Extraterrestrial beings -- Fiction; Life on other planets -- Fiction; Mars (Planet) -- Fiction; Science fiction
He shrugged his shoulders. “I am only sure that I know perfectly where
your interests lie—sentimentalists have words: love, loyalty,
friendship, enmity, jealousy, hate, a thousand others; a waste of
words—one word defines them all: self-interest. All men of intelligence
realize this. They analyse an individual and by his predilections and
his needs they classify him as friend or foe, leaving to the weak-minded
idiots who like to be deceived the drooling drivel of sentiment.”
I smiled as I buckled my weapons to my harness, but I held my peace.
Nothing could be gained by arguing with the man and, too, I felt quite
sure that in any purely academic controversy I should get the worst of
it; but many of the matters of which he had spoken had aroused my
curiosity and one had reawakened in my mind a matter to which I had
given considerable thought. While partially explained by some of his
remarks I still wondered why the red-man from whom I had rescued him had
seemed so venomously bent upon slaying him the day of my advent upon
Barsoom, and so, as we sat chatting after our evening meal, I asked him.
“A sentimentalist,” he said. “A sentimentalist of the most pronounced
type. Why that fellow hated me with a venom absolutely unbelievable by
any of the reactions of a trained, analytical mind such as mine; but
having witnessed his reactions I become cognizant of a state of mind
that I cannot of myself even imagine. Consider the facts. He was the
victim of assassination—a young warrior in the prime of life,
possessing a handsome face and a splendid physique. One of my agents
paid his relatives a satisfactory sum for the corpse and brought it to
me. It is thus that I obtain practically all of my material. I treated
it in the manner with which you are familiar. For a year the body lay in
the laboratory, there being no occasion during that time that I had use
for it; but eventually a rich client came, a not overly prepossessing
man of considerable years. He had fallen desperately in love with a
young woman who was attended by many handsome suitors. My client had
more money than any of them, more brains, more experience, but he lacked
the one thing that each of the others had that always weighs heavily
with the undeveloped, unreasoning, sentiment-ridden minds of young
females—good looks.
“Now 378-J-493811-P had what my client lacked and could afford to
purchase. Quickly we reached an agreement as to price and I transferred
the brain of my rich client to the head of 378-J-493811-P and my client
went away and for all I know won the hand of the beautiful moron; and
378-J-493811-P might have rested on indefinitely upon his ersite slab
until I needed him or a part of him in my work, had I not, merely by
chance, selected him for resurgence because of an existing need for
another male slave.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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