: Submission to Divine Providence in the Death of Children Recommended and inforced in a sermon preached at Northampton on the death of a very amiable and hopeful child about five years old by Doddridge Philip - Sermons English 18th century; Death Sermons

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WORLD IN A MIRROR

BY ALBERT TEICHNER

It was a backward world, all right--in a special and very deadly manner!

God knows I didn't want Hacker in the preliminary delegation right from the start. I wasn't thinking, either, of the screwball ways history can go about poetically repeating itself sometimes. I just knew that an uppity, smart-alecky kid of fifty could only cause trouble.

He already had.

I'm only the Science Chronicler of this expedition but Dr. Barnes is Chief Medical Officer. His protests should have mattered where mine didn't. "I'm a hundred per cent behind Johnson," he told Captain Weber. "That kid's no damned good. The three of us will go into town with these Newtaneans and, sure as I'm standing here, Hacker will do something wrong."

Captain Weber, looking worried as usual, tried to explain. "He'll just do the chauffeuring." But he got off that tack immediately when he saw we were not following along. "Look, I know he's a pest. But this is a political matter, for the good of the Space Corps. His great-great-uncle is President of the World Council. For all I know the old man hates his guts, won't listen to a word he says, but let's not take any chances. We're going to need plenty of these expeditions. And hyper-drive craft take an awful lot out of the economy."

The upshot of the matter was that we patriotically agreed to the setup. The captain gave Hacker a good chewing-out about respecting the rights of the Newtaneans.

I still felt uncomfortable about Hacker, though. He had tasted blood on Rayna and the effect of that on him had been unusually bad; he had acquired a reckless attitude toward the rights of intelligent life, his own included.

As if to prove me wrong, he drove very carefully over the special road the Newtaneans had laid out overnight from our landing area to the highway a mile or so away. The three carloads of scowling plenipotentiaries up ahead looked appealingly funny. While the Newtaneans were remarkably, even handsomely, like us their facial muscles carried different emotional convictions. On our landing ten hours before those officials had thought our smiling faces indicated angry aggressiveness and we had been equally uncertain about their intentions. But their Semanticizer had eventually made the true state of affairs clear. Evolution had determined that an upward set of Newtanean facial muscles meant a bad situation, a downward set pleasure and cordiality. The more they scowled the more we smiled and everybody was very happy about the potential flowering of transgalactic culture that we were instituting.

When we turned onto the magnificent superhighway, however, Hacker became furious. He kept trying to pull over to the right but a steady stream of scarab-shaped cars, filled with curious sightseers, kept getting in his way.

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