The chair car was peeling chromium and worn upholstery. Wilson sat wearily in his upright chair—the tilt-back didn't work—and stared out his window into the night. The metal wheels clacked as the train picked up speed getting out of the city, and the car swayed gently.
Wilson's eyelids drifted down, and he propped them open again. It had been a long day and an exhausting day, but he couldn't let go. Not yet.
He was on his way. Not to either coast, as Emily had suggested. That was what they'd expect. He was enroute to a port city just as convenient as New York or Los Angeles or San Francisco, and it was closer and less obvious. He was on his way to New Orleans.
If he had to leave the North American continent, he preferred South America over the other possibilities. There had been hints in professional magazines. Now he put them together. Recruiting had been parceled out geographically. The African republics were hiring at New York, and the west coast ports were being used by Australia, the Chinese empire, and the splintered Indian states.
But the best facilities for psychological research were in Brazil and Venezuela; they had some excellent psychologists and sociologists of their own. He had met a number of them at a Pan-American Conference in Caracas before it became impossible to get a passport for any kind of conference and asking for one was asking for trouble.
Perhaps Brazil would be the best choice. It was in the middle of a massive economic assault on its unexploited resources. The economy was expanding faster than the stock exchange could keep up with it. Research grants would be easy to get, and the grantors would be too busy to pry into what he was doing . . . .
The earphone buzzed softly. "Tickets?" said the conductor.
Wilson straightened up. "I'd like to turn in my chair car ticket for a bedroom or a compartment. I didn't have time to make a reservation."
The conductor's theta rhythms didn't speed up as he made a pretense of checking his reservation cards. "Well, now, I think we can take care of you. We have a bedroom in Car 110 just ahead. Bedroom C. What's the name?"
"Lester Craddock," Wilson said promptly, "with two d's and a ck. Thanks, conductor."
"That's all right," he said, his red face pleasant. "Things are a little loose on Wednesdays anyhow."
Within ten minutes Wilson was between cool, nylon sheets. Like himself, they were a little frazzled around the edges, but they were still serviceable.
He let the train's gentle motion rock him to sleep. The nightmare didn't return for a long time.
He woke and the rocking and the clack-clack of the wheels were unchanged, but the sunlight was streaming in around the edge of the curtain and through one long, patched tear across it. He looked at his watch: 8 o'clock. He had slept for almost ten hours. He could stop running now and start thinking.
Yesterday, unaware, he had been on the ragged edge of nervous exhaustion. He had blundered ahead haphazardly, riskily. It was a wonder he had not been caught. He had gotten the money and fixed the Tool, true, but there had been simpler and safer ways to do it. He had been on the verge of hysteria.
Now it was different. He was out of the deadly area unsuspected. He had an aid no one would suspect; not the equal of the room-sized laboratory model, which could almost talk, but the simple analysis of theta brain rhythms gave him a vital warning system, a kind of basic lie detector. And he was on his way.
He got up and washed. He shaved with the electric razor he had bought at the station and brushed his teeth with the railroad's toothbrush. He dressed, slipping into the jacket with the heavy pocket, and pressed the button behind his ear. It hummed softly, picking up a reflection of his own brain activity.
Wilson walked down the swaying aisles, listening to the rise and fall in pitch and intensity of the earphone as the theta rhythms changed, watching the faces of the people he passed. No one seemed unduly excited as they looked at him.
When he got back from a leisurely breakfast in the dining car, the room was made up. He settled himself in the chair by the window and stared out at the flat river-bottom land fleeing past him toward the north.
The earth was summer-green and lovely with the sunlight across it. A distant jet liner drew pencil-thin, white vapor trails across the sky. On the glistening ribbon of the tollway looping the hills beside the tracks, a gleaming, new Cadillac Turbojet 500 kept pace with the train for a few miles. Its top was retracted; a girl was driving, and the wind blew out her long, blond hair, pulling back her head like an anxious lover. And then she raised one white arm in a carefree wave and poured kerosene to the turbine and outdistanced the train within a few seconds.
No one would have suspected, sitting here, looking out upon the fertile land and man's conquest of it, that a blight lay upon the earth, that the world man knew was dying of it. It was not nature that would conquer man; man would conquer himself. He was the only one who could do it.
The blight was anti-science. It seemed like a natural, human thing to be against this neurotic necessity for eternal progress, to long for the simpler, saner life, but it was a basic self-negation of everything that made man human. It attacked the innermost core of man's distinction from the blind forces of the universe, and it would level man back into his old equality with the animals and the vegetation. They didn't adapt their environments; they adapted. That was their method of survival.
Science was not a laboratory or a technology or a gadget; science was a way of life. With their minds, it said, men can understand the universe, and understanding will make it a comfortable, human thing. There were no dark, unfathomable mysteries, no secrets men should not know, no knowledge forbidden.
Deny that, and you opened the door to darkness and despair, to old superstitions and new fears; you made man a slave again. He had been master now for long generations. He had made earth his, and the space around the earth, and he was reaching out toward the other worlds of the solar system. But now, through some, strange, suicidal psychosis, man was turning upon the quality that set him apart; he was destroying himself.
A wise person could have seen it coming a long time before, could have prepared for it, perhaps, could have fought it. But there was no one wise enough—or even if there was, he or she could not make himself heard, could not rally support, was a voice crying in the wilderness.
It had been hard to recognize. Anti-science was a continuous thread through the fabric of humanity's intellectual history, an antithesis to the thesis of humanity's conquest of its environment, winning sometimes, losing sometimes, but mostly developing out of the conflict a new synthesis.
So it would have taken a very wise person to have seen that the growing anti-scientism of the seventies was different in kind than the absolute anti-scientism of the medieval church, say. But the twentieth century had seen science altering humanity's environment in a geometric progression, increasing its command of earth's resources, making earth a fairer, more comfortable place in which to live. In this context anti-scientism was an ugly revulsion, not a turning away to another frame of reference.
It had not taken the catalyst of war to precipitate incipient distrust into active rebellion. The slow grinding of two great world powers against each other had nurtured it, had held it in, and after the disintegration of one of them and the rise of fundamentalism in a dozen little countires, Senator Bartlett had come out of nowhere to give it vent.
Harvard in the east had been the first to go, then Cal Tech in the west, and then—Wilson shuddered, remembering.
Houses flashed past the window. The train slowed as it entered a city. In the corridor outside, the conductor called, "Alexandria!" A few minutes later, the train crept up to a station and stopped.
At the university, they had been close to what looked like a solution. If man exhibits symptoms of homicidal insanity, then, truly, the only proper study of mankind is man. If society makes pariahs of those members who have contributed most to what it is, then those members should study society. What was needed was a science of man, call it anthropology, psychology, mass psychology, sociology, political science, or what you will. And quickly—before scientist became a deadly word.
The electroencephalograph, developed and improved, had become their Tool—Sammy Black had called it that and Tool it had been—for supplying external evidence of what goes on inside the head. They had identified and analyzed alpha rhythms, theta rhythms, and delta rhythms, matched them with actions, reactions, stimuli of all kinds—including words.
Words were one of the keys. It is in words that we think, and it is in words that we do most of our communication. Through words we learn about the world, and through words society teaches us its social and cultural patterns. All this makes its impression on language, and in it can be read the structure of society. Words take on emotional and action content; learn to manipulate them properly and you can make people do whatever you wish. Demagogues had learned that a long time ago. Advertisers had learned it more recently. But they were intuitive artists, and art cannot be taught.
So at the University they had been compiling a Dictionary, the first real dictionary the world had ever had. Later would come an analysis of the structure of language and perhaps the development of the Tool into a true psionic device which would pick up and transmit thoughts themselves.
Now all that was lost, the Dictionary ashes, the Tool twisted, indecipherable metal. Granted the time and the money, it would take him years to get back to where they had been. And he didnt have years.
It was symptomatic of the scientist's blindness to social values and social dangers that it had taken the shock of a university's murder to make him realize that the Tool was more than a research device; it was a weapon, warning against surprise, a clue to the intentions of his fellow men. As he sat there, thinking, the earphone began to buzz. The note climbed slowly in pitch and intensity until it reached a shrillness that brought him to his feet.
The door rattled as someone took hold of the handle. Slowly it swung inward. He had forgotten to lock it!
In the doorway, his theta rhythms expressing a violent excitement was the thin, dark-haired man Wilson had seen twice before.
"Dr. Wilson?" he began.
Wilson's fist was already swinging. It caught the man squarely on the jaw. He collapsed slowly, turning a little, his eyes glazing.
Anyone who had followed him this far and knew his name knew too much.
Wilson caught him before he hit the floor, kicked the door shut with his heel, and stowed the man on the broad seat, his face to the cushion. Only then did he notice that the window shade was three-quarters of the way up. Anyone watching on the platform could have spotted him.
There was no one on the platform now. Wilson pulled down the shade, got his little handbag of possessions, picked up a cardboard sign, and walked out of the compartment. He hung the sign on the outside of the door: DO NOT DISTURB.
He strolled down the aisle and out onto the platform. He watched the train pull away.