Judge Robinson screeched, "Ay? Ay? What's all this hubbub?" Assemblyman Brown sneered, "A very unlikely story." Attorney General Smith wanted it proven in blackandwhite while Senator Jones remarked Miss Francis' taste was on a level with her scholarship.
She waved the toothpick toward the chairman and politely waited for either further questions or dismissal. All the while her intense interest in each gesture of the inquisitors and every facet of the investigation had not diminished at all. As she sat there patiently, her eyes darted from one to the other as they consulted and only came to rest on Senator Jones when he spoke directly to her again.
"And what steps can you take to undo, hum, this?"
"So far, none," admitted Miss Francis, "but since this thing has happened I have given all my time to experiment hoping in some manner to reverse the action of the Metamorphizer and evolve a formula whereby the growth it induced will be inhibited. I cannot say I am even on the right road yet, for you must recall I have spent my adult life going, as it were, in one direction and it is now not a matter of merely retracing my steps, but of starting out for an entirely different destination in a field where there are no highwaymaps and few compasspoints. I cannot say I am even optimistic of success, but it is not for want of trying—be assured of that."
Another semisilence while the committee conferred once more. Finally Senator Jones spoke in grave and measured tones: "It is a customary politeness in hearings of this nature to thank the witness for his helpfulness and cooperation. This courtesy I cannot with any sincerity extend to you, madam. It seems to me you have proven yourself the opposite of a good citizen, that you have set yourself up, in your arrogance, against all logical authority and have presumed to look down upon the work and methods of men whose standing and ways of procedure are recognized by all sound people. By your conceit, madam, you have caused the death of young men, the flower of our state's manhood, who gave their lives in a vain attempt to destroy what your ignorance created. If I may be permitted a rather daring and perhaps harsh aside, I think this should strike you doubly, as a woman who has not brought forth offspring to carry on the work of our forefathers and as one who—with doubtful taste—boasts of that sterility. I think the results of your socalled experiments should chasten you and make you heed the words of men properly qualified in a field where you are clearly not so."
Someone in the back of the room applauded the senator's eloquence.
"Senator Jones," said Miss Francis, turning her eyes on him with the attention I knew so well, the look which meant she had found an interest for the moment excluding all others, "you accuse me of what amounts to crime or at least criminal folly and I must answer that your accusations are at once both true and false. I have been foolish, but it was not in despising the constrictions and falsity of the academic world. I have flouted authority, but it was not the authority of the movingpicture heroes, whose comic errors are perpetuated for generations, like those of Pasteur, or so quietly repudiated their repudiation passes unnoticed, like those of Lister, in order to protect a vested interest. The authority I have flouted, in my arrogance as you call it, is that authority all scientists recognized in the days when science was scientific and called itself, not boastfully by the name of all knowledge, but more humbly and decently, natural philosophy. That authority is what theologians term the Will of God; others, the life force, the immaterial principle, the common unconscious, or whatever you will. When I, along with all the academic robots whom you admire, denied that authority, we did not make ourselves, as we thought, men of pure science, but, on the contrary, by deposing one master we invited in a horde of others. Since we could not submit to moral force we submitted in our blind stupidity—we called it the rejection of metaphysical concepts—to financial force, to political force, to social force; and finally, since there was no longer any reward in itself for our speculations, we submitted to the lust for personal aggrandizement in fortune, in notoriety, in castebound irresponsibility, and even for the hypocritical backslapping of our fellows.
"In the counterrevolution known as the nineteenth century we even repudiated the name of speculation and it became a term of disrepute, like metaphysical. We went further than a mere disavowal of the name; we disavowed the whole process and turned with disgust from the using of our minds to the use of our hands in a manner which would have revolted the most illiterate of Carpathian peasants. We extirpated the salivary glands of dogs in order to find out if they would slobber without them. We cut off the tails of mice to discover if the operation affected their greatgrandchildren. We decapitated, emasculated, malnourished, and poisoned rodents against whom we had no personal animus for no other reason than to keep an elaborate apparatus in use.
"Even these pastimes failed to satisfy our undiscriminating appetite. Someone a little stupider, a little less imaginative—though such conditions must have been difficult indeed to achieve—invented what is called the Control Experiment whereby, if theory tested be correct, half the subjects are condemned without trial to execution.
"These are my sins: that in despising academic ends I did not despise academic means, that in repudiating the brainlessness of the professorial mind I did not attempt to use my own. Because I was proud of the integrity which made me choose not to do the will of a research foundation or industrial empire, I overlooked the vital fact that I had also chosen not to do God's Will, but what I stupidly thought to be my own. It was not. It was faintheartedness, sloth, placation, doubt, vagueness and romantical misconception. In a word, it was the aimlessness and falsity of the nineteenth century coming back in the window after having been booted out the door; my folly was the failure to recognize it. I have deluded myself, I have taken halfmeasures, I have followed false paths. Condemn me for these crimes. I am guilty."