The military man who had initiated the discussion said indifferently, "No, Doctor, I do not."
"I'll explain, then, that I firmly believe that any scientist capable of doing such work. even an Earthman, is certainly my intellectual equal, at least, and, if you'll pardon my presumption, yours as well."
Ennius interrupted. "Pardon me, Dr. Arvardan. I would like to return to the Synapsifier. Has Shekt experimented with human beings?"
Arvardan laughed. "I doubt it, Lord Ennius. Nine tenths of his Synapsified rats died during treatment. He would scarcely dare use human subjects until much more progress has been made."
So Ennius sank back into his chair with a slight frown on his forehead and, thereafter, neither spoke nor ate for the remainder of the dinner.
Before midnight the Procurator had quietly left the gathering and, with a bare word to his wife only, departed in his private cruiser on the two-hour trip to the city of Chica, with the slight frown still on his forehead and a raging anxiety in his heart.
Thus it was that on the same afternoon that Arbin Maren brought Joseph Schwartz into Chica for treatment with Shekt's Synapsifier. Shekt himself had been closeted with none less than the Procurator of Earth for over an hour.
4. The Royal Road
Arbin was uneasy in Chica. He felt surrounded. Somewhere in Chica, one of the largest cities on Earth-they said it had fifty thousand human beings in it-somewhere there were officials of the great outer Empire.
To be sure, he had never seen a man of the Galaxy: yet here, in Chica, his neck was continually twisting in fear that he might. If pinned down, he could not have explained how he would identify an Outsider from an Earthman, even if he were to see one, but it was in his very marrow to feel that there was, somehow, a difference.
He looked back over his shoulder as he entered the Institute. His biwheel was parked in an open area, with a six-hour coupon holding a spot open for it. Was the extravagance itself suspicious?…Everything frightened him now. The air was full of eyes and ears.
If only the strange man would remember to remain hidden in the bottom of the rear compartment. He had nodded violently-but had he understood? He was suddenly impatient with himself. Why had he let Grew talk him into this madness?
And then somehow the door was open in front of him and a voice had broken in on his thoughts.
It said, "What do you want?"
It sounded impatient; perhaps it had already asked him that same thing several times.
He answered hoarsely, words choking out of his throat like dry powder, "Is this where a man can apply for the Synapsifier?"
The receptionist looked up sharply and said, "Sign here."
Arbin put his hands behind his back and repeated huskily, "Where do I see about the Synapsifier?" Grew had told him the name, but the word came out queerly, like so much gibberish.
But the receptionist said, with iron in her voice, "I can't do anything for you unless you sign the register as a visitor. It's in the rules."
Without a word, Arbin turned to go. The young woman behind the desk pressed her lips together and kicked the signal bar at the side of her chair violently.
Arbin was fighting desperately for a lack of notoriety and failing miserably in his own mind. This girl was looking hard at him. She'd remember him a thousand years later. He had a wild desire to run, run back to the car, back to the farm…
Someone in a white lab coat was coming rapidly out of another room, and the receptionist was pointing to him. "Volunteer for the Synapsifier, Miss Shekt," she was saying. "He won't give his name."
Arbin looked up. It was still another girl, young. He looked disturbed. " Are you in charge of the machine, miss?"
"No, not at all." She smiled in a very friendly fashion, and Arbin felt anxiety ebb slightly.
"I can take you to him, though," she went on. Then, eagerly, "Do you really want to volunteer for the Synapsifier?"
"I just want to see the man in charge," Arbin said woodenly.
"All right." She seemed not at all disturbed by the rebuff. She slipped back through the door from which she had come. There was a short wait. Then, finally, there was the beckon of a finger…
He followed her, heart pounding, into a small anteroom. She said gently, "If you will wait about half an hour or less. Dr. Shekt will be with you. He is very busy just now…If you would like some book films and a viewer to pass the time. I'll bring them to you."
But Arbin shook his head. The four walls of the small room closed about him, and held him rigid, it seemed. Was he trapped? Were the Ancients coming for him?
It was the longest wait in Arbin's life.
Lord Ennius, Procurator of Earth, had experienced no comparable difficulties in seeing Dr. Shekt, though he had experienced an almost comparable excitement. In his fourth year as Procurator, a visit to Chica was still an event. As the direct representative of the remote Emperor, his social standing was, legalistically, upon a par with viceroys of huge Galactic sectors that sprawled their gleaming volumes across hundreds of cubic parsecs of space, but, actually, his post was little short of exile.
Trapped as he was in the sterile emptiness of the Himalayas, among the equally sterile quarrels of a population that hated him and the Empire he represented, even a trip to Chica was escape.
To be sure, his escapes were short ones. They had to be short, since here at Chica it was necessary to wear lead-impregnated clothes at all times, even while sleeping, and, what was worse, to dose oneself continually with metaboline.
He spoke bitterly of that to Shekt.
"Metaboline," he said, holding up the vermilion pill for inspection, "is perhaps a true symbol of all that your planet means to me, my friend. Its function is to heighten all metabolic processes while I sit here immersed in the radioactive cloud that surrounds me and which you are not even aware of."
He swallowed it. "There' Now my heart will beat more quickly; my breath will pump a race of its own accord; and my liver will boil away in those chemical syntheses that, medical men tell me, make it the most important factory in the body. And for that I pay with a siege of headaches and lassitude afterward."
Dr. Shekt listened with some amusement. He gave a strong impression of being nearsighted, did Shekt, not because he wore glasses or was in any way afflicted, but merely because long habit had given him the unconscious trick of peering closely at things, of weighing all facts anxiously before saying anything. He was tall and in his late middle age, his thin figure slightly stooped.
But he was well read in much of Galactic culture, and he was relatively free of the trick of universal hostility and suspicion that made the average Earthman so repulsive even to so cosmopolitan a man of the Empire as Ennius.
Shekt said, "I'm sure you don't need the pill. Metaboline is just one of your superstitions, and you know it. If I were to substitute sugar pills without your knowledge, you'd be none the worse. What's more, you would even psychosomaticize yourself into similar headaches afterward."
"You say that in the comfort of your own environment. Do you deny that your basal metabolism is higher than mine?"
"Of course I don't, but what of it? I know that it is a superstition of the Empire, Ennius, that we men of Earth are different from other human beings, but that's not really so in the essentials. Or are you coming here as a missionary of the anti-Terrestrians?"
Ennius groaned. "By the life of the Emperor, your comrades of Earth are themselves the best such missionaries. Living here, as they do, cooped up on their deadly planet, festering in their own anger, they're nothing but a standing ulcer in the Galaxy.