Page 12 - Fables volume 2

“Well,” drawled the hamster, “What has all his restless activity
gained him and his kind? They overpopulate, they eat everything in
sight, and then they dash off in search of greener pastures. Disaster
awaits such foolhardiness. His discoveries are offset by his
destructiveness.”
“Phooey!” The lemming was darting about erratically, while the
hamster slowly whirled in a tight little arc. “At least I know the earth
and the moon go around the sun.”
“Maybe so. But what good does it do you? You can’t run off of
one to another.”
“Maybe not. But I’ll have a lot of fun trying!”
The Grand Arbiter had had enough.
“Stop!” he commanded. “I’m getting dizzy watching you two run
around. I am a giant Sumatran rat, the most intelligent of our order,
and I demand respect.”
The debaters fell silent.
“One of you is committed to a linear but indeterminate cosmology,
the other to a cyclical view of history and a rejection of eschatology.
No—don’t interrupt me! You came for a judgment and you’ll get it.
Both of you ignore biological basics: neither of your positions is
rooted in your genetic inheritance; rather, they are the result of
learned behavior. I have read the literature, and you are committing
the same error: in fact, our inherent, untutored path as rodents is
neither a straight line nor a circle. It is a spiral.”
The lemming chattered his teeth in annoyance and the hamster
convulsively clutched at invisible straws.
“Yes, the experiments were performed on blindfolded adult mice
and those too young to have opened their eyes. Their instinctive
tendency was to follow helical spirals. Why should this be? We must
resort to an even more fundamental science: physics, in its
examination of oscillatory motion. The spiral is the inevitable result
of a particle subject to two forces dynamically adjusting to each other
through the period of motion.”
“What has that to do with us?” asked the lemming, somewhat
chastened.
“I don’t like where this is going,” complained the hamster.

11