Lucifer felt his anger rising again.
"I'm afraid I don't follow you."
"I intended no invidious comparison, Dr. Brill. But, as orientation progresses, you will better understand what I mean. Have you ever thought how your science would appear to an extra-terrestrial mind?"
"The concept has never occurred to me," Lucifer snapped, thinking of the grotesque creatures running out of the rain, and the blindfolded child walking alone down the corridor. "We see your science as a great number of cubicles, all operating within one structure, with a minimum amount of inter-communication. Each cubicle is engrossed in a process of infinite abstraction from a body of potential knowledge self-doomed to be finite. It studies every new idea chiefly in terms of concepts fundamental to its own specialized body of knowledge."
Huth waved a large hand to cut off a protest from Lucifer.
"And what of the phenomena an individual scientist observes and evaluates? He shapes the facts into an hypothesis that may be valid only within his own cubicle. He does not venture outside. A most glaring example is that of your medical diagnostician. He uses the tools of his science brilliantly, then lays them down and becomes a therapeutic nihilist!"
"Specialization has meant progress," Lucifer protested.
"Progress, yes, but progress only to the frontiers of infinity. Will you dare venture into that frontier, Dr. Brill?"
"Of course."
"Be careful! The price of that venture is very high. Consider for a moment your Earth biologist: The very nature of the subject on which he has founded his science eventually dooms him to technological unemployment! If he follows the living cells to their ultimate sequence of interactions between ions and molecules, biology ends as it began—as applied chemistry and physics!"