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Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 24, No. 14. 1961.

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Alchreb was worried. He was always concerned at the behaviour of his students, so nobody paid any attention; although he claimed this occasion was different. It was extremely serious, he told himself, closing his respiratory aperture and letting a shiver run over his yellow-gray body. In a way, of course, this was a typical case, a young student at the academy was the cause as usual, but this was outrageous, the youth of today were too much, too much altogether . . . Alchreb wished that the Wise Founding Fathers had provided some form of government for these youngsters until they reached an age of mature thinking, say 70 or 80. It was always the young who created needless trouble.

The cause of Alchreb's jeremiad was a 50-year-old tutor in music at the Academy named Krababok, who had flagrantly defied the edicts of the Wise Founding Fathers. He had built a machine! The Founders, many thousands of years ago, had decided that the aims of Thex civilisation were to contemplate the beauties of the world and communicate them to each other by means of painting, sculpture, drama, poetry and prose. They had further decreed that these aims were the only worthwhile ones and these the only means of achieving them. The Founders, it appeared, had at the dawn of history attempted other methods of appreciating beauty, and come to the conclusion that they were valueless. In particular they warned against making and using machines, and to avoid confusion had described machines in great detail. But with all the care, they did not think of an individual like Krababok.

He was a renegade, a heretic, a social canker. He not only disagreed with the basic tenet of philosophy, he dared to put his revolutionary ideals into practise. Using the descriptions in the records, he built a machine to aid him. Krababok had decided that the accepted means of communication were by-ways, and the only way to formulate thought was not in words, action or time, but in thought itself. The solution was simple: build a machine to transfer thought to other minds. Being industrious in a perverse way, after several decades, Krababok built his machine. All would have gone well if Krababok had not rashly shown It to a fellow student, who reported the horrifying deviation to Alchreb.

This was the dilemma. What to do? Alchreb made up his mind, and set to work. The machine would be kept in the Hall of Records of the Wise Founding Fathers with a notice explaining its dangers. As for Krababok, 10 years solitary contemplation of the Beauties of the world would assist him to come to himself.