The unorthodox becomes the orthodox. The theory crustifies into the dogma. The method becomes methodology. Was this forever to be the entrapment of science? There were an infinite number of exploratory possibilities on this frontier of today; and, for all their challenge, they could be a soporific. The frontier itself was finite. But what about the next frontier? And the next? And the next?
Huth could be right, in this at least: Perhaps parapsychology had been too long exploring the unknown of its present frontier. Some must remain behind to develop and consolidate. But others must keep moving on!
To look forever beyond the next horizon! There was the challenge. There was the dream forever bright.
Lucifer thought of his crude experiment with the psi positive children, and he admitted now what he had denied at the time: Not for a decade had he been so excited by any experiment; it had brought back the wonder of the moment when an aimless undergraduate had first come upon the Rhine card tests. Lord, that was more than twenty years ago! For twenty years he had been walking in Rhine's shadow. And his personal, private dreams had never lived to see sunlight.
When would science learn to use genius without being smothered by it? Freud and Einstein had left a vision to their sciences, not a citadel. They had tried to cast a light, not a shadow. Rhine had brought psi into his laboratory to demonstrate its scientific validity. Now, the physicist, the biochemist, the mathematician and, yes, the geneticist—all of them, must take this validity into their own laboratories. The parapsychologist must become the physical scientist; the physical scientist must become the parapsychologist. Only from the total crucible of science could psi emerge in a useful form.
But what of Huth, and Mendel's Planet?
However it had been brought together, whatever one thought of it, this living laboratory was now a fact. Psi was being mated to psi; children were being born, children with a psi potential that could be trained into a power of unknown magnitude. Huth had described it well: A laboratory on the scale of life itself!
Huth knew his semantics, all right. The barbs of his words got under the skin, hooked and held fast. How pallid an Earth laboratory would seem after Mendel's Planet. The symbol cards seemed to have lost their meaning.
A dozen projects clamored to reach the surface of Lucifer's thinking. Each cried out its siren challenge; each demanded experimentation. How much there was to do here on Mendel's Planet!
Now, Nina was at his side, and she said gently, "It's raining again, Lucifer. Won't you come in?"