Rescue Party
A sci-fi story by Arthur C. Clarke
© 1946 Smith and Smith Publications.
(excerpt)

"Last came one of the strange beings from the system of Palador. It was nameless, like all its kind, for it possessed no identity of its own, being merely a mobile but still dependent cell in the consciousness of its race. Though it and its fellows had long been scattered over the galaxy in the exploration of countless worlds, some unknown link still bound them together as inexorably as the living cells in a human body.

When a creature of Palador spoke, the pronoun it always used was 'We.' There was not, nor could there ever be, any first person singular in the language of Palador.

...T'sinadree and Alarkane were thinking rapidly. So was the Paladorian, though in a different fashion. The conception of personal death was meaningless to it, for the destruction of a single unit meant no more to the group mind than the loss of a nail-paring to a man.

...In moments of crisis, the single units comprising the Paladorian mind could link together in an organization no less close than that of any physical brain....Very rarely, millions would be needed, and on two historic occasions the billions of cells of the entire Paladorian consciousness had been welded together to deal with emergencies that threatened the race.

...Long ago, Alarkane had written a book trying to prove that eventually all intelligent races would sacrifice individual consciousness and that one day only group-minds would remain in the Universe. Palador, he had said, was the first of those ultimate intellects, and the vast, dispersed mind had not been displeased."

"Alarkane" neglected the possibility that some non-human species on Earth are simply born like the Paladorian. Think of some fish and bird species which swim and fly as if under collective control. Also, he wrongly assumed that the conventional human notion of a self separated from all others is fundamental, thinking which Albert Einstein called "an optical delusion of the consciousness."¹ As the historian Jacques Barzun put things more recently, the human will "is distributed among all the living."² So, no sacrifice would be needed to become like a Paladorian; one merely abandons the delusion of egocentricity and bad habits that go with it.

Arthur C. Clarke is a long-time resident of Sri Lanka and most famous as co-writer of the Stanley Kubrick film 2001: a space odyssey. In 1945 he published a paper describing the principles for communication via satellites in geostationary orbits.

1. Rudolf v.B. Rucker, Geometry, Relativity and the Fourth Dimension, (New York: Dover Publications, 1977), p. 118.
2. Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present - 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, (New York: HarperCollins, 2000).

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