The Right Side of the Tracks
The Right Side of the Tracks opens with the human starship Probe, crewed by fifty men of the Galactic Glia's Supreme Council, arriving to investigate Nodar, a human colony planet that has broken with the ten-thousand-world galactic norm of constant hourly signal contact. For years Nodar has refused to answer, and Council fears either alien conquest or a hostile plot brewing behind the silence. Commander Linder, blustering and rigid, insists the silence must mean malice; Dr. Stern, the ship's semanticist, argues for withholding judgment. When they finally land, they find Nodar's spaceport and civic buildings shabby and neglected, its citizens distracted, staring at a giant wall of chaotic, meaningless-looking flickering images and sounds, and its official greeter, Jackson, unnervingly asymmetrical — one side of his face smiling while the other stays blank, his eyes blinking out of sync, one hand tracing arabesques in the air independent of his stride. Linder's demands for explanation and respect are met with amused condescension: the Nodarians insist they need no help, have deliberately let some of their machinery go unrepaired because they no longer require it, and treat the visitors' outrage as a minor inconvenience. When Linder and his officers grow belligerent, Jackson and a crowd of Nodarians literally spank them like children and send them back to their ship unharmed but humiliated. Only Stern, who held back and tried to understand rather than assert authority, is spared this treatment — a distinction Linder resents, ostracizing Stern for the return voyage on suspicion of colluding with the "enemy." During the voyage, Stern is caught practicing an elaborate hand-coordination exercise (a "patty-cake" ambidexterity drill) and is mocked, but he recruits the more open-minded officer Crawford to help him prove his theory. Using the ship's projector, Stern slows down one of the garbled Nodarian transmissions and reveals it isn't garbage at all: it contains multiple fully coherent layers — dramas, equations, diagrams — superimposed and played back at a speed ordinary humans perceive only as noise. Stern explains that the Nodarians have spent their isolation deliberately training themselves out of ordinary single-track consciousness (which processes one stream of attention at a time, whether alternating between two chess players or two pieces of music) into a new mode capable of parallel, simultaneous processing — first via physical ambidexterity, then extended to full cognition. He frames this as nothing less than a new evolutionary stage of human consciousness, one Nodar isolated itself to develop in peace, uninterested in conquest and merely unready — not unwilling — to explain itself to a galaxy still operating on old, serial modes of awareness. The story ends on Stern's realization, staring at the star charts, wondering how vast this "inward side of man" might yet prove to be — setting up Nodar's transformation as a hopeful rather than threatening development for the rest of humanity.
By Albert Teichner · First published 1963 · Genre: Science Fiction, First Contact, Philosophical Science Fiction