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By Root 1139 0

difference in skin colour or appearance. Also they cannot tolerate those who do not think as they do. Although they know perfectly well, theoretically, that the surface of the inhabited globe is divided into thousands of areas, each with its system of religious or scientific belief, and although they know that it is entirely by chance that any individual among them was born into this or that area, this or that area of belief, this theoretical knowledge does not prevent them from hating foreigners in their own particular small area, and if not harming them, isolating them in every way possible. This means, that unless we can perfect our own adaptation to them, they will attack us, the Team’s members. This we must expect. Further, we must expect that the colonies on Earth that are the result of previous Descents will have acquired—or many of them will—these same qualities of separativeness, and unharmony and hostility to others. Or, retaining in that poisonous brew they call air only the memory that they should not allow themselves to be affected, they devote all their energies to elaborate systems whose function was once to keep them sane, but which now have become their own justification.

“Now, as you know, this will not be my first Descent.”

Here, again, many glances were exchanged. This time for mutual comfort and support. For not one of those present were unaware of the dramatic histories of some of the previous Descents. Or rather of those which were documented—for most were not, since they had been designed to remain unknown to the inhabitants of Earth. But throughout the Solar System, tales of the various Descents were told and retold—as fables, as far as most people were concerned. But to the few who knew they were literally true, they were grim enough hearing. For the first Law enjoined on them all, the children of the System, by their Father, was to love one another—that is, to respect the laws of Harmony. And yet so very close to them, their neighbour, strand of their strand, pulse of their pulse, energy of their energy, was Earth, whose inhabitants not only did not respect the Law, but who tended to persecute or kill, if they did not ignore, Those who came to remind them of it. And such a backsliding and a falling-away on the part of close neighbours tended to make them uncertain of their own continuing safety and health of mind—for after all, every one knew perfectly well that accidents could happen anywhere, that the planetary housekeeping and estate managing was, and had to be, subsidiary to a structure of Law much greater than that of the Solar System. In short—they, too, could become victims; there but for the grace of Light, went they.

Merk continued: “When the time comes, it will be our task to wake up those of us who have forgotten what they went for; as well as to recruit suitable inhabitants of Earth—those, that is, who have kept a potential for evolving into rational beings; and to generally strengthen and defend our colonies on Earth for their task. That has always been so, of course. But this time it will be all that and more—it will be an assisting of the Earth’s people through the coming Planetary Emergency in which all life may be lost. But we have already dealt with that earlier in the Conference.

“At the risk of boring you, I must repeat, I am afraid—repeat, reiterate, re-emphasise—it is not at all a question of your arriving on Planet Earth as you leave here. You will lose nearly all memory of your past existence. You will each of you come to yourselves, perhaps alone, perhaps in the company of each other, but with only a vague feeling of recognition, and probably disassociated, disorientated, ill, discouraged, and unable to believe, when you are told what your task really is. You will wake up, as it were, but there will be a period while you are waking which will be like the recovery from an illness, or like the emergence into good air from a poisoned one. Some of you may choose not to wake, for the waking will be so painful, and the knowledge of your condition and Earth’s condition so