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"There's no witchcraft involved," retorted Goat, with a sardonic grimace. "I haven't accused you," said Nuwell quickly. "No, but I keep up with events, even out here, well enough to know that you're the Mars City government's chief nemesis where there's any suspicion of extrasensory perception. I doubt that you chose to make this trip yourself without reason, Mr. Eli."
He dipped a spoon into a tobacco humidor, dusted the tobacco lightly with dried zerfa, and rammed it into his pipe. "You must understand that our modern Statisticalists are the intellectual heirs of those ancient materialistic thinkers who denied the possibility of any discarnate existence, or of any extraphysical mind, or even of extrasensory perception.
"Some of them were trying to develop human extrasensory powers so that materials could be teleported from Earth, and the others were trying to change the human body physiologically so that humans could live under Martian conditions. But you say they were both wrong?" "In each way that they followed, they sought to make humans partly like us, the children of the past," said Qril.
"Witchcraft the practice of extrasensory perception, if you prefer the term is forbidden on Mars because to practice it one must differ from his fellow men when the inexorable dangers of our frontier demand that we work together. To practice it, one must devote time and mental effort to untried things when our thin margin of safety makes concentrated and combined effort necessary for survival.
It has extended man's conquest of the planet and begun his adventures into space. It has enlarged the field of human creativity by increasing the number and proportion of men and women trained and experienced in productive and creative enterprises. It has opened the door to study and experimentation in extrasensory perception man's "sixth" sense.
"I'm not surprised if you did," said Maya. "From what Qril tells me, Dark, this prenatal alteration they performed on you gave you even more extensive powers than we realized. He says that you have extraordinary extrasensory ability, if you would only make an effort to use it." "Oh, I do, do I?" murmured Dark thoughtfully.
The only reason the rest of us chose to attempt the extrasensory powers particularly teleportation was that we were not qualified in genetic research and this seemed a field in which we stood a chance to contribute along alternate lines. The effort should be followed along both lines."
Experience will be necessary before you can compete with the simplest effort of one of our race. Dark turned to Maya. "He's right," said Dark. "I do have extrasensory powers, but they'll need some development." "I know," said Maya.
"If you bear my earlier memories, I'm surprised you didn't recognize him as Goat Hennessey, too." "I recognized him as someone else," said Dark in a low voice. "We worked together," went on Old Beard. "I was a leader in the effort to solve our problem through extrasensory perception, and he was the major scientist in the group attempting to solve it by genetic change.
"I was the leader of the section of the experiments dealing with extrasensory perception, and, instead of executing me at once, they tried to persuade me to continue this work for the government along specific lines and under supervision.
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