If by Roger Lee Vernon

Author:Roger Lee Vernon [Vernon, Roger Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781462053797
Publisher: iUniverse
Published: 2011-12-21T05:00:00+00:00

II

“It was better than television.” - Helen West

I usually arose at seven, but I jerked wide-awake suddenly at five that morning, dressed quietly and went downstairs to the study to observe Xan-Tu. Our guest was still floating above the small table and from the stacks of books it appeared that he had gone through the Britannica along with a two volume history of the world, an English unabridged dictionary, my French, German, and Spanish dictionaries, and a world almanac.

“Good morning, Dr. West.”

“Good morning, Xan-Tu. I hope you had a pleasant night.”

“Yes, I did. To change the subject, I suspected this from listening to your news broadcasts, but now that I read your world history, I fear that your planet is in deep trouble. Humanity has gotten itself into a corner.”

“The planet has always been in trouble Xan-Tu. Civilizations rise and fall.”

“But a nuclear war, as you call it, would return most of the surviving earth’s people from a Stage Five culture to a Stage Three. Further, you have built your civilization on easy to reach resources, coal, oil, and metals near the surface. Those easy to obtain resources have been consumed. Now that you have achieved a technological stage, you can manage to reach the resources deeper beneath the surface of your planet and utilize those minerals that need much more processing. But if you blow yourselves up, your technology may take centuries or millennia to come back. And if the war is bad enough, mankind could be finished.”

“Were you sent here to save us from ourselves?” This was a common enough theme of various books recently. The theme represented a surrender of mankind, unable to find a way out. “Perhaps only a deus ex machina can help us now,” I observed cynically.

“That was not my purpose. ‘Dues ex machina’ is not a television term, Dr. West, but fortunately I read your English dictionary this morning. It is an interesting concept. The Greeks had dramas in which the characters boxed themselves in so completely during a stage play that there was no possibility of a happy ending. So in the last scene the actors simply pulled a small statue of an appropriate God across the stage in a little wagon and the God solved all their problems. The God in the machine. It was a simple machine, a simple solution, and a simple God.”

It seemed to me that Xan-Tu was speaking more exactly and had improved his understanding of human conditions overnight. He was learning rapidly. Was that dangerous?

I took out my camera and asked: “May I take your picture?” Certain primitive tribes felt their life force was diminished by picture taking. Anyway, pictures were private, so it was best to ask.

“All right,” Xan-Tu agreed.

All along I had the feeling that our guest might just fly away without anyone else seeing him and I would be left with an unbelievable story backed up only by young Jose.

Could I even take a picture of the robot? Well I could and the pictures were there.

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