Chocky

‘Some time ago. It’s where you ought to be,’ I told him.

  ‘Good,’ he said, and came in, carefully closing the door behind him. He was wearing his dressing-gown and bedroom slippers, and his hair was all on end. I wondered if he had been having a nightmare.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.

  He glanced back at the door as if to make sure it was closed.

  ‘It’s Chocky,’ he told me.

  My spirits sank a little.

  ‘I thought she’d gone away – for good,’ I said.

  Matthew nodded.

  ‘She did. But she’s come back now. She says she wants me to tell you some things.’

  I sighed. It had been a relief to think that we had finished with all that, but Matthew was looking very earnest and somewhat troubled. I took a cigarette, lit it, and leaned back.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’m all attention. What things?’

  But Matthew had become abstracted. He did not appear to hear. He noticed my expression though.

  ‘Sorry, Daddy. Just a minute,’ he said, and reverted to his look of abstraction. His changes of expression and the small movements of his head gave one a sensation of seeing one side of a televised conversation, with the sound cut off. It ended with him nodding and saying aloud: ‘Okay. I’ll try,’ though rather doubtfully. Looking at me again he explained:

  ‘Chocky says it’ll take an awful long time if she has to tell me and then I have to tell you because sometimes I can’t think of the right words for what she means; and sometimes they don’t quite mean it when I can; if you see what I mean.’

  ‘I think I do,’ I told him. ‘Lots of other people have difficulty over that at the best of times. And when it’s a kind of translation, too, it must be quite hard work.’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ Matthew agreed, decidedly. ‘So Chocky thinks it would be better if she talks to you herself.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Well – tell her to go ahead. What do I do?’

  ‘No, not the way she talks to me. I don’t understand why, but she says that only works with some people. It doesn’t with you, so she wants to try and see if we can do it another way.’

  ‘What other way?’ I inquired.

  ‘Well, me talking, but sort of letting her do it.… Like my hands and the painting,’ he explained, not very adequately.

  ‘Oh,’ I said again, this time doubtfully. I was feeling at sea, unclear what was implied, uncertain whether it ought to be encouraged.’ I don’t know. Do you think…?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But Chocky’s pretty sure she can work it okay, so I expect she can. She’s usually right about things like that.’

  I was uneasy, with a feeling that I was being rushed into taking part in something suspiciously like a séance. I stalled.

  ‘Look here,’ I said. ‘If this is going to take some time, don’t you think it would be better if you were in bed. You’d keep warmer there.’

  ‘All right,’ agreed Matthew.

  So we went up to his room. He got back to bed, and I sat down in a chair. I still had misgivings, a feeling that I ought not to be allowing this to go on – and a conviction that if Mary were here she would disapprove strongly – which was scarcely allayed by the hope that once Matthew was back in bed again he would fall asleep.

  Matthew leant his head back on the pillow, and closed his eyes.

  ‘I am going to think of nothing,’ he said.

  I hesitated. Then:

  ‘Look here, Matthew. Don’t you…?’ I began, and then broke off as his eyes reopened. They were not looking at me now, nor, seemingly, at anything else. His lips parted, came together two or three times without a sound, parted again, and his voice said:

  ‘It is Chocky talking.’

  There was no air of séance about it, nothing of the medium about Matthew, no pallor, no change in his rate of breathing. Except for the unfocused look in his eyes he was apparently quite himself. The voice went on:

  ‘I want to explain some things to you. It is not easy because I can use only Matthew’s understanding, and only his’ – there was a slight pause – ‘vocabulary, which is simple, and not large, and has some meanings not clear in his mind.’

  The voice was characteristically Matthew’s, but the flatness of its delivery was certainly not. There was an impression of intended decisiveness blurred, and frustrated; an athlete condemned to take part in a sack-race. Unwillingly fascinated I said:

  ‘Very well, I’ll do my best to follow you.’

  ‘I want to talk to you because I shall not come back again after this. You will be glad to hear this: the other part of his parent, I mean Mummy, I mean your wife, will be gladder because it is afraid of me and thinks I am bad for Matthew, which is a pity because I did not mean me, I mean you, I mean Matthew, any harm. Do you understand?’

  ‘I think so,’ I said, cautiously. ‘But wouldn’t it be best to tell me first who you are, what you are, why you are here at all?’

  ‘I am an explorer, I mean scout, I mean missionary – no, I mean teacher. I am here to teach things.’

  ‘Oh, are you? What sort of things?’

  There was a pause, then:

  ‘Matthew hasn’t words for them – he doesn’t understand them.’

  ‘Not, perhaps, a very successful teacher?’

  ‘Not yet. Matthew is too young. He can only think in too simple words for difficult ideas. If I think in maths, or physics, we do not meet. Even numbers are difficult. This is a good thing, I mean, lucky.’

  I have quoted the above exchanges as closely as I can remember in order to give some idea of what I was up against, and to justify my use of editorial discretion from now on. A verbatim record would be impossible. The small-change words and usages came easily enough, but less familiar words brought hold-ups. There were detours in search of the right word, and others to establish the true significance of the approximate word that had been pressed into service, also several expeditions up cul-de-sacs where sheer inadequacy of vocabulary left us faced by a blank wall.

  Add to that the necessity to wade through a morass of Matthew’s favourite, and not very specific, adjectives: sort-of, kind-of, and I-mean, and the going became so intricate that it is quite necessary for me to edit ruthlessly in order to extract and attempt to convey Chocky’s intended meaning – in so far as I could grasp it, which was not always.

  I could perceive from the beginning that it was not going to be easy. The sight of Matthew lying there, quite expressionless as he spoke, his eyes with that unfocused stare, and his whole mien far more negative than that of a ventriloquist’s dummy was too disturbing for me to give the words the full attention they needed.

  I turned out the light as an aid to concentration – and in sneaking hope that without it he might fall asleep.

  ‘All right. Go ahead,’ I said into the darkness. ‘You are a missionary – or a teacher – or an explorer. Where from?’

  ‘Far away.’

  ‘Far? How far?’

  ‘I do not know. Many, many parsecs.’

  ‘Oh,’I said.

  ‘I was sent here to find out what kind of a planet this is.’

  ‘Were you indeed. Why?’

  ‘To see, in the first place, whether it would be useful to us. You see, we are a very old people compared with you, on a very old planet compared with yours. It has long been clear to us that if we are to survive we must colonize. But that is difficult. A ship that can travel only at the speed of light takes a very long time to get anywhere. One cannot send out ships on the chance of their finding a suitable planet. There are innumerable millions of planets. The chance of finding a suitable one is infinitesimal.

  ‘So a scout – an explorer – is sent out in this way. Because mind has no mass it takes no time to travel. The scout makes his report. If he reports that it would be a suitable planet for a colony, other scouts are sent to check. If their reports are favourable, the astronomers go to work to locate the planet. If it is found to be within practi
cable range they may send a ship of colonists. But this is very rare. It has happened only four times in a thousand of your years. And only two colonies have been established.’

  ‘I see. And when are we to expect a ship here?’

  ‘Oh, this planet is not any use to us. Your planet is exceptional, and very beautiful, but it is much too cold for us, and there is a great deal too much water. There are plenty of reasons why it is quite impossible for us. I could tell that at once.’

  ‘Then why stay here? Why not go and find a more suitable planet?’

  Chocky went on, patiently:

  ‘We are explorers. We are at present, as far as we know, the only explorers of the universe. For a long time we thought that ours was the only planet that could support life. Then we found others that could – a few. For still longer we thought we were unique – the only intelligent form of life – a single, freakish pinpoint of reason in a vast, adventitious cosmos – utterly lonely in the horrid wastes of space.… Again we discovered we were mistaken…

  ‘But intelligent life is rare… very rare indeed… the rarest thing in creation…

  ‘But the most precious…

  ‘For intelligent life is the only thing that gives meaning to the universe. It is a holy thing, to be fostered and treasured.

  ‘Without it nothing begins, nothing ends, there can be nothing through all eternity but the mindless babblings of chaos…

  ‘Therefore, the nurture of all intelligent forms is a sacred duty. Even the merest spark of reason must be fanned in the hope of a flame. Frustrated intelligence must have its bonds broken. Narrow-channelled intelligence must be given the power to widen out. High intelligence must be learned from. That is why I have stayed here.’

  It took some time to get all that across. It seemed very high-minded, if a little high-flown. I asked:

  ‘And into which of these categories do you consider the intelligent life of this planet to fall?’

  The Chocky-Matthew voice answered that without hesitation.

  ‘Narrow-channelled. It has recently managed to overcome some of its frustrations by its own efforts – which is hopefully good progress at your age. It is now in a groove of primitive technology.’

  ‘It seems to us to be making progress pretty fast.’

  ‘Yes. You have not done badly with electricity in a hundred years. And you did well with steam in quite a short time. But all that is so cumbersome, so inefficient. And your oil engines are just a deplorable perversion – dirty, noisy, poisonous, and the cars you drive with them are barbarous, dangerous…’

  ‘Yes,’ I interrupted. ‘You mentioned that before, to Matthew. But we do have atomic power now.’

  ‘Very crudely, yes. You are learning, slowly. But you still live in a finite, sun-based economy.’

  ‘Sun-based?’

  ‘Yes. Everything you are, and have, you owe to the radiations from your sun. Direct radiations you must have in order to keep your bodies alive, and to grow your food, and provide fresh water; and they could continue to sustain you for millions of years. But intelligence held at subsistence level cannot come to flower. To grow and expand it needs power.

  ‘Recently you have learnt to exploit the stored-up energy of your sun – for that is what all your fuels are – and you call that progress. It is not progress. Progress is an advance towards an objective. What is your objective? You do not know, and since you do not know, you might as well be going round in a circle – which, indeed, is just what you are doing, for you are squandering your sources of power. And they are your capital: when they are spent you will be back where you were before you found them. This is not progress, it is profligacy.

  ‘Your fuels, your capital, should certainly be used. Frozen power does no good to anyone. But used, not wasted. They should be invested, to produce greater power.

  ‘It is true you have an elementary form of atomic power which you will no doubt improve. But that is almost your only investment for your future. Most of your power is being used to build machines to consume power faster and faster, while your sources of power remain finite. There can be only one end to that.’

  ‘You have a point there,’ I conceded. ‘What, in your opinion, ought we to be doing?’

  ‘You should be employing your resources, while you still have them, to tap and develop the use of a source of power which is not finite. Once you have access to an infinite supply of power you will have broken out of the closed circle of your solar-economy. You will no longer be isolated and condemned to eventual degeneration upon a wasting asset. You will become a part of the larger creation, for a source of infinite power is a source of infinite possibilities.’

  ‘I see,’ I said. ‘At least, I think I see – dimly. What is this source of infinite power?’

  ‘It is radiation – throughout the cosmos. It can be tapped and used.’

  I thought. Then I said:

  ‘It is a funny thing that in a world swarming with scientists nobody has suspected the existence of this source of power.’

  ‘It is an equally funny thing that two hundred of your years ago nobody understood, nor suspected, the potentials of electricity. But they were there to be discovered. So is x x x x x.’

  ‘So is – what?’

  ‘Matthew has no word for it. It is a concept he cannot grasp.’

  After a pause I asked:

  ‘So you are here to sell us a new form of power. Why?’

  ‘I have told you that. Intelligent forms are rare. In each form they owe a duty to all other forms. Moreover, some forms are complementary. No one can assess the potentialities that are latent in any intelligent form. Today we can help you over some obstacles; it may be you will so develop that in some future time you will be able to help us, or others, over obstacles. The employment of x x x x x is only the first thing we can teach you. It will liberate your world from a great deal of drudgery, and clear the way for your future development.’

  ‘So we are, in fact, a speculative investment for you?’

  ‘You could also say that if a teacher does not teach his pupils to overtake him there can be no advance.’

  There was quite a lot more along these lines. I found it somewhat tedious. It was difficult to drag the conversation from the general to the particular. Chocky seemed to have her mission so much at heart. But I managed it at last.

  Why, I wanted to know, out of, presumably, millions of possible hosts, had Chocky chosen to come here and ‘haunt’ Matthew?

  Chocky explained that ‘millions’ was a gross overstatement. Conditions varied with the type of intelligent life-form, of course, but here there was a number of qualifications that had to be fulfilled. First, the subject had to have the type of mind that was susceptible to her communications. This was by no means common. Second, it had to be a young mind, for several reasons. Young minds, she explained, have absorbed so much that it is unlikely and inexplicable from myths, legends, fairy-stories, and religion, that they are disposed to accept the improbable with little question, providing it is not alarming. Older minds, on the other hand, have formed rigid conceptions of probability, and are very frightened by any attempt at contact: they usually think they must be going mad, which interferes with rapport. Third, it must be a mind with a potential of development – which, according to her, a surprising proportion have not. Fourth, its owners must inhabit a technologically advanced country where the educational opportunities are good.

  These requirements narrowed the field remarkably, but eventually her search had brought her to Matthew who fulfilled all of them.

  I said that I still did not see her purpose. She said, and I thought I could detect a note of sadness even through the flatness of the delivery:

  ‘I would have interested Matthew in physics. He would have taken it up, and with me to help him he would have done remarkably well. As his knowledge of physics increased we should have had the basis of a common language. He would begin to understand some of the concepts I wanted to communicate to him. Gr
adually, as he learned, communication would grow still better. I should convince him that x x x x x existed, and he would begin to search for it. I would still be able to communicate only in terms that he could understand. It still would be like’ – there was a pause – ’something like trying to teach a steam-engineer with no knowledge of electricity how to build a radio transmitter – without names for any of the parts, or words for their functions. Difficult, but with time, patience, and intelligence, not impossible.

  ‘If he had succeeded in demonstrating the existence of x x x x x – let us call it cosmic – power – he would have become the most famous man in your world. Greater than your Newton, or your Einstein.’

  There was a pause while she let that sink in. It did. I said:

  ‘Do you know, I don’t think that would have suited Matthew very well. He hated taking the credit for saving Polly’s life. He would have hated this unearned fame even more.’

  ‘It would have been hard-earned. Very hard-earned indeed.’

  ‘Perhaps, but all the same – Oh, well, it doesn’t matter now. Tell me, why have you decided to give it up? Why are you going away?’

  ‘Because I made mistakes. I have failed here. It is my first assignment. I was warned of the difficulties and dangers. I did not take enough notice of the warnings. The failure is my own fault.’

  A scout, a missionary, she explained, should preserve detachment. She was advised not to let her sympathies become engaged, not to identify with her host, and, above all, to be discreet.

  Chocky had understood this well enough in theory before she came, but once she had made contact with Matthew it had seemed that the preservation of detachment was not one of her gifts. Forms of engagement had seemed to lie constantly, and stickily in her path. For instance, after observing that Earth was a very oddly arranged and backward place, she had allowed herself to feel impatient with it, which was bad; and she had even let these feelings be known, which was worse. The proper missionary temperament would not have let itself get into arguments with Matthew; nor have been tempted into making disparaging remarks about the local inhabitants and their artifacts. It would simply have noted that Matthew was incompetent with his paints; it would have resisted the urge to try to help him do better. It would have been careful to keep its influence down to the minimum. Quite certainly it would not have permitted itself to develop an affection for Matthew that could lead to a flagrant interference with the natural course of events. It would regretfully, but quite properly, have let Matthew drown…