Read I Speak for Earth for Free Online

are at present no more than a candidate, and in fact we have altogether some
six
candidates, whom you will of course meet if you, and they, pass our most stringent tests. You may refuse, naturally; I only hope you will not, because you are definitely among the very best possible selections.”
    “On what grounds?”
    “On all grounds.” Schneider made a casual gesture. “Original mind. Adaptable to various kinds of company and environment. Sociable. Well-liked. Capable. In excellent health. But the rest you will discover.” He drew himself forward and leaned both elbows on the desk.
    “Mr. Morea, what we must ask you to do is this. We wish to establish by various tests—psychological and physical—that you in fact match the information on record about you. Some of the testing may not be pleasant; it will be designed to find out if you have irrational fears from childhood, which we can eliminate, or not. Then we will bring you together with the other candidates, to establish your sociability beyond doubt. We think it will be very good; we have chosen with care. And then, ultimately, it will be a choice.”
    “Who are the others?” Joe felt his throat remain dry in spite of his best efforts to relax.
    “You will discover if they are also passed by our testers.”
    “I see.”
    There was a pause. Schneider consulted some notes on his desk. “You will be assigned accommodation here—rather like hospital accommodation, I regret, but necessarily so, for the observation will have to last the clock around. The tests may last about a week; then you will be informed of the result and meet your colleagues.”
    Joe shrugged and said confessedly, “I suppose I ought to feel this as a great honor. I must say I don’t. I feel it as a load of unwanted responsibility.”
    Schneider gave him a thoughtful stare. “Yes,” he said. “So do we all. Not us alone, on the project itself, but the whole human race. We resent the arbitrary way in which Gyul Kodran and the others responsible for the dreadful decision presented to us. We may feel confident of doing our best, but we have no way of knowing that our best will be good enough.
    “But, rationally regarding the problem, we realize that we can do no more than our best. Accordingly, we decide by consulting our best sources of knowledge what we must do. And we are driven by pure logic—which is all we can trust in this matter, for logic must be shared by thinking beings, where emotion or intuition must necessarily differ with different metabolism, different sexual orientation, different environments—we are driven, as I say, to some conclusions which we may not
feel
instinctively to be right but which our intelligence advises us to accept. You, Mr. Morea, are such a conclusion.”
    He got to his feet and extended his hand across the desk. “I wish you luck,” he said, “as a sop to the intuitions and superstitions we cannot altogether discard.”
    Joe managed a smile in response, and shook the hand. “I feel superstitious right now,” he said. “I’ll cross my fingers, too.”

VI
    Now I know what it feels like to be a focus
.
    The thought ran through Joe Morea’s mind a dozen times a day in the course of the following week. It was as though he had been transported into a sealed universe in which he was the only object worthy of attention. There were other people with him in this universe, but they existed there only because of him. They were serious-faced, intent men and women, so much alike in their physical characteristics that he took to tabbing them by minute differences of behavior rather than by name.
    The days began to acquire a rhythm like music—a sort of smooth but not uniform rise and fall, from examination to trial to examination again.
    White-coated like the others, a young man with glasses came to the comfortable but stark accommodation they had provided for him. He said, “Please come with me.”
    Obediently Joe followed him through featureless