“This paper seems to have developed into a fairly filthy scandal sheet,” Hebster mused out loud. “I shouldn’t be surprised if it makes money.”
“I take it then,” Braganza asked without turning around from his contemplation of the street, “that you haven’t read it very regularly in recent months?”
“I am happy to say I have not.”
“That was a mistake.”
Hebster stared at the clumped locks of black hair. “Why?” he asked carefully.
“Because it has developed into a thoroughly filthy and extremely successful scandal sheet. You’re its chief scandal.” Braganza laughed. “You see, these people look upon Primey dealing as more of a sin than a crime. And, according to that morality, you’re close to Old Nick himself!”
Shutting his eyes for a moment, Hebster tried to understand people who imagined such a soul-satisfying and beautiful concept as profit to be a thing of dirt and crawling maggots. He sighed. “I’ve thought of Firstism as a religion myself.”
That seemed to get the SIC man. He swung around excitedly and pointed with both forefingers. “I tell you that you are right! It crosses all boundaries—incompatible and warring creeds are absorbed into it. It is willful, witless denial of a highly painful fact—that there are intellects abroad in the universe which are superior to our own. And the denial grows in strength every day that we are unable to contact the Aliens. If, as seems obvious, there is no respectable place for humanity in this galactic civilization, why, say men like Vandermeer Dempsey, then let us preserve our self-con-ceit at the least. Let’s stay close to and revel in the things that are undeniably human. In a few decades, the entire human race will have been sucked into this blinkered vacuum.”
He rose and walked around the desk again. His voice had assumed a terribly earnest, tragically pleading quality. His eyes roved Hebster’s face as if searching for a pin-point of weakness, an especially thin spot in the frozen calm.
“Think of it,” he asked Hebster. “Periodic slaughters of scientists and artists who, in the judgment of Dempsey, have pushed out too far from the conventional center of so-called humanness. An occasional auto-da-fe in honor of a merchant caught selling Primey goods—”