Eight Keys to Eden by Mark Clifton (easy books to read .TXT) 📕

said. "There will be more, and more, and more.

"You had an advantage," he reminded Them. "You started with a crystalline vibration nearer to the force field than that possible in protoplasm. We've had to come up the hard way.

"But we have come up.

"You had no competition. We've had to fight for our very lives every inch of the way, endure the setbacks lasting for centuries, millennia. It is no wonder that the me-and-mine-ascendant concept has dominated all our thought, and does still. Without it, we'd not have survived at all.

"It takes time to outgrow it, to learn we can survive without it. Five hundred years after Copernicus, a survey of the high school students in the United States revealed that a third of them still rejected his knowledge, still believed the Earth to be at the center of the universe and man was the reason why the universe had been created at all. But two thirds had adjusted.

"More important, there was a Copernicus.

"Don't sell man short because he's slow to learn, and you are[187] impatient for fuller, deeper exploration of the truths in reality. He has much to offer you, as you to him. Competition for survival has given him ingenuity.

"Once all learned men believed the Earth to be the center of the universe, but there was a Copernicus who asked the question, 'What if it isn't so?'

"Millions of men watched apples fall to the ground, but one did ask if this might not be the key to the structure of the universe, the balance of the stars.

"Billions watched the stars, but finally one did ask, 'What if the light be curved instead of straight?'

"There is capacity in man, this protoplasmic life, that had to learn an ingenuity which might surpass even yours.

"This is not the final door in the corridor of thought. Still other doors, on down the corridor, are yet to be explored. And you may need these special gifts of man to open them, as he has needed this new room of thought.

"Be patient. A million or a billion may come here to seek the method that can change things to fit the equation of desire, before one comes who asks a question even you have not conceived.

"But someday he will come—and ask."

The lights danced faster now in patterns of delight.

End of Project Gutenberg's Eight Keys to Eden, by Mark Irvin Clifton