Collected Short Fiction, page 114
“These are not proper subjects for investigation,” Fuentes said. “If you come to Brazil, you will have to forget them.”
“We let ourselves be the victims of blind political forces and of demagogues,” Wilson went on unchecked. “We should have turned onto sociology and psychology the intense, concentrative techniques of the physical sciences. We might have been able to do what the intuitive psychologists and social scientists failed at.”
“The time for that is long past,” Fuentes said. “Nowhere in the world is there a place where you can work at that—not in the African republics or the Chinese empire or the Indian states or Australia. And the witch fever runs stronger in Europe and the U.S.S.R. than here. Once, in the political ignorance of half a century ago, it might have been possible. Not only would it mean that present rulers would lose their power, but a true social science would force changes in human values. And that humanity cannot tolerate.”
So that hope was gone, too. He had been fleeing, after all, only to save his own life. “Yes,” Wilson said, his shoulders drooping wearily, “yes. Too late.”
“It is possible,” Fuentes said gently, “that this reaction against science is partially due to the increased efforts of science in the social and psychological fields. Intuitive politicians warned you away from politics twice: in the ’30s and in the ’50s. Some of you ignored the warning.”
Fuentes looked at Wilson’s bent head. “Because you are a great scientist, Dr. Wilson,” he said in a brisk, businesslike voice, “Brazil will accept you. But the decision is yours. Will you come?”
Wilson struggled irresolutely. “How do I get there?”
Fuentes pointed beneath the table. “There is a door. Long ago, I understand, it was used during a madness here known as Prohibition. A fast turbine boat waits below. It will speed you to the Gulf, where an atomic submarine waits.”
Wilson sighed helplessly. “Let’s go—”
Together they lifted the plastic table aside. Fuentes knelt on the floor and felt for a handle.
In his ear, the speaker began to scream. Wilson said: “Hurry up! There is danger close.”
Fuentes looked up, puzzled, shock his head, and lifted a square door. Beneath it was blackness. Smog drifted dankly up into the. room. “Go down, my friend. There is a ladder on this side.”
The speaker intensified, its shrill warnings of violent theta waves not far away. Wilson lowered himself hesitantly into the hole, his feet groping. He found the rung and went down swiftly until his feet hit a swaying platform.
Strong hands grabbed his arms and held them tightly. A flashlight blazed up into Fuentes’ suddenly pale face.
“Thanks,” said a harsh voice beside Wilson’s ear. “We wanted this one. The senator will be very happy.”
VI
Wilson struggled, but the hands holding him were strong. The boat swayed under his feet.
“Quiet, Wilson,” the voice, grated at him, “or we’ll have to quiet you.”
Wilson stopped fighting and looked up at Fuentes. The Brazilian’s face was twisted and angry. “You must release this man,” Fuentes said in shrill English. “The Brazilian government has extended to him its protection.”
“To a criminal?” the man in the boat mocked. “To a convicted arsonist? No, Fuentes, that won’t do.”
Fuentes shook with passion, staring down into the light. “This is an insult to the Brazilian government. We will not let it go unpunished.”
“Any time,” the voice said dryly. “Be glad we don’t take you along, little man, and drop you into the river with an anchor tied to your feet.”
Slowly the passion left Fuentes’ face. He looked down wistfully toward Wilson. “You knew that there was danger close,” he said quietly. “Almost I think you are a witch, after all. I hope you are. You will need all your craft.”
“So long, Fuentes,” the voice said. “Send us some more.”
The light flicked off. In the darkness, the boat began to move silently away. As it shoved into the grayness above the river, Wilson was pulled down hard onto a seat thinly padded with foam rubber. Rope was twisted tightly around his wrists; they were tied to something behind him.
Before his fingers became too numb, he felt it; it was a cleat fastened to the side of the boat. He tugged at it, but it was solid. The possibility of jumping overboard was gone.
The boat picked up speed in the river, the only sound the bubbling of the propellers in the water; it glided through the fog without running lights. “Well, Wilson,” the harsh voice said, “you ran a long way to fall right into our arms.”
“I gave you a chase, anyway,” Wilson said wearily.
“What chase? Who followed you? We knew you’d head, for a port; so we waited for you. We know all the recruiters; we read their mail and bug their offices and favorite meeting spots. Once in a while we let them smuggle out a small-timer just so they don’t get discouraged. But we wanted you and Nugent here. You’re the fall guys for the great Egghead Plot.”
“Nugent? Here?”
“Yeah. But he ain’t in any condition to talk.”
There was suddenly a slight wave of heat. It played over Wilson for a moment, and he heard a sound in the air like the flutter of leathery wings. Out of the smog drifted a red ball of fire and then a second one. They touched the radar antenna and clung there, one above the other, lighting up the boat with a dim, reddish radiance.
Wilson had seen it before: witch fire.
Wilson was vaguely surprised to notice that the man opposite him was not thin and dark-haired. He was the broad-shouldered hoodlum who had beaten Dr. Nugent.
He had a machine pistol in his hands, but it was forgotten. He was staring over his shoulder at the brush discharge of electricity. “What did Fuentes mean—‘witch’ ?” he asked harshly, swinging around.
“Don’t you know?” Wilson’s voice was deep. “I can call down the lightning bolt from heaven; I can call forth the fire from the earth. I can bring life to the dying and death to the living. I can take your warped mind and make it sound again.”
“Don’t make jokes,” the voice said uneasily.
The phone, which had quieted, began to buzz louder in Wilson’s ear. That was fear. By bringing fire and violence against scientists, the Lowbrow had endowed them in the secret recesses of his mind with a power to match his measures.
“No joke,” Wilson said. The witch fire began to fade as its charge leaked away. “In my mind is the power to build a city or to smash one flat, to send a spear crashing through the sky or to bring a star so close you can almost reach out and touch it, to make man as wealthy and as powerful as the ancient gods or to make him a beggar among untouchable wealth. I am all-powerful; I am Man the Witch, the seeker after mysteries, the knower of all things, the doer to whom nothing is sacred, nothing too difficult—”
“Shut up!” said the hoodlum. The witch fire had disappeared; in the darkness Wilson listened to the Lowbrow’s theta rhythms, violent and swift, and waited. “No wonder the senator says you’re all traitors,” the Lowbrow said, swearing crudely. “No wonder he says you got to die. You don’t care about people or the United States or anything. All you care about is your laboratories and your experiments, and let the devil take the hindmost.”
“As he will take you, my friend,” Wilson said quietly.
The man cursed savagely. There was a whisper of movement in the darkness. The earphone squealed in an ascending scale. Wilson was waiting. As the Lowbrow lunged, Wilson’s foot caught him in the face. Cartilage yielded as he shoved. As the man hurtled backward, Wilson felt a deep, atavistic sense of savage satisfaction.
Somewhere forward, metal tore tinnily. Feet moved in the darkness.
Wilson was yanking at the cord, but he succeeded only in cutting it into the flesh of his wrists. His hands got wet and slippery, but the rope held them tight.
Something was hovering in the darkness above. Wilson had a vague sensation of heat, and then he heard a thin tinkling of broken glass. Wilson caught a whiff of something acrid and sulphurous before he stopped breathing.
He held his breath as long as he could. When he had to release it, the odor was gone. Something thumped lightly to the deck near him.
In a moment he felt fingers plucking at the rope that held his wrists. They stopped briefly.
“Ugh!” said a feminine voice. “Blood!”
“What did you expect,” Wilson asked impatiently, “ice water?”
“Your old self, eh, Dr. Wilson?” Something sawed at the ropes. “What was that sulphurous stink?” he growled.
“A fast-acting anaesthetic. Quick thinking to hold your breath. Actually the hell-and-brimstone was gratuitous. Just for effect.”
“Like the St. Elmo’s fire?”
“Yes. We have a generator.”
The ropes fell away from his wrists. Wilson flexed them experimentally and decided they would still work. “Dr. Nugent is aboard somewhere.”
“Let’s find him.”
A hand found his and led him forward in the darkness. “How are you getting around?” he asked. “Infrared?”
“Exactly. Some more of the mumbo jumbo. Just a minute. Here’s the man you kicked. He isn’t very pretty. But then he wasn’t very pretty to start with.”
The girl had stopped. She released his hand. There was a sharp, little hiss in the darkness.
“What was that?” Wilson asked.
“Hypodermic,” she said briefly. “Make certain he stays asleep until we get away. Also induces an innocuous but uncomfortable and long-lasting disease resembling shingles. And, incidentally, tattooes him with a witch’s mark—in this case a red and blue conventionalized atomic symbol. Satisfied?”
“Why not kill him?”
“Dr. Wilson! Besides, he’s more use to us alive. He can spread the word that there are witches abroad, and he will carry a secret guilt—as he carries our mark—to his grave. He will swear that you and Dr. Nugent are dead. In his world that’s the only way he and the others can survive.”
“Who are you anyway?” Wilson asked as she took his hand again and led him forward, twisting through a narrow doorway and into a cabin. Twice more he heard the brief hiss of the hypodermic.
“We’re witches,” she said lightly. “Like you.”
“Seriously,” Wilson insisted.
“Very seriously,” she replied. “The day of the scientist in the free society is gone; we must be witches in another kind of society. Here’s Dr. Nugent. Can you carry him?”
Wilson slipped his hands under the man lying unconscious in what felt like a bunk. He lifted him and held him against his chest. Nugent’s body was heavy but not as heavy as Wilson had expected. The long chase had gaunted him.
“Your voice is familiar, Wilson said, frowning. “I should know you.”
“You should,” she agreed and guided him by an elbow.
“Why should I trust you?”
“Are we back to that again?” she asked impatiently. “What else can you do?”
“The girl in the Cadillac,” Wilson said suddenly. “Pat Helman.”
“The same.”
“You aren’t alone.”
“No. There are a few others, some scientists, some laymen, but eggheads all. A decade ago some of them decided that the pressing need for research was in society itself. They didn’t learn much, but they learned enough to know that it was time to hide. The Lowbrow movement—whatever its name—was inevitable.”
“Did they do anything except hide?”
“You’ve just seen what they have done. They have begun the creation of a myth. The Lowbrow movement can’t be stopped, but it can be guided—with skill and luck. Instead of the disintegration of civilization, there will be a slowing down. Instead of smashing up the car, Dr. Wilson, we’re going to brake it. We’re going to pull it over to the side of the road and figure out how to control the passenger and how to make the steering mechanism work.
“Here’s a stretcher,” she said briskly. “Put Dr. Nugent in it.”
There were ropes at the four ends of the stretcher. As soon as Wilson lowered Nugent’s body onto the canvas, it was whisked away.
“In a generation,” the girl said, “cities will cease to exist as social and economic entities. Men will stop using industrial machinery; no one will be able to make it or to keep it in repair. The population will plummet during an interregnum of starvation and violence. If we are successful, the people who are left will live in small, self-supporting communities. Witches will live among them, part of them, helping and learning.”
“You talk very glibly for an errand girl,” Wilson said dryly.
“Hanging around eggheads, you pick it up. Besides, where can you go? You can stay here with Sleeping Beauty or you can climb this ladder with me.”
She put a snaky, metal rung in his hand. He took a deep breath. “What can I lose?” he said. He started up the ladder. It swayed under him.
The leathery swish was loud as he came through an open hatch into the body of the helicopter. By the dim radiance from a strip of fluorescent paint circling the narrow cabin, lie saw a hand extended to help him up.
It pulled him close to a face he had been expecting: the face of a thin, dark-haired man he had seen three times before—once in a hotel lobby, once outside an electronic parts store, and once in the doorway of a railway bedroom.
Irony: the man he had been evading was help, and he had run away from him and run straight into the hands of the Lowbrows.
Wilson dropped the hand and pulled back toward the side of the ship, feeling a vague distaste for all this mummery; mixed up in it was a feeling of disillusion about his own judgment. The ship was rising, which meant there was a third person, a pilot, forward.
Beside the open hatch in the helicopter’s belly was the stretcher. On it was Dr. Nugent, breathing stertorously, his face bruised and stained with blood.
Through the hatch came Pat. She was wearing a conical hat and a black robe. Heavy goggles masked her eyes, and a hooked nose drooped toward a fanged mouth.
“Laugh, damn it!” she said. “This isn’t my idea.” She stripped off the goggles and the nose and removed the fangs; once more she was merely a very pretty girl.
“Not merely,” Wilson thought. Certainly not merely.
“I think it’s going too far,” Pat said.
Wilson didn’t feel like laughing. “All right. The masquerade is over; it’s time to unmask. Who are you?”
“Witches,” said the dark-haired man. “If you want a personal handle, it’s. Pike. But that isn’t important now. The question is: who are you?”
VII
An angry pulse began to beat in Wilson’s temple. He had run too far and too fast and too long. “You know who I am!”
“Dr. John Wilson, associate professor of psychology, who knows everything and has learned nothing?”
Wilson stared at Pike blankly. The man was serious. “What are you talking about?”
“You,” Pike said calmly. “You just can’t admit that you were wrong, can you? That you were a fool, that you were mistaken?”
“Wrong?” Wilson repeated. “I thought your purpose was to rescue roe from the Lowbrows. Was I wrong about that?”
“Yes. Our purpose was to rescue you from yourself. But we make mistakes, too. We can deliver you to Fuentes’ sub. Is that what you want—to run to Brazil?”
Wilson ran his tongue over dry lips. “There’s no alternative, is there?”
“Consistently Aristotelian, aren’t you, Dr. Wilson? With you it must always be alternatives: black or white; good or bad; run and live or stay and die.”
“It boils down to that,” Wilson said coldly. His temper was back under control. The long flight and the long peril had worn his nerves thin; he thought he had found friends, that he could relax. That was his mistake. These people were scheming maniacs playing on the superstitions of morons. “A man who refuses to choose a side is a coward.”
“And a man who chooses a side without recognizing that he is probably wrong is a fool. You can’t choose sides against humanity. The human problems must be lived with. You’re a fool, John Wilson, and worse—you’re a fool who knows he is right, who is sure that he has the Answers if They will only listen. You’re no different from the Lowbrows. You haven’t learned anything, and you don’t want to learn.”
Wilson’s hand touched the cabin wall behind him. It was real and solid, not dream stuff. “If that’s what you think of me, you went to a lot of trouble to get me away from the Lowbrows.” Even to himself, his voice sounded plaintive and rejected.
Pike shrugged. “Life isn’t mathematics, and the rules aren’t interchangeable. You can’t add two and two and get four in human values. To make a worthwhile member of the human race is equal to whatever effort is necessary.”
“Go to hell!” Wilson growled. “Nobody asked to be saved.”
“Still sure you’re right, aren’t you? Still sure the mob that burned the university was wrong. After everything that has happened to you, you haven’t rearranged a hair of one of your beliefs.”
“Why should I?”
Pike studied him as if Wilson, were a specimen under his microscope. “Because you’re wrong, John Wilson. You’re as wrong as Senator Bartlett, who acted out of his convictions, too. You think that because you’re a little brainier than the Lowbrows your convictions are superior; it isn’t true. Because you can manipulate a few people, because you taunted that poor Lowbrow in the boat into jumping you, you think that you know people. Nuts, Dr. Wilson! Senator Bartlett knows more about people than you will ever know. He accepts them for what they are, and he manipulates them by the millions. By any standard, you are a failure.”
Wilson glanced helplessly at Pat. In her eyes he read something he did not want: a deep, impotent pity. Quickly he looked back at Pike and something he could face.
