Collected Short Fiction, page 169
“That’s ridiculous! You do not look more than middle aged.” Again there was silence. “How can such things be?”
“Much is possible—for men who had found truth,” Wilson got out. “Disease is unnecessary. Aging can be delayed.”
The young man was silent again. Perhaps he was absorbing the implications of the information he had received. What would the Emperor give for the secret of longevity? What could the young man himself do with another half century or more of vigorous life in which to get ahead in the world? It might change his entire outlook upon his career; he might not have to take shortcuts to win success while he still could enjoy its fruits.
The silence endured until Wilson was afraid he would fall back into the cavern inside his head. But he clung to consciousness as if it were the edge of a cliff. Next time he might not have so firm a grip on his cavern—on his mind.
“Are you telling the truth?”
“Can I tell—anything else?”
“Always you answer a question with a question. Why?”
“That is the nature of man—and the nature of life. There are no final answers—only new questions.”
“Mysticism! The answers I want are not so difficult. Where did you get the rest of your education?”
“Everywhere.”
“Are you a witch?”
“To some.”
“Where are your fellow witches?”
“In the villages.”
“Where do they get their support?”
“From the villages.”
“They do not get their machines from the villages nor their supplies. Where is the witch world? Where is the place that witches learn their craft? Where do they get their machines?”
“The witch world—co-exists with the empire—and with all other kingdoms and empires—of the world.”
“Where else is it?”
“Wherever man can exist.”
“And where is that?”
“Everywhere.”
“You are evading my questions. Have you the will to do that?”
“The will—and the capability.”
“Then there are other methods of persuasion.”
Distantly Wilson felt his hand lifted. The shadows swirled on the ceiling above his head. He did not feel pain, but in a few moments the odor of cooking meat drifted to his nostrils.
“A foretaste of the flames,” the young man said.
“Your measures—combat each other.” Wilson said. “I feel nothing. Burn away. Or if you would have me suffer—you must give me the power—to resist.”
“You devil!” As distantly as it was lifted, Wilson felt his hand dropped. The shadows danced once more across the ceiling. “Why did you let yourself be captured?”
“If not me then another.”
“The villagers could have resisted. They could have overcome us.”
“They are peaceful folk. Violence breeds more violence. Other soldiers would come. So long as the Emperor is content—to rule the body without coercing the spirit—the Empire will exist and the people will obey it. The life the people have—is beyond the realm of the Emperor.”
“You are speaking nonsense again,” the young man said, but he said it absently. “Would you like your right hand to match your left? Let me tell you what the Emperor has in mind. If the witches would support him with goods and machines—and you have them, we know—he could soon conquer this entire continent Eventually perhaps the world itself! All the world under one peaceful rule. Think of that! And you witches would be well repaid.”
“Sometime in his life every ruler has that dream,” Wilson said. “The answer is always the same. You cannot give us anything we do not already have. You can only take from the people.”
“You are an obstinate and shortsighted witch!”
Wilson summoned his energies once more. “You are an inquisitive young man. You wish to know. If you had attended a village school you would know much already.”
“I attended the Court School. And I learned much there but even more at the Court itself. You see where it has taken me.”
“From ignorance to ignorance,” Wilson said. “It is not too late. I was ten years older than you are before my education truly began. You still can learn. Go seek the truth. What distinguishes half-man from animal? What separates man from half-man? What will select next man from present man?”
“What should I care about such follies? Be still, old man.”
“You may be next man. But you must find your way. You must pass the tests. To be fit to survive you must survive.”
“You talk rubbish, old man,” the young man said, but he sounded uneasy.
He was thoughtful for a few moments and then, Wilson thought, he shook himself like a dog coming out of a cold bath. “Next man or past man, you will burn, old man. We will put you to the trial, and then you will be dead man.”
“You do not fear the witch’s power?”
“Let it save you from the flames. Perhaps then I will believe in witchcraft and your mumbojumbo.”
“Then it may be too late. The man who can be convinced only by a show of force—is lost to reason.”
“Reason is a weak man’s solace.”
“Force is a strong man’s refuge.”
“You will burn brightly!”
“Bum me brightly then,” Wilson said. “Perhaps by my fight you may see a part of the truth. You will not have another chance. I am the only witch we will allow the Emperor to take.”
And Wilson loosened his grasp and fell back into the cavern and dreamed of flames.
VIII
Wilson woke not to the dim confusion of the courtroom but to the pale light of morning filtering through tall windows lined with bars. His pillow was whispering to him, “You are a witch, and you have set a fire—a fire which destroyed a university and the people in it, people who were your friends and now are dead ashes. You are guilty. You have committed arson and murder, and you must be punished.”
More bars were all around him. Bars for walls, bars for a door. Only above him and below him was there something solid—the ceiling and the floor were concrete, but Wilson felt that inside them, if he dug, he would find the same cold, gray bars.
He was in a cell. It was part of a block of cells stacked one atop another and beside another like so many houses built of toothpicks, but the toothpicks were solid steel. Outside his cell was a corridor, and beyond that was a stone wall. The tall, barred windows were in the wall. He was a prisoner held in a maximum security prison, and he had no more chance of escaping than a witch from the deepest Inquisitorial dungeon.
He ran his hand over the rough material of the prison blanket that covered him, and over the dustily astringent odor of mopped concrete floors he smelled coffee brewing far off. How long had it been since he had smelled something so good? They had taken that from him, and he lay in his bunk, listening to his pillow, and enjoyed the smell.
“You’re awake, eh?” said an interested voice dose beside him. “It’s the first time you’ve been awake.”
Wilson’s eyes slowly drifted shut.
“Oh,” the voice said, disappointed. “I guess you ain’t. But if you are and don’t want to let on, I want to talk to you when you get a chance to listen. They say you’re a crummy scientist. But you don’t seem so bad to me. You just lay there, moaning and talking in your sleep, and I guess you’re just a crummy con like me, and it’s us against them. We got something working, fellow. If you want a piece of it just wiggle your eyelids.”
Wilson lay very still, breathing regularly, listening to his vindictive pillow. His eyelids did not move.
“I don’t blame you, fellow,” said the voice beside him. “Why should you trust anybody? Maybe when they bring you back—if they bring you back.”
They came soon afterwards. Men dressed Wilson’s unresisting body in newly pressed clothes and half carried, half dragged him to an armored truck. It had two cots in the back, and they placed Wilson on one of them. The truck started up. After about ten minutes of slow, twisting city driving, the truck picked up speed. Twenty minutes later it drew up to the back of an old brick building. Wilson was hustled into a small doorway and up a flight of stairs to the courtroom.
“No one will appear in this man’s defense,” Youngman said. “His cause is unpopular, and anyone who testifies for him will be called ‘traitor’ by his neighbors, and perhaps worse will happen to him. Therefore I will call John Wilson himself to be the only witness for the defense.”
With great care, as if he were walking a tightrope, Wilson made his way to the witness chair and with Youngman’s aid settled himself into it. Slowly Youngman led him through a rebuttal of the testimony presented by the prosecution. Wilson hesitated often and fumbled for words, but he finally told his story of the events.
He had returned to find the University already in flames, he said. He had fled the scene and later the area under an assumed name for fear that what had happened to the others at the University would happen to him. By the time Youngman had finished, they had painted a picture of a man driven by desperation into a wild and sometimes irrational flight for his life.
Youngman turned to the district attorney and took his seat. The district attorney hesitated for a moment, frowning, and then pulled himself up.
“You claim that you returned to the University to find it in flames. Yet Mrs. Craddock points out that you were talking about plans to burn it at dinner that evening.” Wilson straightened a little. “Not plans,” he said gently. “The possibility of others burning it. And by the testimony of your own witnesses—Mrs. Craddock and the officials who noted the time of the fire—I left the city after the fire already had begun, 35 miles away.” The district attorney seemed unable to find an appropriate word. He turned halfway toward the young man sitting at the table. Smoothly the young man got up. “Your honor? May I interrogate the witness?”
The voice was familiar.
The judge nodded. “Of course, Mr. Kelley. You have been appointed assistant prosecutor for that purpose.”
Now Wilson knew him. Leonard Kelley was chief investigator for Senator Bartlett’s Subcommittee on Academic Practices.
“Mr. Wilson,” Kelley said smoothly, “you are, as you know, not accused of setting the fire itself but of conspiring with others to set it. That you were not there to put the torch yourself is incidental, and you are only trying to confuse the jury by pretending otherwise. You will not deny that your actions following the fire were those of a guilty man.”
“It is a truism that the guilty flee when no man pursueth,” Wilson said drily, straightening a little more. “But it is equally true and equally obvious that the wise man, when he sees an angry mob approaching with a rope, does not stop to ask questions.”
Kelley studied Wilson’s face with shrewd, perceptive eyes. “You were trying to flee the country entirely when you were captured.”
“A moment of folly. Luckily I thought better of it and returned.”
“You mean you were returned.”
“No, I returned of my own volition, having escaped from the agent of the Subcommittee.”
“You escaped, Wilson? How?”
“Your colleague lost his head—and had his nose somewhat altered.”
“And then what did you do, Wilson?”
“I returned. Three months later I gave myself up voluntarily.”
The members of the jury turned to each other. The stern-faced members of the audience shifted positions.
“What did you do in those three months, Wilson?”
“I lived in small towns, worked in the fields and in the shops.”
“Did you believe that this would enable you to escape justice?”
“I knew that I could avoid recapture,” Wilson said with a careful choice of words. “But I was living in these places in this way so that I could learn why the people hate scientists.”
Kelley turned toward the jury and the audience until his back was almost to Wilson. “I am glad that you admit this basic truth, Wilson. The people hate scientists, and they have good reason to hate. But why do you think they hate you.”
“Not me personally,” Wilson said. “All scientists. Blame for that lies on both sides. The scientists are at fault because they have been blind to the needs of the people for security, and the people, because they have been unable to see that the only security is death—or a way of life so like death that it is scarcely distinguishable.”
“You are condemning the people to death?”
“You twist my words. The people must accept the fact of insecurity. I do not say it; life insists on it. The people must find their security in their own ability to cope with change. The scientist, on the other hand, must give up his childlike worship of science.
“One of the great philosophers of science, T.H. Huxley, summed it up this way, ‘Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the great truth which is embodied in the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God. Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.’ The scientists must recognize that he still is a layman in every field but one. And in that one field he must accept the consequences of his actions, reckoning the human payment for every change and communicating broadly the information that is peculiarly his own. I do not say it; the gulf between the people and the scientists demands it.”
“You claim that they are a separate breed?”
“Their attitudes set them apart; their common interests and their common heritage must bring them back together. The scientist is rational man at work. The mob is irrational, wherein lies the ultimate terror for the reasoning man.”
“Now you are calling the people irrational!”
“Only when they act like a mob or when, like the scientist when he is out of his laboratory, they are sentimentalists. The sentimentalist is the person who wants to eat his cake and have it, too. G. K. Chesterton once said about him, ‘He has no sense of honor about ideas; he will not see that one must pay for an idea as for anything else. He will have them all at once in one wild intellectual harem, no matter how much they quarrel.’ ”
Kelley studied the audience and the jury and then looked back at Wilson. “Science never has reckoned the consequences for any of its actions or computed the human payment that must be made. Why should it start now?”
“Men once never herded cattle or tilled the land or lived in cities or traveled in airplanes. Tribes once killed every stranger. Kings once cut off the heads of the bearers of ill tidings. Senators once were elected by state legislatures.”
“Are you trying to tell us that men change?” Kelley asked.
“That is obvious to everyone except the cynic. Men can change. And they do. This is not only a possibility for the individual and a necessity for society but a historical inevitability. Our perspective is too short for us to recognize the phenomenon in action, but men evolve. We can see it happening more swiftly in our social institutions.”
“How do you think men are changing, Wilson?”
Wilson smiled. Kelley was willing to let him convict himself out of his own mouth, not only before the jury here in the courtroom but before the broader jury of the nation. But it was more important to Wilson that he get these concepts on the record—not just for now, important as it was, but for the years to come.
“Surpluses slow down the process of change,” Wilson said. “Shortages speed it up. Necessity is not only the mother of invention but evolution. Surpluses are created by advancing stages of civilization, and population expands to consume them. When primitive man progressed from nut and fruit gathering to the hunting of concentrated sources of protein on the hoof, he had extra food with which he could feed the child which once might have been sacrificed to starvation.
“When the hunter became the farmer and the herder, the process of selection became slowed even more. He could nurse the sick as well as feed the unable and the unwilling. The coming of the machine and industrialization brought further surpluses and the further development of morality and ethics and the religions that glorify weakness. Evolution is further slowed.”
“Are you now attacking the Christian religion?” Kelley asked sharply.
Wilson waited until the roar of the audience died away. “Other religions do the same thing.” The roar returned. “Moreover, I am a Christian—though, to be sure, a Unitarian. Christianity is one of the finest ethical and moral philosophies man ever had conceived, but it is a philosophy bred of surpluses. It could never have been possible to a tribe living on the narrow edge of starvation.
“The concern of that tribe is for the traits that will promote survival in this life, not in the next. That tribe’s religious rites are basically evolutionary. When man was recently separated from his apelike ancestors, many throwbacks must have been born. They had to be weeded out.”
“How, Wilson?”
Again Kelley was leading him, Wilson thought. Let him lead as long as the ideas came out. “The rite of manhood was the principal method— not merely adulthood but manhood. As soon as the child was old enough to have reached discretion, he was subjected to some ritualistic torture or feat of endurance. Scars were scratched into his body and face; lips and earlobes were distended by progressively larger plugs; food was withheld or voluntarily abjured. This was true of the American Indian. And even in some of the countries considered more civilized it was part of the rites preceding knighthood.
“All of these rites stressed a common element—present sacrifice for future good, something no animal can comprehend, something only the human can consciously achieve. Imagine a tribal meeting around a campfire. The adolescent stands straight before the fire, hoping he can endure what lies ahead, anticipating the joys of manhood if he can come through without disgrace. The chief or the witch doctor picks up a burning brand from the fire and hands it to the boy, flames toward him. If the boy is human he accepts it, lets it burn him to prove that he is fit to join the adults of the tribe. If he is animal, if he is not fit, he refuses to take it or lets it drop. And he is killed. Or he is killed genetically by the refusal of any young woman of the tribe to mate with him.”
