Field Study Read Online Free

held up one, two, three; blinked at the lights.
    Pake grasped Trancore's arm, pulled him outside. He was suddenly quite sober. There was a strange harshness in his voice.
    "Do you have to impress me? The world needs your knowledge and" — he waved at the glitter of Broadway — "you fritter time and energy mooching around here. You don't cure a girl of T.B., but you fix that old thug's squint."
    "A whim. Alone, I can do so little."
    "Why do you do anything?"
    TRANCORE fingered a green bill reflectively. "Even a healer must eat. Field research is expensive. And we are pledged to live as far as possible within the framework of the society we examine, applying our skills to that end. In that way, we reduce the possibility of observation affecting the subject we observe.
    "By using the hypnotic and telekinetic techniques which I have developed in my own profession, I could obviously earn sufficient of your tokens for subsistence during my period of study by gambling, for instance; but that would not be ethical."
    Pake imagined a poker player who not only reshuffled cards as they were being dealt to him, but who could disappear, if his opponents queried his success, by erasing the fact of his presence from their minds.
    "You could teach — " he began.
    "And run foul of the witch-doctors who briefed you yesterday? Think, Mr. Pake! Would you give a hypodermic and a gallon of cocaine to an aboriginal tribe suffering from toothaches? Besides, these techniques have taken me five hundred years to learn."
    "That's why I thought — "
    "That I was from the future? I might be, in terms of possibility. We are," said Trancore, "no older than you, as a race, in terms of universal evolution. But as individuals, we are longer-lived. The biggest single advance you will make as a race will be when you increase the life-span of the individual."
    Pake thought that over, and fantasy was far from his mind.
    "You could help us," he said.
    "We may, when you become more than ephemerate. And, for psychological reasons, that must be achieved by your own efforts."
    "Are we so contemptible?"
    "Would we study you if you were? Our architects, our musicians, even our fiction writers do fieldwork in this territory, write scholarly theses when they return. Anthropology, in our sense of the term, embraces all the arts and sciences. We are all scholars. Occasionally we innovate, and you benefit."
    "Why do you tell me this?"
    Trancore shrugged. For the first time, Pake noticed that they were standing in the middle of a busy side-walk. They might have been in the middle of the Gobi desert for all the notice people took of them. A plump man walked straight toward them, frowned, then detoured carefully around the spot where they stood. Pake wondered what the man thought he saw. Probably a puddle or broken-up side-walk.
    "I like you," Trancore said simply. "And you will remember very little that you can impart to others and expect any measure of belief. And you have imagination enough to control your terrestrial chauvinism and your natural resentment at being studied. It may comfort you to know that, in the physical sciences, your race is considered to be quite well advanced."
    It did, somehow. Yet —
    ALL the niggling, back-mindbiting inferiorities that man has ever suffered, from the time he was first chased by a sabertooth to his feeling of helplessness when science outran his emotional control, suddenly seemed to crowd together into Pake's brain for a staggering second.
    "Resentment isn't the word," Pake said slowly. "I could kill you."
    "But you won't. Others would. Now you understand why our visits are unannounced. And they will remain so until all men are as essentially civilized — that is to say, non-aggressive — as you are."
    Pake knew the question was really unimportant and that its true answer would be incomprehensible, anyway. But he asked it.
    Trancore smiled. "Your preoccupation with the physical sciences . . . No, I don't have a spaceship garaged