of electronics.
Lawrence got to his feet and called the waiting skis.
"You can come back," he said. "There's no danger. She only sank a couple of meters."
He had already forgotten the watching millions. Though his new plan of campaign had still to be drawn up, he was going into action again.
Chapter 27
When Pat and the Commodore returned to the cabin, the debate was still going full blast. Radley, who had said so little until now, was certainly making up for lost time. It was as if some secret spring had been touched, or he had been absolved from an oath of secrecy. That was probably the explanation; now that he was convinced that his mission was discovered, he was only too happy to talk about it.
Commodore Hansteen had met many such believers - indeed, it was in sheer self-defense that he had waded through the turgid literature of the subject. The approach was almost always the same. First would be the suggestion that "Surely, Commodore, you've seen some very strange things during your years in space?" Then, when his reply was unsatisfactory, there would be a guarded - and sometimes not so guarded-hint that he was either afraid or unwilling to speak. It was a waste of energy denying the charge; in the eyes of the faithful, that only proved that he was part of the conspiracy.
The other passengers had no such bitter experience to warn them, and Radley was evading their points with effortless ease. Even Schuster, for all his legal training, was unable to pin him into a corner; his efforts were as futile as trying to convince a paranoiac that he was not really being persecuted.
"Does it seem reasonable," Schuster argued, "that if thousands of scientists know this, not one of them will let the cat out of the bag? You can't keep a secret that big! It would be like trying to hide the Washington Monument!"
"Oh, there have been attempts to reveal the truth," Radley answered. "But the evidence has a way of being mysteriously destroyed - as well as the men who wanted to reveal it. They can be utterly ruthless when it's necessary."
"But you said that - they - have been in contact with human beings. Isn't that a contradiction?"
"Not at all. You see, the forces of good and evil are at war in the Universe, just as they are on Earth. Some of the saucer people want to help us, others to exploit us. The two groups have been struggling together for thousands of years. Sometimes the conflict involves Earth; that is how Atlantis was destroyed."
Hansteen was unable to resist a smile. Atlantis always got into the act sooner or later - or, if not Atlantis, then Lemuria or Mu. They all appealed to the same type of unbalanced, mystery-mongering mentality.
The whole subject had been thoroughly investigated by a group of psychologists during - if Hansteen remembered correctly - the 1970's. They had concluded that around the midtwentieth century a substantial percentage of the population was convinced that the world was about to be destroyed, and that the only hope lay in intervention from space. Having lost faith in themselves, men had sought salvation in the sky.
The flying saucer religion flourished among the lunatic fringe of mankind for almost exactly ten years; then it had abruptly died out, like an epidemic that had run its course. Two factors, the psychologists had decided, were responsible for this: the first was sheer boredom; the second was the International Geophysical Year, which had heralded Man's own entry into space.
In the eighteen months of the IGY, the sky was watched and probed by more instruments, and more trained observers, than in the whole of previous history. If there had been celestial visitors poised above the atmosphere, this concentrated scientific effort would have revealed them. It did nothing of the sort; and when the first manned vehicles started leaving Earth, the flying saucers were still more conspicuous by their absence.
For most men, that settled the matter. The thousands of unidentified flying objects that had been seen over the centuries had some natural cause, and with better understanding of meteorology and astronomy there was no lack of reasonable explanations. As the Age of Space dawned, restoring Man's confidence in his own destiny, the world lost interest in flying saucers.
It is seldom, however, that a religion dies out completely, and a small body of the faithful kept the cult alive with fantastic "revelations," accounts of meetings with extraterrestrials, and claims of