"To get down to the matter uppermost in your minds: Yes, the experiment
was a success, and if you will use your psycho-transmutative powers to
remodel your villages along the lines my constituents and I remodeled
ours and to build enough factories to give your 'masters' that sense of
self-sufficiency so essential to their well-being, and if you will
'plant' your disassembled Multiple Moebius-Knot Dynamos in such a way
that the resultant fields will be ascribed to accidental causes, you
will have no more trouble attracting personnel than we did. Just make
sure that your 'masters' quarters are superior to your own, and that
you behave like dogs in their presence. And when you fabricate your
records concerning your mythical departed masters, see to it that they
do not conflict with the records we fabricated concerning ours. It would
be desirable indeed if our Sirian-human society could be based on less
deceitful grounds than these, but the very human attitude we are
exploiting renders this impossible at the moment. I hate to think of the
resentment we would incur were we to reveal that, far from being the
mere dogs we seem to be, we are capable of mentally transmuting natural
resources into virtually anything from a key to a concert hall, and I
hate even more to think of the resentment we would incur were we to
reveal that, for all our ability in the inanimate field, we have never
been able to materialize so much as a single blade of grass in the
animate field, and that our reason for coincidentalizing the planet
Earth and creating our irresistible little utopias stems not from a need
for companionship but from a need for gardeners. However, you will find
that all of this can be ironed out eventually through the human
children, with whom you will be thrown into daily contact and whom you
will find to possess all of their parents' abiding love for us and none
of their parents' superior attitude toward us. To a little child, a dog
is a companion, not a pet; an equal, not an inferior--and the little
children of today will be the grown-ups of tomorrow.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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