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"Maybe they ran out of oil?" I suggest.
"Nonsense," says Bohr. "They can only have run out of their soul. Oil isn't everything. Anyone can harvest nuclear fusion if enough effort is expended. But if you let go of your soul, you will find this effort too expensive, and you'll die. The most potent killer in the Universe is a primitive lifestyle. I've seen it over and over."
"Yap!" Martin agrees.
"It's not going to be a picnicking, landing down there," says Werner Heisenberg. "Look at their faces, they don't look happy, they don't even look alive."
"The light is gone out in them," says Martin.
"You're wasting your effort going down there, trying to learn something," says Bohr to me in his usual straightforward manner, with the captain sitting two rows in front of us.
The captain turns around towards us. "That is all nonsense! Open your eyes! I see a rich society there. I see no beggars. I see no one in sloppy clothes, or starved or destitute sleeping on street corners. The city looks clean, not overcrowded, there is peace and order. And the lack of cars; that's wonderful! I'd prefer animal carts a thousand times over the gasoline driven, air poisoning traffic we used to have."
The captain turns back again, not waiting for an answer. Bohr doesn't give him one either.
"A society is like a star," Bohr whispers to me. "If they haven't accumulated enough gravity within themselves, mentally, they'll reach a threshold where the structure falls apart on which most people's livelihood depends. On Earth we called this the Empire Period, a four thousand year period of poverty and war. Without technologies and vast industries, entire cultures tend to vanish. So tell me, what do you expect to learn from them, when you have refused for millennia to learn the lesson of their fate from your own history? Mankind could have stood on the moon in 200 AD if it hadn't been for the weight of empires dragging it down. That is what you will face at Gamma Point Eight. The young there, won't remember how things once were, or they may regard it as not important to them. Poverty has become a religion to them all, like with your captain, who rather sees clean streets than people in them, or orderly stagnation on his ship, instead of your excitement with living and with freedom and caring."
"And the old people won't tell you anything either," adds Odessa. "They likely never knew what hit them."
"You should look for a society that had enough inner strength to survive and prosper," Bohr comes back. "You should look for a society that had enough strength in itself to get past the threshold of the empire period, the small-minded period that is rich in poverty syndromes. That is what I see you are clinging to right now inside this ship. I know several societies of the caliber that you should be looking for, from which you could learn a great deal. There is one in particular that I have named planet Odessa, or planet 'O' for short. Even I could learn a lot from those people if I were to be able to decode their language."
"Ah, I see, you have a plan for this ship," says Natalia.
"Well, shouldn't it be used the best way possible when an entire civilization is at stake?" Bohr comes back, whispering, unabashed.
"We can have the ship in orbit above planet 'O' within seconds," says Martin. "We could...."
"Do you really believe these people will let you have their ship," Odessa interrupts, "especially when they're so close to the goal that they waited five years for, which, at the moment, looks quite wonderful in their eyes?"
Nobody answers Odessa for a very long time.
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