III
Fear is a subtle poison.
It began long ago, in a small New Mexico town, long before there were gamma-men or even interplanetary travel. The fear radiated from mushrooming clouds with impossible radiance at the core, and the fear did more harm to the minds of men than the deadly spectra of invisible death did to their bodies.
It began with scientists in cages in the name of national securities; it developed into continual surveillance for all men engaged in atomics. These workers, and their families, led cloistered, monastic lives. They intermarried, since there was little contact with outsiders, and they shared generations of haunted, spy-ridden lives. They lived in the midst of fear and mistrust, while the earth went through its chronic spirals of war and the preparations. Throughout history, scholars and philosophers have warned that knowledge must be free and universal, like sunlight. But there have always been wars and secrets and guarded weapons, and fear is older than man.
Scientists were men of dangerous knowledge, of destructive potentials. As such, they were hostages of fear and illusions of safety. They were segregated, guarded, well-fed, and at first provided with all the deadly toys necessary to their amusements. It was all painfully logical and futile, but all the best brains of mankind were locked up to putrefy for lack of fresh air and the stimuli of mutual thoughts. Their knowledges and prerogatives became hereditary.
Natural law works against segregation. Artificial isolation of any group leads to misunderstandings, prejudices, resentments, mutual fears, and eventually to violence. Fear-hysteria is a serpent devouring its own tail. In time, the once-honored and glorified gamma-men became feared and hated. In the minds of the ignorant and superstitious populace, they were associated with medieval wizards and workers of dreadful miracles. The threat of gamma groups became a political pawn, and was used as a club to beat down restless, unhappy populations.
With their knowledge, and the popular delusion of their almost supernatural powers, it was easy enough for ambitious men to misuse the Scientists. In some cases, the gamma-men themselves usurped authority, but this noble experiment slipped through their fingers, and they lost control from sheer unworldliness. In truth, from the working of natural law, the juice had run out of them and they no longer understood the basics of normal human relations. In a final paroxysm of public panic, they were disarmed, their toys taken away, and every last gamma-man imprisoned in carefully guarded and isolated colonies. Like the ancient Indians, they were placed in reservations and kept there by force.
After this culminating outrage, the gamma-men lost heart for practical activity. Locked into their libraries, they turned to abstractions and dabbled in dead-end philosophies. Most of them were querulous oldsters, hidebound by tradition, their sciences now become a ritual religion, their books exalted as "The Word," and their fading knowledge still held secret for reasons long forgotten.
Not quite all gamma-men accepted this half-life allotted to them. There were sports, avatars, occasional throwbacks who rebelled and went "off reservation."
None of these actually ran amuck, but so great was the fear-conditioning on one side, and so difficult the adaptation to ordinary living on the other that there were painful accidents and incidents. Nothing genuinely monstrous occurred, but enough friction developed to keep alive and add to the public dread of gamma-men. The term became a byword for nursery terror. And in their turn, the infant generations of gamma-men learned to pity and despise the ignorant and corrupt multitudes of normal humanity. They lost contact with their human heritage.