John W. Campbell, Jr., invented the rationale for this story, but then turned down the story pro­per because "Real talented people don't behave like small children." How he could have reached such a conclusion after what was then thirty years in science fiction, I cannot begin to imagine. I know he's been at s-f conventions. The point of the story, however, is not in the antisocial ways artists sometimes behave, but in whether society (in the form, say, of Green­wich Village policemen) can really afford to purge itself of its deviants.

 

THE DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL
by
James Blish

 

The fight began, really, with a simple comment that Mordecai Drover offered to nobody in particular while watching Dr. Helena Curtis, the Bartok Colony's resi­dent novelist, trying to finish her research before night­fall. He couldn't fathom why the remark had set off such an explosion.

After all, all he had said was, "I can never quite get used to it."

"What?" Henry Chatterton asked abstractedly. 

"Seeing a woman using an index. It's as outlandish a sight as a chimpanzee roller-skating."

At this precise moment Callisto slid into Jupiter's shadow and the nighttime clamor of the Bartok Colony began to rise rapidly toward its sustained crescendo. Typewriters began to rattle one after the other, pianos to compete discordantly, a phonograph to grunt out part of Le Sacre du Printemps for Novgorod's choreography pawns, and collapsible tubes to pop air-bubbles as paint was squeezed onto palettes. The com­puter, too, began humming deep in its throat, for Dr. Winterhalter of the Special Studies section was trying to make it compose a sonata derived entirely from information theory.

The clamor would last four hours and 53.9 min­utes before beginning to taper off.

Helena, however, made no move toward her type­writer. She closed her reference book with a savage snap, as though trying to trap a passing moth, and stood up. Mordecai, who had already plunged deep into Canto XVII of The Drum Major and the Mask, failed to notice her glare until he became aware of an unprecedented silence in the Commons Room. He looked up.

Helena was advancing on him, step by step, each pace made more menacing by the peculiar glide Cal­listo's slight gravity enforced. She was graceful under any circumstances; now she looked positively serpen­tine, and her usually full lips were white. Alarmed, Mordecai put down his pen.

"Just what did you mean by that?" she asked.

By what? Mordecai searched his memory frantic­ally. At first all he could come up with was the last strophe he had written, only a few seconds ago, and as yet he had no idea what he meant by that: The thing was badly flawed and needed revision before even its author could know what it meant.

Then he remembered the remark about women and indexes—indices?—already hours away in the fleet sub­jective time of Callistan night.

"Why, it wasn't anything," he said wonderingly. "I mean, you know how it is with chimpanzees—" 

"Oh, I do, do I?"

"Well, maybe I didn't—what I mean is, they get to be
very skillful at unusual tasks—it's just that you don't
expect them to be—Helena, it was only a joke! What
good is a joke after it's explained? Don't be obstinate."

"Meaning don't be obstinately stupid?" she said
through her teeth. "I've had enough of your nasty innuendos. If there's anything I loathe, it's a would-be genius with no manners."

Henry Chatterton's smock was already spattered with egg tempera from top to bottom, and the painting on his canvas was nearly a quarter finished. Slashing away at one corner of it with a loaded brush, he said out of the corner of his mouth:

"We've had to put up with that viper's tongue of yours long enough, Helena. Why don't you go hitch your flat frontispiece over your décolleté novel and let the rest of us work?"

"Now, wait a minute," John Rapaport said, flushing heavily and looking up from the dural plate on which he had been sketching. "By what right does an egg-coddler go out of his way to insult a craftsman, Chat­terton? If you have to dip that brush of yours in blatherskite, save it for your daubs—never mind smearing it over Helena."

Chatterton swung around in astonishment and then began to smirk.

"So that's how it's going to be! Well, Johnny boy, congratulations. But I predict that you'll find five hours makes a very, very long night. Don't say an expert didn't warn you."

Rapaport swung. His engravers' point flew accurately at Chatterton's left eye. The painter ducked just in time; the tool stuck, quivering, in his canvas. He took one look at it and rushed on Rapaport, howling. Mor­decai would have been out of the way with no difficulty if Helena's open hand had not caught him a stinging blow across the chops at the crucial moment. Then he and Chatterton went over.

The noise quickly attracted the rest of the happy family. Only fifteen minutes after Mordecai's innocentremark, the Commons Room was untidily heaped with geniuses.

It looked like a long night.

 

Because Mordecai, a month before, had fumbled so long and so helplessly with his space suit until an im­patient crewman had decided to help him dog it down, he had almost been dumped out of the air lock, and the ship's captain barely gave him time to get clear before taking off again. Within a few seconds, it seemed, he had been more alone than he had ever been in his life.

He had stood still inside the suit, because he could do nothing else, and fumed. Actually, he knew, he was more afraid than angry, though he was thoroughly furious with himself, and with Martin Hope Eglington, his mentor. It certainly hadn't been Mordecai's idea to come to Jupiter IV. He had never even been in space before, not even so far as the Moon, and had had no desire to go.

Nevertheless, here he was, under a sky of so deep a blue that it was almost black, and full of sharp cold stars, even though it was midday. The Sun was a miniature caricature of itself, shedding little light and no apparent heat. There was nothing else to be seen but a wilderness of tumbled rocks, their sharp edges and spires protruding gauntly through deep layers of powdery snow, all the way to the near horizon. The fact that Mordecai could hear a faint sighing whistle outside his suit, as of the saddest and weakest of all winds, did not cheer him.

It had begun, as such things usually did with Mor­decai, with what had seemed an innocent question, this time one asked by someone else. Eglington had been helping him with the prosody of The Drum Major and the Mask, Mordecai's major poem thus far, cast as a sirvente to Wallace Stevens. They had swinked at it all day in Eglington's beautiful and remote Ver­mont home. Mordecai had now been Eglington's only protégé; there was a time when the Pulitzer Prize win­ner had maintained a sort of salon of them, but now he was too old for such rigors.

"That's enough for now," Eglington had said shortly after dinner. "It's really shaping up very well, Mor­decai, if you could just get yourself past trying to compress everything you know into one phrase. In a poem of this length, at least a little openness of texture is desirable—if only to let the reader into it."

"I see that now. Whew! When I first got started, no­body told me poetry could be such hard work."

"All real poetry is hard work; that's one of the tell­tales. Tell me something, Mordecai—when do you do most of your work? I don't mean your best work, neces­sarily; at what hours of the day do you find that you work most easily, can concentrate best, put the most out?"

That had been easy to answer. Mordecai's work habits had been fixed for fifteen years. "Between about eight at night and two in the morning."

"I thought so. That's true of most creative people, including scientists. The exact hours vary, but the fact is that most of the world's creative work—and creative play; it's the same thing—is done at night."

"Interesting," Mordecai had said. "Why is that, do you suppose?"

"Oh, I don't have to suppose. The answer is known. It's because, during those hours, the whole mass of the Earth is between you and the Sun. That protects you from an extremely penetrating kind of solar radiation, made up of particles called neutrinos. The protection is negligible statistically, because all matter is almost perfectly transparent to neutrinos, but it seems that the creative processes are tremendously sensitive to even the slightest shielding effect."

"Too bad they can't be blocked off completely, then. I'd like to be able to work days. I just can't."

"You can if you want to undergo some privations in the process," Eglington had said, almost idly. "Ever hear of the Bartok Colony?"

"Yes, it's a retreat of some sort. Never went in for that kind of thing much myself. I work better alone."

"I see you don't know where it is. It's on Callisto."

The notion had startled and somewhat repelled Mor­decai, for whom the neutrinos had already been al­most too much. He would expect Eglington to know about such things—he was not called "the poet of phys­ics" for nothing—but Mordecai had no interest in them. "On Callisto? Why, for heaven's sake?"

"Well, for two reasons," Eglington had said. "First of all, because at that distance from the Sun the raw neutrino flux is only about three point seven percent of what it is here on Earth. The other reason is that for nearly five hours of every two weeks—that is, every Callistan day—you have the small bulk of the satel­lite plus the whole mass of Jupiter between you and the Sun. For that period you're in a position to work your creative engine with almost no neutrino static. I'm told that the results, in terms of productivity, are truly fantastic."

"Oh," Mordecai had said. "It seems like an extreme measure, somehow."

Eglington had leaned forward, intensely serious. "Only extreme measures produce great work, Morde­cai. Tell me—what was the big change in Man that differentiated him permanently, qualitatively, from all other species?"

"The opposable thumb," Mordecai had said promptly.

"Wrong. The opposable thumb helps Man to handle things, it stimulates curiosity, it gets the world's work done. It is, if you like, a device of daylight. But the ability to think in abstractions is the big skill that Man has, and that is an ability that works mostly at night. Second question: Why was fire Man's most important discovery?"

"Well, it helped him to get more nourishment out of his food," Mordecai said, but more cautiously now. "That's minor. What else?"

Mordecai had known he was well out of his depth by that time. He simply shook his head.

"Independence of the Sun, Mordecai. That one gain has permanently arrested Man's evolution. With­out it, he was developing a number of specialized types for different environments : the bushman, the pigmy, the Eskimo, and so on. Fire not only halted the process, but reversed it; devolution set in. Now we don't have to adapt to our environments; we can carry our own wherever we go. In that way we protect ourselves from adapting away from abstract think­ing and toward some purely physical change that will make it unnecessary for us to think."

Eglington had paused and sniffed reflectively at his brandy. Then, with apparent irrelevance, he had added: "Do you tell your relatives what your work hours are?"

"Not by a long shot. They're all alarm-clock types. They think I'm lazy as it is; if I told them I didn't get up until noon, they'd be sure of it."

"Exactly. Daylight encourages monkey-thinking, practicality, conformity, routine operation. It's at night that Man-thinking gets done. During the day there are the twinges about the regular paycheck, keeping the family fed, making your relatives proud of you, taking no chances, and all the rest of that rot. 'Early to bed and early to rise' is nothing but an invitation to put your head into a horse collar. The man who stays in bed all day isn't a lazy slob; he's a man who's very sensibly protecting his valuable human brains from the monkey-drive."

"You make a good case," Mordecai had said admir­ingly.

"I really think you ought to go, Mordecai. I'll give you a letter to the chairman; he's at the Earth head­quarters at MIT. I'm quite sure I can swing it."

Mordecai had felt a belated surge of alarm. "But, Martin, wait a minute—"

"Don't worry; you'll be admitted. Anyhow, you've gone as far as you can go with me. Now you need to strike out on your own—and this is the way to do it."

And so Mordecai Drover, on Jupiter IV, frightenedly had been waiting for somebody from the Bartok Colony to pick him up. He did not feel a particle more creative than he had felt at his worst moments back home. Rather less, as a matter of fact.

A stirring in the middle distance drew his attention belatedly. Something like a bug was coming toward him. As it came closer, he saw that it was a sort of snowmobile, with huge fat tires and a completely sealed cabin. He let out a gasp of relief.

"Hello," his suit radio said in a voluptuous feminine voice. "Stand fast, Mr. Drover; we have you on the radar. Welcome to Bartok Colony."

The voice virtually transformed Callisto for Morde­cai; if there was one historical period in which he would most like to have lived, it was that of Marlene Dietrich. When, half an hour later, he found that Dr. Helena Curtis strongly resembled that—alas!—long­dead Helen of the age before space flight, he had been suddenly, as Eglington probably had expected, ready to stay on Callisto forever.

"Now there are only two rules here," Dr. Hamish Crenshaw, the Colony's director, had begun murmur­ing in Mordecai's ear while his suit was being stripped off him. "First of all, we have no facilities for children; you'll understand, I'm sure, and forgive us when I tell you that we—uh—Take Steps. Dietary steps; you'll never notice them, but we like to be honest. And the other rule is Get Along. We're all one family here, and we try not to quarrel."

"Oh, of course not," Mordecai had said, but he hadn't really been listening.

 

After the fight the Colony's surgeon—a staff member, not a guest—gave Mordecai a hyaluronidase injection for his black eye and dismissed him without cere­mony. Evidently the brawl in the Commons Room had produced several more serious wounds. Mordecai prowled the corridors morosely for a while, but kept meeting people he had only recently been fighting with —or, at least, trying to fight out from under. He finally went back to his own cubicle and tried to resume The Drum Major and the Mask.

It was hopeless. The cacophony of noise in the sta­tion had hardly bothered him after the first strange night, but now he couldn't think through it. He won­dered how the others had stood it for so long. Neut­rinos or no neutrinos, his own brain was generating nothing but blots.

Besides, he felt almost intolerably guilty. After all, his remark had been unfeeling, especially after what had happened two nights ago (or a month ago, as he kept thinking of it). That had been one of the unex­pected effects of night on Jupiter IV: The same shield­ing that liberated the creative impulse seemed to liberate the libido as well. In four hours and 53.9 minutes, two people could fall in love, become passionately and exclusively attached to each other, and fall ex­plosively out of love before the night was over—a process that would have taken months or years on Earth.

No wonder the Colony, as Dr. Crenshaw had put it, Took Steps against the possibility of children.

But was it Mordecai's fault that Helena was the most beautiful woman in the Colony and hence the most frequent figure in these amours and explosions? Be­sides, he had suffered, too. He could hardly find it com­fortable to be out of love with Dietrich, after having adored her image hopelessly since he was old enough to distinguish pants from trousers. He doubted that he would ever write another love poem again.

The corridors of the Colony began to resound with a series of hoots and shrieks, as loud as though they were being heard by an insect trapped in a steam calliope. Dr. Winterhalter had once again begun to hope, and had wired the computer's output directly to the Hammond organ; the computer's current notion of what a sonata ought to sound like was rattling the doors in their sockets. The computer had not yet quite solved the music of the spheres. The Cadre to Suppress Dr. Winterhalter, made up of all the musi­cians in the Colony, would be stampeding past Mor­decai's door at any moment.

Yet after all, he told himself, the remark hadn't been any more virulent than many of the things that got said daily in the Colony, and Helena had always been one of the worst offenders; Chatterton had been right about that. Even at home, Mordecai recalled with nostalgia, nighttime was the time you said things that you regretted the next day. He had always attributed that looseness of tongue to the dulling of inhibitions by fatigue (or, of course, alcohol), but since it was so much worse here, maybe the double-damned neutrinos had been responsible for that, too. Or maybe they hadn't. If you coop thirty highly individualistic people in one sealed can on a sheerless ice ball like Cal­listo, you should expect tempers to get somewhat frayed.

Whatever the answer, Mordecai wanted out. There was no doubt in his mind that being in the Colony had increased his productivity markedly, but it wasn't worth the constant emotional upheavals.

 

He peered up and down the corridor to make sure he would not be run over by the Cadre, and then set off determinedly for the office of Dr. Hamish Crenshaw. There was no sense in postponing matters.

As he passed Helena Curtis's closed door, however, he paused. Maybe one postponement could do no harm. There was another question nagging at him, which he suddenly decided was more important. He knocked tentatively.

Helena opened the door and stared at him, her eyes coldly furious. "Beat it," she said.

"I don't mean to interrupt," Mordecai said humbly. "I apologize for my remark. It was nasty and inexcus­able. Also, I've got something I'd like to discuss with you."

"Oh?" For a moment she simply continued to glare at him. Then, gradually, some of the unfriendliness seemed to die away. "Well, it's decent of you to apolo­gize. And that beastly squabble did sour me on Rapa­port, just in time; maybe I owe you an apology, too. What's on your mind?"

"I want to know what you know about old Walker Goodacre—the man who founded the Colony. I'm be­ginning to think there's a joker buried somewhere, and he may be it."

"Hmm. All right, come on in. But no monkeyshines, Mordecai."

"Certainly not," he said innocently. "That's part of the problem, Helena. This setup is supposed to encour­age what they call Man-thinking, and it does seem to have that effect—but it also seems to bring out all the monkey-emotions. I'm starting to wonder why."

"Well," Helena said, sitting down thoughtfully, "they say the neutrinos—"

"Hang the neutrinos! I mean let's just forget about them for the time being and think about what the Col­ony's supposed to accomplish. We should begin with the history; there's where you can help, right at the beginning. How is the Colony actually run?"

"By a board of directors, administering the Good-acre estate," she said. "The place was originally foun­ded by Goodacre himself; he put ten million dollars into a special trust to build the place and then be­queathed another ten to keep it going. The Colony is run off the interest from the bequest."

"All right. What kind of man was Goodacre?" Mor­decai asked. "I mean aside from the fact that he was a rich man. Wasn't he also a scholar of stature? I seem to remember that he was."

"Oh, yes," Helena said. "He was a sociologist, con­sidered one of the most eminent of his time. Mordecai, if you're suggesting that this whole thing is an ex­periment and we're just experimental animals, you're wasting your breath. The newspapers milked all the melodrama out of that when the Colony was first founded. Of course, it's an experiment; what of it?"

"Of course. But what kind of experiment? Look here, Helena, you know more history than I do. A lot more. Think back on the history of bequests to artists. Do they usually come from men who are artists or schol­ars themselves? It's my impression that they don't. More usually, they come from men who are not cre­ative themselves and feel guilty or frustrated about it —men whose money was often made by dubious means in the first place, so some of it is given away to the most 'disinterested' people the rich man can imagine, in expiation. Like the Nobel Prizes—money made from dynamite. Only a cultural cipher could dream of an artist as 'disinterested,' in that sense."

"I can think of a few exceptions," Helena said, "but only partial ones. In that respect, old Goodacre was an unusual case. I'll grant you that."

"Right. Now it's my judgment that this experiment as it was outlined to us is working very badly. Yet Goodacre was a top sociologist, you tell me; why should the biggest experiment he ever designed, being run strictly in accordance with his wishes, be so miser­able a failure?"

"Well, sociology's not an exact science—"

"I had the notion that it'd become much more exact since Rashevsky, at least. And I think it might be more sensible to assume that old Goodacre did know what he was doing and that this mess is exactly the out­come he wanted. Why did he want it?"

"Mordecai," Helena said slowly, "I apologize again, and this time I mean it. Let's see how close we can get to the bottom of this before the night's over."

"Why stop then?" Mordecai urged. "It's only a ques­tion of fact—no creativity involved."

In this, of course, he was a little underestimating himself. Deduction is creative; Mordecai had simply had too little experience with it to realize the fact.

 

During the succeeding days Dr. Hamish Crenshaw appeared to be indulging in a series of improvised attempts to prevent further brawls by dividing the sheep from the goats, without having quite made up his mind how to tell one animal from the other. His first move was to forbid working in the Commons Room, which did nothing but stop work in the Com­mons Room; it utterly failed to prevent brawling there, and it was impossible for the director to close the Com­mons Room entirely.

Then he tried to reshuffle the room assignments so that all the guests whose records carried the fewest marks for quarrels would wind up on one side of the Colony and the most quarrelsome guests on the other. The net gain here was fewer bruises sustained by accident by the least quarrelsome. The most quar­relsome continued to quarrel, more frequently now be­cause they were deprived of the calming effects some­times exerted by the cooler heads.

After this had become sufficiently obvious to all, Dr. Crenshaw decided to reshuffle the rooms according to talent. This was abortive. Everybody at Bartok Colony, except the staff, was supposed to be a leader in his field, so Crenshaw apparently concluded that the only way to measure talent was by age: Young poets, for exam­ple, were sheep, old poets goats. Since there was only one poet in the Colony at the moment—Mordecai—the plan foundered on Mordecai's obvious inability to baa and bleat at the same time from opposite sides of the donte.

But nothing seemed to discourage Dr. Crenshaw. He tried to segregate the sexes. This produced the biggest riot in the Colony's history. The next move in the game of musical chairs was to lump all the practition­ers of the noisy arts—music, ballet, sculpture—into one group and those who quietly wrote or painted into the other. The concentration of noise made it worse than it had been when diffused and in no way decreased the squabbling.

The most recent solution was a curfew. The rules were that everyone had to be in his room by nightfall and had to stay there until the night was over. All gatherings were forbidden, but exceptions were made for teams ("such as composer-and-librettist," Dr. Cren­shaw had added with what he seemed to think was great tact). This move really made a difference; it actually cut the quarreling in half.

It also cut productivity right back down to the day­time level, even in the naturally solitary arts.

"Which I think is what you've been aiming for all along," Mordecai told Crenshaw grimly in Crenshaw's office. "All the other silly rules were designed to convey an illusion of bumbling desperation, to disguise the curfew as just one more example of the same."

Crenshaw laughed disarmingly, but a look at Mor­decai and Helena evidently convinced him that neither, had been disarmed.

He put his hands together on his desktop and leaned forward confidingly.

"Now that's a peculiar theory," he said, still smiling. "Suppose you tell me why you think so."

"It's in keeping with the whole philosophy," Mor­decai said. "Dr. Curtis and I have been doing consider­able research lately, and we've come up with some conclusions we don't like. Among other things, we talked to Dr. Ford."

Crenshaw frowned. Dr. Ford was the Colony's staff physicist. The statement that he had been talking to guests obviously did not please the director.

"We found out a few things about the neutrino no­tion that we hadn't known before," Mordecai went on. "Dr. Ford says that neutrinos go through ordinary matter as if it weren't there. Back home on Earth, the neutrino flux is so great that there are a hundred neut­rinos passing through a space the size of a match­box at any given instant—yet even detecting their exist­ence was one of the hardest problems physicists ever tackled. He says the difference between the night and the day flux on Earth has never been measured."

"Never by instruments," Crenshaw said smoothly. "But the human brain measures it; it's a very delicate detector."

"That's pure hypothesis," Helena retorted. "Dr. Ford says that to capture the average neutrino would take a lead barrier fifty light-years thick. Under those con­ditions, exceptional captures within a human brain must take place on the order of once every million years or more."

"We considered all this in setting up the Colony," Crenshaw said. "We do have people like Dr. Ford on our staff, after all. Obviously the neutrino-capture theory was not proved. It was a conjecture. But we've been in operation for quite a few years now, and the empirical evidence has been adding up all during that time. Your own personal experience should confirm it. There is a definite increase in creativity out here and particularly when we are in the Jovian shadow."

He leveled a finger at them or, rather, between them. "This is one reason why I don't like to have physi­cists like Ford shooting off their mouths to our guests. Physicists don't understand the artistic temperament, and artists generally don't know enough about physicists to be aware of their limitations. You didn't know, for instance, the real meaning behind what Ford was telling you. I do know: He was complaining that the neutrino theory is based upon the concept that the brain acts as an organic detector, and the ground rules of his science don't allow organic detectors. Since you had no way of knowing this and, like most lay people, you regard physicists as minor gods, you're shaken up. You've allowed him to discredit not only your belief in the Colony, but even the evidence of your own ex­perience!"

"Very plausible," Mordecai said. "But experience isn't evidence until it's put in order, and there's always more than one possible order. Dr. Curtis and I don't know much about physicists, it's true, but we do know something about artists. We know that they're highly suggestible. They have to be or they'd be in some other trade. Convince them that they're going to be more creative in the dark of the moon, or after a course of mescal, or in the Jovian neutrino shadow, and most of them will be more creative, whether there's any merit in the actual notion you've sold them or not." He grinned reminiscently. "I once knew a writer whose work was largely unsalable, so he had to have a regu­lar job to stay alive. He developed the notion that he had to be fired at least once a year in order to maintain his productivity. Sooner or later, toward the end of each job year, he was fired—and it did increase his writing output for a while. What has that to do with neutrinos?"

"Nothing," Crenshaw said. "A single example never has anything to do with anything except itself. But let's suppose for the sake of argument that the neutrino theory is not only shaky, but entirely wrong. Have you anything better to offer? Until we discover just what creativity actually is—what goes on in the brain to produce it—we'll never really know whether it's pos­sible for a neutrino to interfere with that process. In the meantime the empirical evidence we collect here in the Colony adds up."

"Adds up to what?" Mordecai demanded.

Crenshaw only shrugged.

"Dr. Crenshaw," Helena said, "maybe there is some­thing in the neutrino theory all the same. I'm pre­pared to admit the possibility—but I don't think it makes any difference. We know that artists always produce best under stress, either personal or societal —it doesn't matter what kind. If production increases in this Colony, it's because conditions here for a resi­dent artist are worse than those he had to work under back home—not better. No wonder production dropped when you cut down our internecine warfare. You've always had it in your power to reduce those quarrels, but you didn't choose to exercise it until now."

"Why now?" Crenshaw inquired gently.

"To cut down on the amount of our work that gets home, of course," Mordecai said, amazed that the man could continue such an obvious rear-guard defense after his major defenses had been breached. "Dr. Crenshaw, we know that old Goodacre knew what he was doing. He was interested in the role of the artist in society. He was asking himself: Does society really need these creative people? Does it really want them around? Are the things they produce worth having, weighed against the damage that they do just by being alive and impinging upon normal people? So he contrived this experiment."

Crenshaw said, "I don't see the point." But he was sweating.

"We do. Above all, old Goodacre wanted to know this: What would happen to society if, generation after generation, the cream of its artists is skimmed off, the artists sent into exile—and their work returned to Earth only at a measurable, controllable rate? Take architecture, for instance: You skim Gropius off one generation, Wright off another, and so on, and what's left? Draftsmen, renderers, workhorses, without any­body to stir them into a ferment. Sooner or later, Earth has no creativity left in its gene-pool but the kind that makes men into engineers and scientists—and mightn't that be just as well, in the long run? That's the question this Colony, is set up to answer, and bril­liantly, too."

Crenshaw sighed.

After a while Helena said: "Well?"

"Well, what?" Crenshaw asked tiredly. "I'm not go­ing to tell you you're right or wrong or way off base. No matter what conclusions you come to, I still have to stay here and administer this madhouse. I'm not Goodacre; I just work here."

"That's what the guards at Dachau said," Mordecai said.

"The question is, what do you plan to do?"

"Go home," Mordecai stated immediately.

"And how do you plan to do that? You signed a con­tract when you came here. In addition to your legal ties, you can't leave here until I personally say you can. I can simply deny you passage, deny you knowledge of the ship schedules—there are half a hundred other knots I can tie you in. Why not just sit and take it? It won't last forever."

"Of course it won't," Helena said grimly. "But we're not sheep or Judas-goats. Suppose the experiment ends by proving that society can get along without us?

Then we'd never get home at all, no matter what the contract says."

Crenshaw looked down at his hands, and then up again. His expression was now one of frank boredom. "That may well be true. However, I deny it for the record. And now I have work to do. Thank you for coming to see me."

Mordecai grinned. Crenshaw had obviously never thought of him as a conspirator, and Mordecai was savoring the surprise.

"There are other people waiting to see you," he said. He got up and opened the door.

There were others, all right. There was Novgorod and his highly muscular group of dancers; Henry Chatterton, his beard bristling and his smock pockets loaded with eggs far too far gone to make decent egg tempera; John Rapaport with his bottles of acid and his beltful of nastily pointed little engravers' tools; Dr. Winterhalter with a sheaf of papers full of calcula­tions on orbits and schedules to Earth; and quite a few additional "harmless artists." They looked any­thing but harmless now.

"We're going home," Mordecai said. "Maybe society would like to get along without us, but we aren't going to let it. It won't catch us again by offering us a nice workroom, where it's always as quiet as three o'clock in the morning. We' don't need that kind of phony solitude—we carry the real thing with us wherever we go, even when we're fighting among ourselves. Do you understand that?"

"No," Crenshaw said hoarsely. "I don't think I do understand."

Mordecai took Helena's hand as she rose. "Then you didn't study your experimental animals thoroughly enough. If you had, you would have found that one of them, F. Scott Fitzgerald, knew the flaw in your experiment a whole century ago and wrote it down."

"What—was it?"

“`In a real dark night of the soul,' " quoted Mordecai, “’ it is always three o’clock in the morning.'”