for two more days i didn't hear from mesner. i indulged in feverish and ridiculous escape fantasies. there could be no escape for me. the educational voices from the tevee drifted in and out.
"... the greatest threat to man's happy survival is reason. man was never intended to go above a certain mental level and become thereby a victim of his own imagination and complex fears. this disease of reason has been carried to its final suicidal limit by eggheads...."
no mention of sabotage. the care-free public must not hear of such disquieting things. all the public heard 24 hours a day was a voice telling them about the evils of reason. the destructiveness of overly-developed brains, and the vicious criminality of eggheads.
after listening to that long enough, and having all subversive level iqs purged, who could believe otherwise? how many believed otherwise now? did i? what in hell did mesner want to dig out of me? who, what, why was i?
i was still a bottle. but now there were countless cracks appearing in it.
then mesner called, said we were going on another field-trip that next afternoon. all right, i said. someway or other, i knew, i would make this my last trip with mesner.
he had located a blind man, he said, who he knew had been a courier, a blind man definitely linked up with a recent sabotaging of a motor parts plant somewhere in illinois.