; just give us time. It's hard to accept the responsible role of demigod.
We're just scared of so much newness.