Free OPUS 21 by Philip Wylie

resent your behavior. Or should. If you pure scientists were pure guys purely devoted to science, Hitler could never have hired a dozen of the lot of you in Germany, or Stalin coerced six.
    If you had insisted on keeping science free--the Wehrmacht could never have been armed. If you had been scientific men, not men practicing science--even granting you felt it necessary to wipe out the Axis--when the deed was done, you could simply have published all the atomic facts and be damned to the politicians and the so-called patriots.
    Left mankind to work out its destinies in a climate where knowledge was still free. As it is--Russia knows enough to wipe up America in a few more years--the patriots and politicians are living in a fool's paradise--your Bulletin sweats monthly to explain that sinister fact--and all you gained by assenting to the current lockup of freedom of knowledge is a bureaucratic sweatbox to do your work in--and a terrible endless case of jitters. You don't understand behavior well enough to predict the results of your own.
    Others do. And by far the most probable result of the failure of pure scientists to behave purely toward science will be the end of the possibility of further top-level scientific investigation for a century or two."

    "You think I should sit down and write out all the atomic secrets I know and print them and scatter them from a plane?"

    "I do not. I think you should sit down and face the fact that science is precisely as hypocritical as religion--essentially no different from it--hamstrung in the opposite tendon by the same egotistical means. Sinful--call it. Guilty. The scientist can see the lack of logic in religion--so he rules it out. He doesn't see the import of its universal existence.
    The religious man can see that physical science offers precisely nothing of value to his inner sensibilities--but fails to see the meaning of logic. So he neglects to learn science and applies logic only when it flushes his toilet or eradicates his foes. You're both apes."

    Paul swallowed the last of his ice. For a moment he sat without speaking, the reflected sunlight softening his sharp features. Then he said, "I hate to think anybody understands anything I don't. And I strongly suspect you do."

    "I strongly know I damned well do."

    There was another pause. Paul pulled his nose. He drew a breath to speak-and gave up the impulse. His eyes turned inward. Little by little, his limbs sagged. An expression of the utmost melancholy passed like a shadow over his face and was followed by lines of resolution--lines I did not like because, visible in them, was conflict-
    -unacknowledged discontent mixed with unknown resolve.

    ' I'm in a terrible mess, Phil."

    "Aren't we--and so forth?"

    "I want to quit."

    "The Lab?"

    He nodded. "There is something positively bestial--in the worst sense--about going any further with schemes to turn physical theory into mere implements of death."

    "Instinct coming to your rescue. I thought you liked the work?"

    "I did. As long as it was a series of problems. Now--it's getting to be a cold choice of means for engineering murder. That's no fun. It's like spending all your time figuring out how to destroy your own home--after you've already hit on half a dozen nifty ways."

    "Why not quit, then?"

    "Brink--for one. I like the old guy. I'm indispensable to him--I at least pretend.

    And I feel loyal."

    "Talk it over with him."

    "No use. He's got the idea that he's engaged in some sort of holy mission--a personal war against all tyranny, right or left. That he, and we, and guys like us, must keep out in front--from the weapons standpoint--until every tyrant's done for."

    "Tyranny, Paul, isn't a gent. It's something inside everybody."

    He drew a long, sighing breath and abandoned the subject. Soon, he grinned at me. "Phil, I came as near praying you'd be in town today as I get to prayer. When the telephone operator put me through--I like to fainted with