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“To the rest of the Galaxy, if they are aware of us at all, Earth is but a pebble in the sky.
If you push us intolerably, is it to be wondered at that we push back? Hating us as you do, can you complain that we hate in our turn?
So we are both prisoners of Earth and both citizens of the great world of the mind in which there is distinction of neither planet nor physical characteristics. Give me your hand, then, and let us be friends.”
There never can be a man so lost as one who is lost in the vast and intricate corridors of his own lonely mind, where none may reach and none may save. There never was a man so helpless as one who cannot remember.
That was the result of a childhood immersed in an atmosphere of bigotry so complete that it was almost invisible, so entire that you accepted its axioms as second nature. Then you left it and saw it for what it was when you looked back.
It was obvious that bigotry was never a one-way operation, that hatred bred hatred!
Old men tend to forget what thought was like in their youth; they forget the quickness of the mental jump, the daring of the youthful intuition, the agility of the fresh insight. They become accustomed to the more plodding varieties of reason, and because this is more than made up by the accumulation of experience, old men think themselves wiser than the young.
Grew said slowly, “The Sixty is your sixtieth year. Earth supports twenty million people, no more. To live, you must produce. If you cannot produce, you cannot live. Past Sixty—you cannot produce.” “And so . . .” Schwartz’s mouth remained open. “You’re put away. It doesn’t hurt.” “You’re killed?” “It’s not murder,” stiffly. “It must be that way. Other worlds won’t take us, and we must make room for the children some way. The older generation must make room for the younger.”
It is an almost universal disease—hate for hate. Do your people really want equality, mutual tolerance? No! Most of them want only their own turn as top dog.”
Like all common beliefs, however superstitious, distorted, and perverted, it has a speck of truth at bottom.
“Yet before I am an Earthman, I am a man. Must trillions die for the sake of millions? Must a civilization spreading over a Galaxy crumble for the sake of the resentment, however justified, of a single planet? And will we be better off for all that?
“And besides, is there an advantage to Humanity to exchange the tyranny of a Galaxy for the tyranny of Earth? No—no—There must be a way out for all men, a way to justice and freedom.”
Of course one of the items that he learned, over and over again, beyond any chance of mistaking, was just this: He was condemned to death! There was no escape, no doubt, no reservation. It might be today; it might be tomorrow. But he would die! Somehow it sank in and he accepted it almost gratefully.
One might accept death reasoningly, with every aspect of the conscious mind, but the body was a brute beast that knew nothing of reason.
“There’s absolute proof.” “They won’t listen. Do you know why? Because they have certain fixed notions about the past. Any change would be blasphemy in their eyes, even if it were the truth. They don’t want the truth; they want their traditions.”
“Legal war?” questioned the Secretary with more than a trace of a sneer. “What is legal war? Earth has always been at war with the Galaxy, whether we made polite mention of the fact or not.”
“Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made . . .”
