Used to free fall from two previous experiences, and loving it, the fluffy little cat was soon bounding about the cabin in curves and gyrations that would have made her the envy of all back-alley and parlor felines on the planet below. A miracle cat in the dream world of free fall. For a long time she played with a string that the man would toss out lazily. Sometimes she caught the string on the fly, sometimes she swam for it frantically.
After a while the man grew bored with the game. He unlocked a drawer and began to study the details of the wisdom he would discover on Mars this trip—priceless spiritual insights that would be balm to a war- battered mankind.
The cat carefully selected a spot three feet off the floor, curled up on the air, and went to sleep.
Jorj Helmuth snipped the emerging answer tape into sections and handed each to the appropriate man. Most of them carefully tucked theirs away with little more than a glance, but the Secretary of Space puzzled over his.
“Who the devil would Maelzel be?” he asked.
A remote look came into the eyes of the Secretary of Space. “Edgar Allan Poe,” he said frowningly, with eyes half closed.
The grizzled general snapped his fingers. “Sure! Maelzel’s chess player. Read it when I was a kid.
About an automaton that played chess. Poe proved it had a man inside it.”
The Secretary of Space frowned. “Now what’s the point in a fool question like that?”
“You said it came from Opperly’s group?” Jorj asked sharply.
The Secretary of Space nodded. The others looked at the two men puzzledly.
“Who would that be?” Jorj pressed. “The group, I mean.”
The Secretary of Space shrugged. “Oh, the usual little bunch over at the institute. Hindeman, Gregory, Opperly himself. Oh yes, and young Farquar.”
“Sounds like Opperly’s getting senile,” Jorj commented coldly. “I’d investigate.”
The Secretary of Space nodded. He suddenly looked tough. “I will. Right away.”
Sunlight striking through french windows spotlighted a ballet of dust motes untroubled by air- conditioning. Morton Opperly’s living room was well kept but worn and quite behind the times. Instead of reading tapes there were books; instead of steno-robots, pen and ink; while in place of a four-by-six TV screen, a Picasso hung on the wall. Only Opperly knew that the painting was still faintly radioactive, that it had been riskily so when he’d smuggled it out of his bomb-singed apartment in New York City.
The two physicists fronted each other across a coffee table. The face of the elder was cadaverous, large-eyed, and tender—fined down by a long life of abstract thought. That of the younger was forceful, sensuous, bulky as his body, and exceptionally ugly. He looked rather like a bear.
Opperly was saying, “So when he asked who was responsible for the Maelzel question, I said I didn’t remember.” He smiled. “They still allow me my absent-mindedness, since it nourishes their contempt. Almost my sole remaining privilege.” The smile faded. “Why do you keep on teasing the zoo animals,
Willard?” he asked without rancor. “I’ve maintained many times that we shouldn’t truckle to them by yielding to their demand that we ask Maizie questions. You and the rest have overruled me. But then to use those questions to convey veiled insults isn’t reasonable. Apparently the Secretary of Space was bothered enough about this last one to pay me a ‘copter call within twenty minutes of this morning’s meeting at the foundation. Why do you do it, Willard?”
The features of the other convulsed unpleasantly. “Because the Thinkers are charlatans who must be exposed,” he rapped out. “We know their Maizie is no more than a tea-leaf-reading fake. We’ve traced their Mars rockets and found they go nowhere. We know their Martian mental science is bunk.”
“But we’ve already exposed the Thinkers very thoroughly,” Opperly interposed quietly. “You know the good it did.”
Farquar hunched his Japanese-wrestler shoulders. “Then it’s got to be done until it takes.”
Opperly studied the bowl of lilies-of-the-valley by the coffeepot. “I think you just want to tease the animals, for some personal reason of which you probably aren’t aware.”
Farquar scowled. “We’re the ones hi the cages.”
Opperly continued his inspection of the flowers’ bells. “All the more reason not to poke sticks through the bars at the lions and tigers strolling outside. No, Willard, I’m not counseling appeasement. But consider the age hi which we live. It wants magicians.” His voice grew especially tranquil. “A scientist tells people the truth. When tunes are good—that is, when the truth offers no threat—people don’t mind. But when times are very, very bad—” A shadow darkened his eyes. “Well, we all know what happened to—” And he mentioned three names that had been household words hi the middle of the century. They were the names on the brass plaque dedicated to the three martyred physicists.
He went on, “A magician, on the other hand, tells people what they wish were true—that perpetual motion works, that cancer can be cured by colored lights, that a psychosis is no worse than a head cold, that they’ll live forever. In good times magicians are laughed at. They’re a luxury of the spoiled wealthy few. But in bad times people sell their souls for magic cures and buy perpetual-motion machines to power their war rockets.”
Farquar clenched his fist. “All the more reason to keep chipping away at the Thinkers. Are we supposed to beg off from a job because it’s difficult and dangerous?”
Opperly shook his head. “We’re to keep clear of the infection of violence. In my day, Willard, I was one of the Frightened Men. Later I was one of the Angry Men and then one of the Minds of Despair. Now I’m convinced that all my posturings were futile.”
“Exactly!” Farquar agreed harshly. “You postured. You didn’t act. If you men who discovered atomic
energy had only formed a secret league, if you’d only had the foresight and the guts to use your tremendous bargaining position to demand the power to shape mankind’s future—”
“By the tune you were born, Willard,” Opperly interrupted dreamily, “Hitler was merely a name in the history books. We scientists weren’t the stuff out of which cloak-and-dagger men are made. Can you imagine Oppenheimer wearing a mask or Einstein sneaking into the Old White House with a bomb hi his brief case?” He smiled. “Besides, that’s not the way power is seized. New ideas aren’t useful to the man bargaining for power—his weapons are established facts, or lies.”
“Just the same, it would have been a good thing if you’d had a little violence in you.”
“No,” Opperly said.
“I’ve got violence hi me,” Farquar announced, shoving himself to his feet.
Opperly looked up from the flowers. “I think you have,” he agreed.
“But what are we to do?” Farquar demanded. “Surrender the world to charlatans without a struggle?”
Opperly mused for a while. “I don’t know what the world needs now. Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the philosopher’s stone. That was the pebble by the seashore he really wanted to find.”
“Now you are justifying the Thinkers!”
“No, I leave that to history.”
“And history consists of the actions of men,” Farquar concluded. “I intend to act. The Thinkers are vulnerable, their power fantastically precarious. What’s it based on? A few lucky guesses. Faith-healing. Some science hocus-pocus, on the level of those juke-box burlesque acts between the strips. Dubious mental comfort given to a few nerve-torn neurotics hi the Inner Cabinet—and their wives. The fact that the Thinkers’ clever stage-managing won the President a doubtful election. The erroneous belief that the Soviets pulled out of Iraq and Iran because of the Thinkers’ Mind Bomb threat. A brain machine that’s just a cover for Jan Tregarron’s guesswork. Oh yes, and that hogwash of ‘Martian Wisdom.’ All of it mere bluff! A few pushes at the right times and points are all that are needed—and the Thinkers know it! I’ll bet they’re terrified already, and will be more so when they find that we’re gunning for them. Eventually they’ll be making overtures to us, turning to us for help. You wait and see.”