* * * * *
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 in which we live. It wants magicians." His voice grew
especially tranquil. "A scientist tells people the truth. When times
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 in the middle of the century. They
were the names on the brass plaque dedicated to the martyred three
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 reactions were futile."
"Exactly!" Farquar agreed harshly. "You reacted. 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 time 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 in his briefcase?" He smiled. "Besides, that's not
the way power is seized. New ideas aren't useful to the man bargaining
for power--only established facts or lies are."
"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 in 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. Which Newton did the world need then?"
"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 in 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."
"I am thinking again of Hitler," Opperly interposed quietly. "On his
first half dozen big steps, he had nothing but bluff. His generals
were against him. They knew they were in a cardboard fort. Yet he won
every battle, until the last. Moreover," he pressed on, cutting Farquar
short, "the power of the Thinkers isn't based on what they've got, but
on what the world hasn't got--peace, honor, a good conscience...."
The front-door knocker clanked. Farquar answered it. A skinny old man
with a radiation scar twisting across his temple handed him a tiny
cylinder. "Radiogram for you, Willard." He grinned across the hall at
Opperly. "When are you going to get a phone put in, Mr. Opperly?"