Argosy: The Short Story Magazine — page 125: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE CHRYSALIDS 125 “We are the New People—so are you. The people who can think-together. We’re the people who are going to build a new world—a different world from the Old People’s and the savages’.” *“’The kind of people that God intended?” I suggested, with a feeling of being on familiar ground. ‘““T don’t know about that. But we do know that we can make a better world than the Old People. ‘They were savages, half men. Shut off from one another, with only inadequate words to link them; tribes shut off by different languages; minds shut off by different religions. ‘There was never any unity in them. ‘“‘ Individually, some of them could think: collectively, they could not. The more complex they made their world, the less capable they were of dealing with it. They had no means of con- sensus. ‘They could co-operate constructively in small units, but only destructively in large ones. They aspired greedily, and then refused the responsibilities they had created. With one hand they grasped reason, with the other they rejected it. Singly, some of them tried to be men; in groups, they remained primitive. There was, you see, no real communication between them: the system of words could work at all only where individuals were very similar: applied to large numbers, it broke down. “They brought down Tribulation, which all but destroyed them. They were inadequate.”’ Brought up as I had been, with a reverence for the Old People, and the belief that they were the true image, I found this both difficult to accept and shocking. While I was still wrestling with it, Rosalind asked, ‘“‘ But you? where do you come from? ”’ ** Our ancestors had the luck to live on an island—or rather two islands. ‘They did not escape Tribulation altogether, but it was less bad here. However, they were cut off from the rest of the world and became almost barbaric again. ‘Then, somehow, the strain of people who could think-together began. Soon, those who were best at it began to find other people who could do it a little, and to teach them to do it better. And of course, the people who could do it preferred to marry others who could do it, and the strain became stronger. ** Later on, when they started to find that there were thought- shape-makers in other places too, they realized how lucky they had been that there was so little deviation in Zealand, and so little feeling about it. It was not like that in most places. Even where they don’t take much notice of physical deviations they are usually superstitiously afraid of people who can think-together. ““For a long time nothing could be done to help the same kind of people in other places—though some who were not too far away sailed to Zealand in canoes; but later on, when we had machines again, we were able to fetch them into safety. We try to do that wherever we can make contact with them—but we have never before made a contact at anything like the distance away that you are. ‘The little girl is unique, and tremendously important. Petra must be protected at all costs.” comiclooks.conn