Far From This Earth by Chad Oliver

Author:Chad Oliver
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 9780575125902
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2015-07-29T16:00:00+00:00

Henry left to put in the call, and then hurried back. Vincent permitted himself a faint smile. It had been a long time since he had an audience this attentive!

“Can you think of any possible reason why an Eskimo might have been chosen?” asked Morton Hillford.

“Frankly, no.”

“A secret civilization?” suggested the United Nations delegate. “A lost tribe? Something like that?”

Vincent snorted. “Nonsense,” he said. “Sir,” he added.

“Look,” said the President. “We know they live in igloos. Go on from there.”

Vincent smiled. “Even that isn’t quite correct, I’m afraid,” he said. “Begging your pardon, sir, but the Eskimos don’t live in igloos, at least not most of the time. They live in skin tents in the summer, stone and earth houses in early winter—”

“Never mind that,” the President said. “That’s not important.”

Vincent puffed on his pipe. “How do you know it isn’t?”

“What? Oh … yes. Yes, I see what you mean.” The President was nobody’s fool. It was hardly his fault that he knew nothing about Eskimos. Who did?

“That’s the catch, as you are beginning to understand, sir,” Vincent said.

“But look here,” put in Morton Hillford. “I don’t mean to belittle your field of learning, Doctor, but the Eskimos simply aren’t the most advanced civilization on this planet! Why, we’ve got a technology hundreds of years ahead of theirs, science they can’t even guess at, a Bill of Rights, a political system centuries in the making—thousands of things! The Eskimos just don’t rate.”

Vincent shrugged. “To you they don’t,” he corrected. “But you’re not doing the evaluation.”

Morton Hillford persisted. “Suppose you were making the choice, Doctor. Would you choose an Eskimo?”

“No,” admitted the anthropologist. “Probably not. But then, I’m looking at it from roughly the same values that you are. I’m an American too, you know.”

“I think I see the problem,” the President said slowly. “The people on that ship are far ahead of us—they must be, or they wouldn’t have that ship. Therefore, their standards aren’t the same as our standards. They’re not adding up the points the same way we are. Is that right, Doctor?”

Vincent nodded. “That’s what I would say, at a guess. It stands to reason. Maybe our culture has overlooked something important—something that outweighs all the big buildings and mass production and voting and all the rest of it. How do we know?”

The President drummed his fingers on his desk. “Let’s look at it this way,” he suggested. “Could it be that spiritual values are more important than technological progress—something like that?”

Vincent considered. “I don’t think so,” he said finally. “It might be something like that, but then why choose the Eskimos? There are plenty of people worse off in a technological sense than they are—the Eskimos are quite skilled mechanically. They’ve invented a number of things, such as snow goggles and hunting techniques and intricate harpoon heads. They’re quite good at gadgetry, as a matter of fact. I don’t think we can throw technology out the window; it isn’t that simple. And as for ‘spiritual values,’ they’re apt to be tricky to handle.

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