Fear is a subtle poison.
It began long ago, in a small New Mexico town, long before there
were gamma-men or even interplanetary travel. The fear radiated from
mushrooming clouds with impossible radiance at the core, and the fear
did more harm to the minds of men than the deadly spectra of invisible
death did to their bodies.
It began with scientists in cages in the name of national securities;
it developed into continual surveillance for all men engaged in
atomics. These workers, and their families, led cloistered, monastic
lives. They intermarried, since there was little contact with
outsiders, and they shared generations of haunted, spy-ridden lives.
They lived in the midst of fear and mistrust, while the earth went
through its chronic spirals of war and the preparations. Throughout
history, scholars and philosophers have warned that knowledge must be
free and universal, like sunlight. But there have always been wars and
secrets and guarded weapons, and fear is older than man.
Scientists were men of dangerous knowledge, of destructive potentials.
As such, they were hostages of fear and illusions of safety. They were
segregated, guarded, well-fed, and at first provided with all the
deadly toys necessary to their amusements. It was all painfully logical
and futile, but all the best brains of mankind were locked up to
putrefy for lack of fresh air and the stimuli of mutual thoughts. Their
knowledges and prerogatives became hereditary.
Natural law works against segregation. Artificial isolation of any
group leads to misunderstandings, prejudices, resentments, mutual
fears, and eventually to violence. Fear-hysteria is a serpent devouring
its own tail. In time, the once-honored and glorified gamma-men became
feared and hated. In the minds of the ignorant and superstitious
populace, they were associated with medieval wizards and workers of
dreadful miracles. The threat of gamma groups became a political pawn,
and was used as a club to beat down restless, unhappy populations.
With their knowledge, and the popular delusion of their almost
supernatural powers, it was easy enough for ambitious men to misuse the
Scientists. In some cases, the gamma-men themselves usurped authority,
but this noble experiment slipped through their fingers, and they lost
control from sheer unworldliness. In truth, from the working of natural
law, the juice had run out of them and they no longer understood the
basics of normal human relations. In a final paroxysm of public panic,
they were disarmed, their toys taken away, and every last gamma-man
imprisoned in carefully guarded and isolated colonies. Like the ancient
Indians, they were placed in reservations and kept there by force.
After this culminating outrage, the gamma-men lost heart for practical
activity. Locked into their libraries, they turned to abstractions and
dabbled in dead-end philosophies. Most of them were querulous oldsters,
hidebound by tradition, their sciences now become a ritual religion,
their books exalted as "The Word," and their fading knowledge still
held secret for reasons long forgotten.
Not quite all gamma-men accepted this half-life allotted to them. There
were sports, avatars, occasional throwbacks who rebelled and went "off
reservation."
None of these actually ran amuck, but so great was the
fear-conditioning on one side, and so difficult the adaptation to
ordinary living on the other that there were painful accidents and
incidents. Nothing genuinely monstrous occurred, but enough friction
developed to keep alive and add to the public dread of gamma-men. The
term became a byword for nursery terror. And in their turn, the infant
generations of gamma-men learned to pity and despise the ignorant and
corrupt multitudes of normal humanity. They lost contact with their
human heritage.
In recent years, few gamma-men had broken out to mingle with the
expanding races now peopling and colonizing the frontiers of the solar
system. Those few were hunted down like outlaws, and killed with brutal
ingenuity.
But a new generation had come among gamma-men, with an urge so
passionate and devout they themselves did not understand it. Either
some latent folk-memory, or some emotional mutation, urged them to
go forth and civilize mankind. In the old books, they tracked down
knowledge and made grandiose plans for engineering the renaissance.
Realizing their common origin, and longing for more nearly normal
lives, they grouped together and made a pact to see some changes made.
Studying history and the other technologies of man, they soon
discovered that social, economic and psychological sciences had
lagged far behind the other developments. These were the blind
spots of mankind, and these led to all the other serious and tragic
misdirections of effort. Always, the sons of Adam had struggled to
achieve workable systems, and always these systems had broken down or
failed at critical moments.