Lucifer recoiled from the bluntness of the question.
"I am a scientist," he replied. "Or at least I have always assumed that. These ideas are as strange to me as they are to you, but I'm trying to understand and evaluate them. Isn't that important?"
"Not to me it isn't—not right now. I think the other boys will feel the same."
"You don't care what all this may mean?"
"Nope. Not yet, anyway. I'm not a scientist, Dr. Brill. Maybe I'm not even a very smart guy and maybe I'm just as glad of it, because my feet are on the ground and I know where I want them to go. Sure, this psi stuff could be big, mighty big. Our kids could go a long way with it. I can see that. But I'm a man, not a guinea pig. I happen to go for the woman they teamed me up with, and she feels the same way about me. That's true of most of the folks here. But we're not breeding kids for someone else. We'd rather run our own show. Guess you professors have been away from ordinary people too long to realize that. You should listen to some of our boys who fought with the underground in the last war. Makes you feel kind of good about people."
"Don't you realize that Huth can destroy all of you?"
"I'm not the hero type, Dr. Brill. In the war, I always kept my head down and squeezed as deep in the mud as I could. But there's some things you have to do, no matter how cold your stomach feels about it."
"When do you plan to do this?"
From the forest came a wild, plaintive cry. Fetzer took a quick step toward the window, then paused.
"You better come with me—both of you."