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 me 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.
"You blame the Lowbrow because he wants security more than truth," Pike said evenly.""But nobody wants security more than you do. You want the world to admit how right you are, no matter what the truth is—because then you won't have to change your beliefs. The Lowbrow seeks his security in human convictions and faiths and strong attachments; you seek your security in the assurance of Absolute Law. Both are static; both are equally deadly.
"There are no Absolute Laws in human affairs, Dr. Wilson. There are only eternal variables. A static philosophy and a static society cannot contain them. For a little while they will compress humanity until, warped and twisted, humanity bursts the molds."
"What makes you think you have all the answers?" Wilson snapped angrily.
"We don't have any of them. We have only the answers that failed. The Universities were one of them. They had to burn; they earned it."
"You're utterly mad!"
"Too long they served as fortresses of isolation, walling in the learned man, the eggheads of yesterday and today, insulating them from humanity and its problems. What you were doing was so much more important than the problems of the little man who kept tugging at your sleeve, trying to get your attention. Finally he had to try something else. He gave you exactly the kind of trouble he had: insecurity and the fear of sudden death. Maybe, his instincts said, he could learn something from your efforts to solve the problem.
"He was wrong. Your only solution was to run, seeking a place where the lightning had not struck, where the fortresses were still unbroken. You couldn't learn to live with this new situation and adjust your convictions to this new reality. And you ran, angry at the impatient child who had a temper tantrum, unable to recognize that it was your fault for provoking a temper tantrum in someone inherently incapable of patience."
"Sylvia Robbins died in that temper tantrum," Wilson said unsteadily, rage shaking his voice.
"Sylvia Robbins had to die. And Aaron Friedman and Sammy Black and a hundred others. You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggheads. The eggheads sealed themselves into shells, and they had to be broken out. They were kicked out because they didn't have the guts to do it themselves.
"As an evolutionary experiment, the Scientist's isolation was an expensive failure. Nature has a way of scrapping failures. The eggheads are being scrapped now so that the components can be used for more valuable organisms."
Wilson's control snapped. He swung forward, his hands doubled into fists. "You son of a bitch!"
Pike's fist was there first. For Wilson the thin, fluorescent strip jiggled and blurred and went out.
When Wilson opened his eyes, he was on the floor of the helicopter, his head cradled in something soft and alive. It was Pat Helman's lap.
Pike was standing above him, fingering his jaw reminiscently. "I can be human, too," he said wryly.
Wilson brought his arm up over his eyes and pressed it down hard, fighting to keep himself intact. The most terrible sound in the world is the shattering of a lifelong set of values at the touch of reality.
For the first time Wilson looked at the facts straight-on, not refracted through the imperfect prism of his convictions: his values had not been able to save the university. If Pike was right, they had carried the torch to it themselves. They had led him right into the hands of the Lowbrows, and in the crucial test, they had broken, just as the Lowbrow's control had broken in the boat below.
That he had been knocked out was immaterial. That he had turned to force was an admission that his beliefs were unable to survive the first verbal attack. And his subconscious knew it.
Wilson groaned and pulled his arm away. He looked up at Pike. "If the world we have is no good, if the age of science has failed," he asked, "what have you got to take its place?"
Pike shrugged helplessly. "We don't know enough to tell you. We don't even know what we need in order to know. New facts, perhaps, or a new way of thinking about the facts we have. But I'll tell you what we offer: a chance at a world without security, a world in which insecurity is accepted as the right and proper state of man, a world in which death is certain, in which the only constant is a person's determination that death shall not be in vain and that the life before that death shall be a challenge—for challenge is inescapable by the nature of the universe."
Wilson sat up, and his mind shattered into brittle shards of pain. "What crazy kind of a world is that?"
"The world that is coming, inevitably. As witches perhaps we can shorten to a century or so the millennial grinding of the millstones of the universe."
"A world of poverty and superstition?" Wilson sneered.""If that's the world that's coming, I'd rather not live to see it."
"Perhaps so," Pike said soberly. "It takes a great courage to face an uncertain future, even more when the future may bring a complete reversal of all your convictions, must surely bring it, when you will have to change your basic beliefs and work for ways of life you learned to hate with your mother's milk."
"How will you escape the flames?"
"Today scientist-witches are burned because the uncertainty of the age demands scapegoats. Self-doubt breeds self-hate and uncertainty breeds brutality. In the burning of the witch a social poison is excreted; the witch dies for the people.
"In time men will learn to live with uncertainty because they must, and then the witch-scientist will be restored to his ancient position and his ancient authority: the wise man of the village, who wields mysterious control over the forces of nature—for the benefit of the village. Witchcraft will be an integral part of the social inheritance; it will be what it once was—a search for truth in an uncertain world.
"But the scientist-witch must burn. He hasn't learned anything in three hundred years; no, not in three hundred centuries. His reaction to danger is still the reaction of the dawn man: fight or flight."
Wilson frowned, trying to straighten out his thoughts. 'What do you want me to do?" he said in a low voice.
Pike looked at Pat for a moment and sighed. "Come down out of your ivory tower, Dr. Wilson. Become plain John Wilson, an ordinary, struggling, suffering citizen. Try living with the great problem of our day, not fighting it or running from it. Find out how the people think, but more important, how they feel and hate and love.
"And when you have learned that much, perhaps you will have learned what you can do to make their lives—and yours—more successful."
"Live with the Lowbrows?" Wilson repeated incredulously.
"More," Pike said. "Be one of them. Force yourself to admit their viewpoint into your understanding. Discover, as a psychologist, what your patient really is and how to cure him, rather than demanding that the patient be some hypothetical patient you can cure. Try to understand why the witch-burner and the witch are children of the same confusion, fathered by the same inner necessity. Learn to sympathize with the emotional need for scapegoats in an era of bewilderment when old ways of life are failing."
"I'll be caught!" Wilson exclaimed.
"Not if you really become a Lowbrow. What about it, John Wilson? Do you have the guts to admit you might be wrong, that you could learn something that would change your view of the universe, perhaps your way of life?"
Wilson hauled himself to his feet. Past the curved, plastic window, trailing fingers of fog thinned and then were gone. The night was clear; the stars were brilliant and hard in the blackness. As Wilson watched, one of the stars fell and streaked across the horizon like a green ball of flame, leaving behind it a fading train.
But it was not that easy for Wilson to climb above the fog and see the stars. Perhaps he was wrong. If failure is the consequence of wrong ideas and disaster, of incorrect convictions, he was wrong.
But knowing it intellectually and realizing it emotionally were quite different things.
Could he face the fact that he might be wrong, as wrong as the Lowbrows? Could he take the chance that he might one day admit it—and be forced to change or die?
Did he have the guts to take his convictions in his hand and cast them out and see how they fell?
Blindly Wilson reached out for strength and understanding. He found Pat's hand.
He clung to it desperately, the only solid thing in a Protean world.