"What could it matter?"
"It doesn't to them, but to us it matters. Public likes their scapegoats alive. More satisfying to hate live people. Public likes to see their dragons behind bars, humiliated, treated like crackpots. Makes a bottlehead feel good to see an Egghead dancing like a monkey. Also prevents martyrs. Living men are never martyrs."
"So why are we going to Sauk City?" I asked. I wanted to change the subject.
Mesner had information that an ex-professor from some long-extinct University had been concealing a high IQ after having supposedly purged himself of it years before. He was supposed to have been caught by a brain-probing spy-eye and was reported to have an IQ of over 160.
Mesner talked of such an IQ as though it was a living time-bomb that might go off any minute and blow Sauk City and the entire State to hell. He shot the heliocar along at 500 miles an hour. He held the T-Bar in one hand and lit cigarettes with the other.
"What upset you so much, Fred? I mean that morning when I interrupted you sorting cards?"
I felt a warning click in my head. I remembered it. The eyes are the windows of the soul.
Mesner, I thought, couldn't look into the windows of a blind man. Could I?
It hadn't been my own thought that had disrupted my idyllic, care-free life sorting cards. Mesner had said it to me.
"Just the unexpected break in the routine," I said. You've already explained it. My quiescent IQ is just too high to be a successful card-sorter."