Case of Conscience by James Blish Read Free Book Online

knowledge, the barrenness of having been born at all? "Only upon this firm foundation of unyielding despair," a famous atheist once had written, "may the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built."
    Or could it be that the Lithians thought and acted as they did because, not being born of man, and never in effect having left the Garden in which they lived, they did not share the terrible burden of original sin? The fact that Lithia had never once had a glacial epoch, that its climate had been left unchanged for seven hundred million years, was a geological fact that an alert theologian could scarcely afford to ignore. Could it be that, free from the burden, they were also free from the curse of Adam? And if they were-could men bear to live among them?
    "I have some questions to ask you, Chtexa," the priest said after a moment. "You owe me no debt whatsoever-it is our custom to regard all knowledge as community property-but we four Earthmen have a hard decision to make shortly. You know what it is. And I don't believe that we know enough yet about your planet to make that decision properly."
    "Then of course you must ask questions," Chtexa said immediately. "I will answer, wherever I can."
    "Well then-do your people die? I see you have the word, but perhaps it isn't the same in meaning as our word."
    "It means to stop changing and to go back to existing," Chtexa said. "A machine exists, but only a living thing, like a tree, progresses along a line of changing equilibriums. When that progress stops, the entity is dead."
    "And that happens to you?"
    "It always happens. Even the great trees, like the Message Tree, die sooner or later. Is that not true on Earth?"
    "Yes," Ruiz-Sanchez said, "yes, it is. For reasons which it would take me a long time to explain, it occurred to me that you might have escaped this evil."
    "It is not evil as we look at it," Chtexa said. "Lithia lives because of death. The death of plants supplies our oil and gas. The death of some creatures is always necessary to feed the lives of others. Bacteria must die, and viruses be prevented from living, if illness is to be cured. We ourselves must die simply to make room for others, at least, until we can slow the rate at which our people arrive in the world-a thing impossible to us at present."
    "But desirable, in your eyes?"
    "Surely desirable," Chtexa said. "Our world is rich, but not inexhaustible. And other planets, you have taught us, have peoples of their own. Thus we cannot hope to spread to other planets when we have overpopulated this one."
    "No real thing is ever exhaustible," Ruiz-Sanchez said abruptly, frowning at the iridescent floor. "That we have found to be true over many thousands of years of our history."
    "But exhaustible in what way?" Chtexa said. "I grant you that any small object, any stone, any drop of water, any bit of soil can be explored without end. The amount of information, which can be gotten from it is quite literally infinite. But a given soil can be exhausted of nitrates. It is difficult, but with bad cultivation it can be done. Or take iron, about which we have been talking. To allow our economy to develop a demand for iron which exceeds the total known supply of Lithia-and exceeds it beyond any possibility of supplementation by meteorites or by import-would be folly. This is not a question of information. It is a question of whether or not the information can be used. If it cannot, then limitless information is of no help."
    "You could certainly get along without more iron if you had to," Ruiz-Sanchez admitted. "Your wooden machinery is precise enough to satisfy any engineer. Most of them, I think, don't remember that we used to have something similar: I've a sample in my own home. It's a kind of timer called a cuckoo clock, nearly two of our centuries old, made entirely of wood except for the weights, and still nearly a hundred per cent accurate. For that matter, long after we began to build seagoing vessels of metal, we