A. Well, some things improve, but their point of view keeps changing with regard to what should and what should not improve. It's hard to say whether the Greeks really believed in progress: they thought there had been a golden age and that the world had degenerated from it. Some of them may have wanted to return to it, but I always suspected their motives--by their own showing, they were decadent. During the Middle Ages, it was felt that art was on the way up--part of an evolutionary process--whereas science was not. Aristotle and the Thomists had science all cut and dried. Nowadays it's fashionable to say the art was as "good" in primitive times as it is now, while science on the other hand is evolving to a higher state of truth. The latter happens to be true, but they still have war. Q. Perhaps it's inevitable. A. If it is, we are wasting our time. Q. That is for the Unity to decide. You set yourself up as Mankind's conscience. A. Not conscience. I plead for self-examination--for a reappraisal of ideas. Q. Yet you only succeed in irritating them. A. That may be the best way. And you confuse conscience with consciousness. If there's one thing I've found out, it's that Man differs from the animals in having more consciousness, just as animals have more than plants. I don't suppose that hydrogen has any at all. Q. But you have turned what was intended to be a field-trip for examination and analysis into a crusade. With all your nagging and irritating them, there have been no results--no real advances. A. I thought you were complaining that I was altering what I was sent to examine. You talk about unification--or absorption--as if it were a catchword. That's the trouble with generalities: they're not necessarily true in all cases. Q. You mean they are too general? A. I mean that they are not general enough. I agree that men progress too slowly toward unification, but we mustn't confuse it with domination. We cannot _impose_ it on them. That would lead to a world divided into the ruled and the rulers--not a unity. Q. Then you are for absorption? A. You know, you twist things around much worse than I do. Q. The Unity is incapable of-- A. Furthermore, I think you have been altered more than I have. Q. You are part of the Unity. A. And the least altered part. You won't be able to absorb them the way you can reabsorb me without destroying them as entities. Q. You set yourself up as the only one to know this. Why? A. Because I have been the one to make the trips. I have been your eye. Q. But the others--the ones you called the spies?