Cycle of Fire
Page 19
“Too much for you to remember?” Kruger stopped, his surprise momentarily covering his grief.
“Not too much to remember, no, but too much to grasp properly. I could have stayed down below and dictated scores of books about everything I had seen you do or heard you say, but even though I understood a good deal of it my people wouldn’t. There was something else they needed more, and gradually I came to understand what it was.
“It’s method, Nils. It’s the very way you people go about solving problems — imagination and experiment together. That was the thing my people had to learn and the thing I had to show them. Their problems are different from yours, after all; they’ll have to solve them for themselves. Of course, the facts are important, too, but I didn’t give too many of those. Just scattered pieces of information here and there, so that they could check their answers once in a while.”
“Then — then it was my own fault you’re doing this! I deliberately exposed you to as many different fields of knowledge as I could, so there’d be no chance of your getting it all recorded before the time of dying!”
“No! It’s not your fault, if you can call it a fault at all. You showed, indirectly I admit, just what we need to know. I was looking for an excuse to avoid staying in the Ramparts; if you want to say you furnished it, all right — and thanks.” He paused; they had reached the platform and Dar began without preamble to make sure his glider was ready for launching.
“But — can’t you come with us, instead? You don’t have to go back to Kwarr and — and…” Kruger could not finish the sentence. Dar straightened from his task and looked at him narrowly. For a moment or two he seemed to struggle with some decision; then he shook his head in the negative gesture he had learned from Kruger.
“I’m afraid not. I think I see a little of how you feel, friend Nils, and in a way I am sorry to leave you behind, but — would you come with me?” He almost gave his equivalent of a smile as he asked this. Kruger was silent.
“Of course you wouldn’t — you couldn’t. You expect to live a long time yet, even though you don’t know how long.” He gripped one of Kruger’s hands with his small claw. “Nils, many of your years from now there will be quite a lot of my people who are part of me. I will be gone, but you may still be around. Maybe with what you and I have done for them some of those people will be scientists, and will have learned to get respect instead of contempt from the ‘hot’ ones, and to start something which may in time be a civilization like yours. I would like to think that you will be helping them.”
He vaulted into the seat of the glider and, without giving the boy time to say a word, tripped the catapult.
Kruger watched the little aircraft out of sight. It did not take long to vanish, for his eyes were not as clear as they should have been, but he was still facing the direction in which it had gone when he finally muttered, “I will be!” He turned away as the thud of a great door sounded from the tunnel.
Contents
Title Page
Contents
I. LOGISTICS
II. DIPLOMACY
III. PEDAGOGY
IV. ARCHAEOLOGY
V. CONFISCATION
VI. INVESTIGATION
VII. ENGINEERING
VIII. TRANSPORTATION
IX. TACTICS
X. ELUCIDATION
XI. ASTRONOMY; DIPLOMACY
XII. GEOLOGY; ARCHAEOLOGY
XIII. ASTRONOMY; XENOLOGY
XIV. BIOLOGY; SOCIOLOGY
XV. ASTRONOMY; LOGIC
Author Bio
Hal Clement (1922–2003)
Hal Clement is the nom de plume under which Harry Clement Stubbs wrote science fiction. Born in Massachusetts in 1922, he graduated from Harvard with a BSc. in astronomy, and later added degrees in chemistry and education. A former B-24 pilot who saw active service during the Second World War, he worked for most of his life as a high-school science teacher. He made his reputation as an SF writer with the work that appeared in Astounding, where his best-known novel, Mission of Gravity, first appeared in serialised form in 1953.