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another to the anonymous organizers) had apparently decided that humans, with
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broad supervision, knew best how to choose and plan for their own rescue.
Hicks sometimes had Ms doubts.
Over a dinner of macaroni and cheese served on a bare oak table, as the
children listened, Hicks asked his hostess about her role in the rescue.
"I'm not sure," she said. "They got to me about six weeks ago. I took in three
people about a week after that, and they stayed here for a few days and then
left. Some more people after that, and now you. Maybe I'm a den mother."
The daughter giggled.
_They could have chosen more hospitable lodgings_. But he kept that thought to
himself.
"What about you?" she asked. "What are you doing?"
"Making up a list," he said.
"Who's going, who's not?"
He hesitated, then nodded. "Actually, we're concentrating more on a list of
others to recruit. There's a lot of work left to be done, and not nearly
enough people to do it."
"I don't think my kids and I are going," the woman said. She stared at the
table, her face slack, then slowly lifted her eyebrows and stood. "Jenny," she
said, "let's clear the table."
"Where ain't we going, Mama?" the boy asked.
"Hush up, Jason," the daughter ordered.
"Mama?" Jason persisted.
"Nowhere, and you pay attention to your sister, what she says."
_They had to start somewhere_, Hicks thought. _She was one of the first. They
didn't know where to begin_. The suspicion of her inadequacy if that was the
right word of her inability to qualify for the migration, did not prevent her
from seeing the good they were doing, or the necessity of their work.
_If we have any free will at all now_.
That question was still unanswerable. Hicks preferred to think they did have
free will, which implied that this woman demonstrated a truly admirable human
quality: selfless courage.
Two days later, she drove him to the airport, and he boarded an airliner for
San Francisco. Only on board the aircraft did he realize that he had heard the
names of the woman's children, but not her own.
High above the Earth, over the deck of obscuring clouds, Hicks napped and
typed notes into his computer and realized he was not, for the moment, on
call. The network had released him for these few hours and he was not privy to
the ordered flow of voices and information. He had time to think, and to ask
questions. _How did the spiders get through airport security?_ That seemed
easy enough. They had departed his luggage in the scanners, crawled through
the mechanisms, and reentered the luggage beyond the sensors' range. Or they
had means of altering their X-ray shadows. Human sensory apparatus had failed
completely from the beginning; if the bogeys could land on Earth without being
detected, what was so amazing about a spider passing through airport security?
He mused about these things behind his closed eyes, relishing the temporary
privacy. Then, on impulse, he inserted a CD carrying the texts of his complete
works into the computer and called up _Starhome_. Scrolling through page after
page, he skimmed the long sections of characterization (reasonably adept and
no more) and intrigue and politics and read in more detail the passages of
speculations and extrapolations. _It's not a bad book_, he thought. _Even now,
two years after I finished it, it engages my interest, at least._
But the pride was largely masked by a sadness. The book dealt with a future.
What future was there? Certainly not the one he had envisaged a future of
humans and extraterrestrials interacting on a vast mission of adventure and
discovery. In some respects, that now seemed pitifully naive.
Life on Earth is hard. Competition for the necessities of life is fierce. How
ridiculous to believe that the law of harsh survival would not be true
elsewhere, or that it would be negated by the progress of technology in an
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advanced civilization&
And yet&
Somebody out there was thinking altruistically.
Or perhaps not.
_Altruism is masked self-interest. Aggressive self-interest is a masked urge
to self-destruction._
He had written that once in an unpublished article on third-world development.
The developed nations could serve their interests best by fostering the growth
and development of less privileged, weaker nations...
And perhaps that was what was happening here.
But many experts on strategy had read his article and criticized it severely,
citing many historical examples to prove him wrong. "Whose interests does the
Soviet Union serve?" one reader had asked him. The Soviet Union, he had
acknowledged, was stronger than ever apparently but faced enormous problems
coordinating the nations and peoples it had absorbed, problems that others
thought might prove fatal in the long run. "But not yet and how many nations
last for more than centuries?" the critic had responded.
_Now apply the theory of necessary altruism to groups of intelligent beings
that have survived tens of thousands of years. If only one of them launches
planet-eating, civilization-destroying probes, and none of them respond by
launching probe-killers _
_Who wins?_
Probe-killers, then, were definitely launched in self-interest. But why
attempt to preserve possibly competing civilizations? Why not just destroy the
planet-eaters and be done with it?
The network was not available to him; all he had were implanted memories,
information he was not always able to access without the help of the network.
He often spurred thought by letting his fingers speak. Now he opened a file
and began to type. The first few sentences came out as gibberish and he erased
them. _There is an answer here, inside me. I know it._
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