“Is it here, then? After so long, is my agony at an end?”
“Master?”
“It is too much, too much, to see it after so long. The oracle of the galactic plan!”
Even through Seffatt’s imperfect intonation, it was possible to realize his distress and excitement. Sinnt opened his mouth to speak, but the alien voice burst forth again.
“Leave me, leave me! It is too much for an old being.”
The leader turned sharply, exultation on his face. He gestured vigorously, and the visitors were bundled quickly from the room.
“This is a great day indeed!” he breathed when he joined them seconds later. “Did you hear the Master? The artifact is an oracle—an oracle which will teach us the galactic plan!”
Rodrone was not so sure that this meaning could be put so hastily on Seffatt’s words. Neither had he ever heard of any “galactic plan.”
“Isn’t it true Seffatt is senile?” he said spitefully. “I’d say his mind’s wandering.”
The leader looked at him haughtily. “It is not possible for a diseased one to know the state of mind of a Master.”
“Who are you calling diseased?”
“We are all diseased, friend, diseased with our humanity.” He turned to Sinnt, “Are you ready to take your vow?” Sinnt nodded.
“All is ready. Your friend may watch too, to show him what it means to acknowledge the truth.”
In an adjoining room, two men waited. One held a rod in an electric heater, while the other directed Sinnt to kneel and bared his back for him. The smell of hot iron filled the room.
The leader took his place in front of Sinnt. “What do you swear?”
“I swear to seek the truth,” Sinnt intoned. “I swear to uphold the Universal Vision. I swear to do all in my power to assist in the unfolding of the Orderly Plan by which alone existence is justified. I swear to work, where necessary, towards the elimination of undesirable life-forms.”
The leader stepped around the kneeling man and was given the heated rod, on the end of which was a glowing brand. “With this iron I seal your vow.”
On Sinnt’s back there was already the mark of an earlier brand, the mark of a curved cross. The leader applied the iron just below it and held it there. The iron hissed; Sinnt shuddered, but managed to make no sound.
For once, Foyle’s blue eyes were wide open, and the lenses on his shoulder camera were dead. Rodrone drew him to one side.
“Do you propose to practice this barbarity on the child, too?” he asked angrily when Sinnt had risen.
“Not yet,” the scientist said weakly. “He must be instructed first. The vows must be taken willfully.”
A healing ointment was being rubbed on his burned back. The look of pain began to leave his face.
“You must all rest now,” the leader said. “Later, we will talk again.”
He withdrew. Rodrone contemplated attempting an escape, but realized that the building was probably filled with people and the society seemed to have a fetish about efficiency. He decided to bide his time.
They were taken to a room containing three couches and locked in. Rodrone stared at Sinnt sullenly.
“What was that part about ‘eliminating undesirable life-forms’?”
“That refers mainly to Homo sapiens,” Sinnt told him without any trace of embarrassment. “You see, Streall thinking differs radically from the human outlook, or even from human science. The idea of random events, entropy, or of spontaneous processes developing by themselves and uncontrolled simply does not occur in their world-picture. There’s no place for chance and probability in the Streall view of the universe; they see it as an immense machine developing in orderly fashion towards a predestined end. Hence the name of the society. But the Streall do admit that chance developments might occur, in certain conditions. This would constitute a disease of existence, a cancer of space and matter, if you like, that endangers the harmony of the whole. Homo sapiens is held to be such a disease, because it has broken the normal pattern and is spreading across the galaxy far too rapidly. According to the Streall, we should still be on Earth.”
“And therefore we should be eliminated? Well, that’s no surprise. We’ve always known the Streall harbored a sneaking desire to wipe us out. The only reason they haven’t tried is because they’re scared of us wiping them out instead. The astonishing thing is to find a group of human beings with the same beliefs.”
“But doesn’t truth rise above personal interests?” Sinnt asked. “What if the Streall are right? What if we are a danger to Thiswhirl? Doesn’t the search for truth demand that we acknowledge the fact?”
“Do you believe it?” Rodrone asked sharply.
Sinnt sighed. “Well, you know, when the society began it was merely a group of men who decided to examine Streall philosophy as a kind of academic project. They had very little to go on: the Streall have never laid themselves open for study. They gathered together whatever scraps they could. Gradually the doctrine began to take hold of them—of us, I should say—until we became convinced of its superiority to all human thinking.”
He paused, and seemed to be thinking nostalgically of those days. “We probably know more than anybody about Streall science. It really does have extraordinary depth, you know. The human race and all its works came to seem pale and shabby to us, to seem, well, evil. But still we had only scraps. Then Seffatt arrived. He taught us more, and we advanced further.”
“Yet you left the society.”
“Pah! There seemed no point in remaining. I became convinced that the society understood only a distortion of the true doctrine: their minds were not keen enough. As for Seffatt, he taught us as much as he thought fit and then stopped. Besides, he is rarely very coherent now… he is prematurely aged. Kelever’s atmosphere is very bad for him, you see. These days the society fills his private quarters with purer air, but by the time we realized it, the damage was done.”
Rodrone turned over in his mind what Sinnt had told him. He had already known that human terms scarcely applied where the Streall were concerned. Their science was like a philosophy, their philosophy was like a science: and it was this remorseless philosophical oasis of theirs which sometimes made Rodrone sweat. They had no thought for themselves, but they had an irrevocable committment to what they thought to be right. It was a logical clarity verging on madness.
Rodrone knew how powerful a philosophy could be, even when it was wrong. It was the scientific, hard-fact nature of Streall thinking that scared him. They could only be right.
Unlike a Streall, a human being would carry on in his own way irrespective of whether he was right or not. Rodrone felt himself to be very human. “I don’t give a damn whether what the Streall say is true or not,” he half snarled. “I’m a man, and I’ll carry on being a man even if I reduce the whole universe to tatters. Furthermore I’m getting out of here and I’m taking the lens with me. It’s mine!”
Leaning over, Sinnt gripped his arm hard. “But think! The lens undoubtedly contains the ultimate knowledge of atomics! With Seffatt’s help that knowledge can be ours!” His lenses glowed with fervor.
Rodrone shook him off. “Damn your knowledge!” he shouted. “They’re going to shoot me tomorrow!”
“Not if you… embrace the faith, as it were.”
“Hmph. And how do I get away with it? You know as well as I do that they had a cephalogrator trained on you the whole time to make sure you meant what you said.”