The Burning

PART ONE
WITCHES MUST BURN
I

The nightmare began when he was still five miles from the campus. For as long as he lived it would be the nightmare to him, never far from his unguarded moments. But then his life expectancy, at that moment, was not long.

The burning of the law building started it. The building was old and dry; it burned briskly, the flames leaping and dancing on the hill like malicious demons, spearing upward into the night, painting the other buildings with scarlet fingers.

There's been an accident, he thought, and poured kerosene to the old turbine under the hood. It responded nobly; the '09 Ford lunged forward.

An instant later he realized that the other buildings were burning, too; the scarlet fingers were their own.

When he reached the edge of town, the hill was a vast bonfire. The town sprawled under it, bathed in a sullen glare, dark-shadowed and lurid like a village in hell.

As he got closer to the campus, the streets became jammed with cars. He drove as far as he could, and then he got out and ran. Before he reached the top of the hill, some instinct of self-preservation made him strip off his tie and turn up his coat collar.

There were no fire trucks, no police cars. There was only the silent crowd, its dark face reddened occasionally by a leaping flame, its ranks impenetrable, its hydra-heads impassive. Only its eyes, holding within them their own small flames, seemed alive.

The law building was a crumbled ruin of stone and glowing coals. Beyond it was a tossing sea of fire, melting islands within it the political science building, the library, the behavioral science building, the Union, the journalism school, the fortress-like humanities building, the auditorium.... For a moment he thought the administration building was untouched. But that was illusion; it was a shell of blank windows reddened by a dying glow.

It was summer, and the night was hot. The fiery death of what had been one of the Midwest's loveliest and finest universities made it hotter. But he was cold inside as he watched the labor and devotion of a hundred years burning, burning....

A man ran toward the waiting crowd, a torch flaring in his hand, his face dark and unreadable, yelling, "Come on! They're running the eggheads now!"

For a moment longer the crowd waited and then, silently, it surged forward. For a few hundred yards he was carried with it, unable to fight free. At the brink of the hill, it dropped him. He stood there, unmoving, jostled by people who pushed past, not feeling them.

Beyond the hill were the physical science building, the experimental biology building, the building for business and economics. They were more isolated, more secure than those on top of the hill. Or so it may have seemed.

Now they, too, were burning. They were fire resistant and they burned less readily, but they burned. The flames roared in the night, and between the flames the forked, black figures ran back and forth. At every exit, the silent crowd waited for them with clubs and pitchforks and axes. Some of the black figures turned back into the flames.

The flames behind him and the flames in front, he watched, and all he could think about was that his papers were gone, charred and irretrievable, and the intolerable waste of five long years of labor and research. Even the Tool was gone.

Then, like a wave of nausea, the truth hit him. The black figures down there were people, people he knew and liked and respected, professors and their wives and their children. He turned aside and was sick.

As he straightened, he fought the impulse to run down the hill, to scream at the mob: "Stop it, stop it, stop it! These are people like you. They live, they work, they love, they obey the laws! They're the best you have and you're killing it, and you're killing your country! Stop before it's too late!

But it was already too late. It was futile. If he tried to help those black figures running below, he would only die himself. He wasn't important, but what he knew and the promise that knowledge held--that was important.

Too many good men had died there already.

He closed his eyes and thought of Sylvia Robbins, who was intelligent, beautiful, as good a friend as any man ever had and might have been more in time, and who now was dying there. He thought of Dr. William Nugent, that tall, lean, iron-gray man of quick intuitions and relentless determination in his search for the truth. He thought of Dr. Aaron Friedman and Professor Samuel Black and a dozen others....

And he thought: If you are down there in that hell, my friends, forgive me. Forgive me, all of you, for being logical while you are dying....

And forgive them, the logicless, murderous mob.

He knew the people that formed this mob, their fears, their passions. He knew the savagery that moved them, the frustrations that demanded a scapegoat, the consciousness of guilt, of wrongdoing, of failure that cried out for an external soul to punish, that created one on demand.

They were unable to face the realization of "I was wrong. I made a mistake. Let's try a new line" that every scientist, every creative thinker must face daily. They needed the age-old, pain-killing drug of "He did it, the Other Guy. He's Evil. He made me Fail."

And yet, knowing them so well, he did not know enough to stop them. He was five years, perhaps ten years away from the knowledge that he could take down the hill with him into their midst and find the right words and the right actions to make them stop, to turn them back into sane human beings.

The intuitive psychologists like the Senator were more capable than the scientists. But it is always easier to drive men insane than to lead them into sanity.
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