Wilson paced the narrow room in the vieux carré, paused at the window to stare through the intricate, wrought-iron scrollwork at the rolling, yellow smog, and walked back to the desk. He picked up the paper and read the want-ad once more:
men—between the ages of 25 and 50 for congenial work in South America; excellent salary, first-class equipment; knowledge of Spanish or Portuguese helpful but not essential; transportation furnished; write to Box 302, New Orleans Times-Picayune, listing qualifications; replies will be kept confidential.
Wilson threw down the paper impatiently and picked up the letter beside it. It was addressed to George McClure, and it said:
Dear Mr. McClure:
Your qualifications are impressive, and we would be most interested in exploring further the possibilities of employing you. There is a small place near the river known as Shrimp Heaven. If you will appear near this place at 7 p.m. on the 23rd, you will be given a final interview.
You need not worry about meeting me. There is only a handful of men that you could be, and I will recognize you.
Come prepared to leave at once if you are accepted.
Until then,
Luis Santoyo
Everything was authentic, from the delicate Latinity of the phrasing to the characteristic Latin rubrics of the signature. The want-ad, too, had the ring of truth.
Making contact had been an intellectual puzzle, and Wilson had worked at it with all his power of concentration. It was a difficult, dangerous business, this hiring of scientists and smuggling them out of the country beneath the noses of the authorities and the Lowbrows. Public channels were the only method of communication; they would be minutely watched.
It had been a tense two weeks: finding a place whose owners needed his rent money too badly to report him, watching television and the papers, studying the ads. Some of them were obvious death-traps; others were obviously what they pretended to be. He had discarded them all but one. That one had differences that were vital to a mind trained to the nuances of meaning.
The age bracket: 25 to 50. Fifty is old for a workman but still young for a creative thinker. "First-class equipment . . . transportation furnished . . . replies confidential." They added up meaningfully.
He shrugged: all right, it was authentic. The question was—and now he must face it squarely: Did he want to leave the United States and go to Brazil or Venezuela or Peru . . .?
No, he didn't. Who would want to leave home? And then he thought: so Einstein hated to leave Germany, so Gamow did not want to leave Russia, so Fermi was reluctant to leave Italy . . . . Like him they had fled from tyranny, placing the environment of the mind above the environment of the body.
But unlike him they had a country to flee to which did not so much welcome them as admit them and forget them. And inside that country there had been freedom to think and freedom to work, and they had created freely.
What would they have thought of their adopted homeland if they had lived to see it change?
There was no use kidding himself: Brazil was not free nor were any of the other countries that still wanted scientists and technicians. They had frontiers to conquer and new industries to build, but they were going at the job the other way, the planned, heavy-handed way.
But there would be scientists there. They would be working, occasionally, on what they wished. Somehow he would be able to work on the Dictionary and develop the Tool . . . .
And there was no choice when death was on one side.
He turned the paper back to the front page where a long list of names was enclosed in a black-bordered box. Among them were Sylvia Robbins, Aaron Friedman, Samuel Black, and John Wilson. But not William Nugent.
Wilson wondered: had Dr. Nugent been working in Wilson's apartment? Had he been trapped there by the flames?
It might have been a graduate student, but Wilson did not allow himself to hope. Bill Nugent was dead with the others.
It had been a tense two weeks; it had also been a strange two weeks with what another age would have called signs and portents in the heavens. Great showers of meteors had startled the night sky with green and yellow and red fireballs and lingering trains, with the rumble of thunder and great explosions heard distantly.
Even this age had reacted to it: a wave of speculation had been followed by a larger wave of superstitious fear. Men did not go out at night if they could help it. Wilson wondered where the meteors had come from: it was too early for the Perseids, and no new comets had been reported.
Wilson slipped into a raincoat and pulled a hat down over his forehead. With his new mustache he was hopeful that a stranger could not identify him from a photograph.
Half an hour later he was watching the decaying, old place on the river called Shrimp Heaven on a faded sign above a discolored plate-glass window. The smog was thicker here, rolling in from the river, but when it thinned he could see peeling, gilt letters across the window that spelled: BAR AND GRILL. The back of the building stood on pilings above the roiled, yellow Mississippi.
In the next fifteen minutes nobody entered the place and two persons left: no wonder it was decaying. He was the only one who loitered in the neighborhood.
Wilson crossed the swirling street, smelling the damp rot of the river. As he reached the cracked glass of the revolving door, a man loomed out of the fog toward him.
Light streamed yellowly through the window upon his lined face and iron-gray hair. Wilson started. The speaker buzzed excitedly in his ear. He stepped forward, pushing his hat back to expose his face. "Bill—" he began softly. But the other man's eyes swept over Wilson's face without recognition, and he walked past.
Wilson took a step after him and felt a gentle hand on his arm. In Portuguese a liquid voice said softly, "Professor Nugent is being followed. If you think as much of your own preservation, Professor Wilson, as he does, you will pretend to have dropped something."
Wilson took another step forward; the hand fell away from his arm. Wilson looked down at the sidewalk and bent as if to pick something up. As he stooped, a dark car passed, its headlights cutting yellow cones out of the smog. It stopped just ahead of the tall, lean, iron-gray man.
The back door of the car slid open. A man got out and stood on the sidewalk. He was broad-shouldered and thick-necked. Dr. Nugent tried to go around him, but the man moved again to block his way. He looked down at an object in his hand and back at Dr. Nugent.
Without warning he whipped a big fist into Dr. Nugent's abdomen. Wilson winced, and his fists doubled futilely at his sides. Dr. Nugent doubled up in agony. In swift succession, the man hit him on the back of the neck, raised his knee into Dr. Nugent's face, and hit him in the face as Dr. Nugent reeled back, his face dazed and bloody. He fell against the car and slowly sagged through the door.
The big man on the sidewalk calmly stuffed the legs into the back seat and got in with them. As the door slid shut, the car pulled swiftly away.
The street was silent and empty.
It had happened so quickly that Wilson was still motionless. Now he started forward, but again the hand was a restraint on his arm.
"It is folly to lose two in a futile attempt to save one," said the voice in Portuguese.
Wilson turned. Beside him was a small, dark man of indeterminate age, past his youth certainly and not yet into old age. He was obviously Latin with a dark, little mustache that curled apologetically now. "I am Luis Santoyo," he said. "I regret that I could do nothing for Dr. Nugent."
"Your name isn't Santoyo," Wilson said in fluent Portuguese. "It's Fuentes. I met you in Bogota."
"You have a good memory, Dr. Wilson," the Brazilian said softly. "It would be wise to seek a more secluded spot. I have a room inside."
Wilson nodded briefly and followed the lithe little man through a narrow dining room scattered with a few poorly dressed diners who studiously ignored them. Fuentes skirted a long bar stretched across the back of the room and went through a small door. The room beyond was about eight feet square. Wide floorboards were splintered and bare underfoot. An old fluorescent light flickered and crackled on the ceiling. In the center of the room was a chipped, plastic table and two wrought-iron chairs.
Fuentes shrugged apologetically. "It is ugly but safe. Sit down, Dr. Wilson, and let us talk of witches and ways to escape the flames."
Wilson looked at him sharply. "Witches?"
"You are a witch, my friend, and that is why the outraged people burned your beautiful university. A few escaped, like you and Dr. Nugent, but you cannot run much farther; you cannot escape without help."
Wilson sank down in one of the chairs and shook his head. "Not witches."
"Why not? Witch is only a variant of the word 'wit'—'to know'—and you are man as knower. Witchcraft is the craft of the wise. The medieval witches and magicians considered themselves scientists, too, you know, and performed their experiments in an attempt to subjugate nature. A witch, my friend, is anyone who has a mysterious power over nature which ordinary mortals cannot attain and who worships gods the people have deserted."
"We worshipped no gods.'
""ou worshipped the gods of knowledge and truth. They were good for their own sake, you said, regardless of their fruits. But the people deserted those gods a generation ago. They wanted security, not progress; peace of mind, not truth. When a new religion is established in a country, the gods of the old religion become the devils of the new. The devil worshippers, the men of strange powers, become witches, and witches must burn.
"'Maleficos non patieris vivere,' says the Bible. 'Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.'"
Wilson brushed the back of one hand wearily across his forehead. "Perhaps. It is an easy thing to draw parallels, but it is more difficult to find the truth and to recognize it when you have found it. What does Brazil offer a witch?"
"The honor a witch is due," Fuentes said softly, "when his witchcraft is needed. The fear and respect which are the coins of his payment. And the opportunity to continue his subjugation of the universe."
"Freely?" Wilson asked sharply.
Fuentes shrugged. "What is freedom? A relative thing. In Brazil there is freedom to work as one pleases at one's specialty. On the other hand, there are restrictions on what one may publish or say in public which might disturb the people or the orderly processes of government. But then, as a scientist, you should not be interested in the people or in politics."
"That is what many of us thought," Wilson said quietly, "for too long. In our eagerness to conquer our environment, the universe, we failed to realize until too late that society is part of our environment. As the natural environment lost its power to threaten our existence, society became the most important part. We restricted the ability of fire and flood, of famine, disease, and ranged violence, to kill us—and we transferred their powers to our fellow men. And then society's threat became personal; it was pointed at us. We were not wise; we should have turned our thoughts and investigations toward society; we should have learned how it functions and why."
"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 to do."
"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 Thirties and in the Fifties. Some of you ignored the warning."
Wilson bent his head.
"Because you are a great scientist, Dr. Wilson," Fuentes 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, shook 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, spick," said a harsh voice beside Wilson's ear. "We wanted this one. The Senator will be very happy."
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 water jet behind; 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 was uneasy.
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 ball lightning 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 U.S. or nothing. 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 surge 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 anesthetic. Quick thinking to hold your breath. Actually the fire-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—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."
""ou 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 whispered 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 Ugly 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, he 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?"