"What plans did you have in mind to make, Howard?" asked Jason, when the coffee had been brought.
Hal tasted what was in his cup, and set the cup down again. Coffee - or rather some imitation of it - was to be found on all the inhabited worlds. But its taste varied largely on any two worlds, and was often markedly different in widely distant parts of the same world. Hal had spent three years getting used to Coby coffee. He would have to start all over again with Harmony coffee.
"Have you seen this?" he asked, in turn.
From a pocket he brought out a small gold nugget encased in a cube of glass. It was the first piece of pocket gold he had found in the Yow Dee Mine; and, following a Coby custom, he had bought it back from the mine owners and had it encased in glass, to carry about as a good-luck piece. His fellow team-members would have thought him strange if he had not. Now, for the first time, he had a use for it.
Jason bent over the cube.
"Is that real gold?" he asked, with the fascination of anyone not of either Coby or Earth.
"Yes," said Hal. "See the color..."
He reached out across the table and took the back of Jason's neck gently and precisely between the tips of
his thumb and middle finger. The skin beneath his fingertips jumped at his touch, then relaxed as he put soft pressure on the nerve endings below it.
"Easy," he said, "just watch the piece of gold... Jason, I want you to rest for a bit. Just close your eyes and lean back against the back of the booth and sleep for a couple of minutes. Then you can open your eyes and listen. I've got something to tell you."
With an obedience a little too ready to be natural, Jason closed his eyes and leaned back, resting his head against the hard, dark-dyed wooden panel that was the back of the booth. Hal took his hand from the other's neck and Jason stayed as he was, breathing easily and deeply for about a hundred and fifty heart beats. Then he opened his eyes and stared at Hal as if puzzled for a second. He smiled.
"You were going to tell me something," he said.
"Yes," said Hal. "And you're going to listen to me all the way through and then not say anything until you've thought about what I've just told you. Aren't you?"
"Yes, Howard," said Jason.
"Good. Now listen closely." Hal paused. He had never done anything like this before; and there was a danger, in Jason's present unnaturally receptive state, that some words Hal used might have a larger effect than he had intended it to have. "Because I want you to understand something. Right now you think you're acting normally and doing exactly what you'd ordinarily want to do. But actually, that's not the case. The fact is, a very powerful individual's made you an attractive offer on a level where it's hard for you to refuse him, a choice to let your conscience go to sleep and leave all moral decisions up to someone else. Be cause you were approached on that particular level, you've no way of judging whether this was a wise decision to make, or not. Do you follow me so far? Nod your head if you do."
Jason nodded. He was concentrating just hard enough to bring a small frown line into being between his eyebrows. But otherwise his face was still relaxed and happy.
"Essentially what you've just been told," Hal said, "is that Nigel Bias, or people designated by him, will decide not only what's right for you, but what you'll want to do; and you've agreed that this would be a good thing. Because of that, you've now joined those who've already made that agreement with him; those who were until an hour ago your enemies, in that they were trying to destroy the faith you've held to all your life..."
The slight frown was deepening between Jason's brows and the happiness on his face was being re placed by a strained expression. Hal talked on; and when at last he stopped, Jason was huddled on the other seat, turned as far away from Hal as the close confines of the booth would allow, with his face hidden in his hands.
Hal sat, feeling miserable himself, and tried to drink his coffee. The silence between them continued, until finally Jason heaved a long, shivering sigh and dropped his hands. He turned a face to Hal that looked as if it had not slept for two nights.
"Oh, God!" he said.
Hal looked back at him, but did not try to say any thing.
"I'm unclean," said Jason. "Unclean!"
"Nonsense," said Hal. Jason's eyes jumped to his face; and Hal made himself grin at the other. "What was that I seem to remember hearing when I was
young - and you must've remembered hearing, too - about the sin of pride? What makes you feel you're particularly evil in having knuckled under to the per suasion of Nigel Bias?"
"I lacked faith!" said Jason.
"We all lack faith to some extent," Hal said. "There are probably some men and women so strong in their faith that Bias wouldn't have been able to touch them. I had a teacher once... but the point is, everyone else in that room gave in to him, the same way you did."
"You didn't."
"I've had special training," said Hal. "That's what I was telling you just now, remember? What Nigel Bias did, he succeeded in doing because he's also had special training. Believe me, someone without training would have had to have been a very remarkable person to resist him. But for someone with training, it was... relatively easy."
Jason drew another deep, ragged breath.
"Then I'm ashamed for another reason," he said bleakly.
"Why?" Hal stared at him.
"Because I thought you were a spy, planted on me by the Accursed of God, when they decided to hold me captive. When we heard Howard Immanuelson had died of a lung disease in a holding station on Coby, we all assumed his papers had been lost. The thought that someone else of the faith could find them and use them - and his doing it would be so secret that someone like myself wouldn't know - that was stretching coincidence beyond belief. And you were so quick to pick up the finger speech. So I was going to pretend I was taken in by you. I was going to bring you with me to some place where the other brothers and sisters of the faith could question you and find out why you were sent and what you knew about us."
He stared burningly at Hal.
"And then you, just now, brought me back from Hell - from where I could never have come back with out you. There was no need for you to do that if you had been one of the enemy, one of the Accursed. How could I have doubted that you were of the faith?"
"Quite easily," said Hal. "As far as bringing you back from Hell, all I did was hurry up the process a little. The kind of persuasion Nigel Bias was using only takes permanently with people who basically agree with him to begin with. With those who don't, his type of mind-changing gets eaten away by the natural feelings of the individual until it wears thin and breaks down. Since you were someone opposed enough to him to fight him, the only way he could stop you permanently would be to kill you."
"Why didn't he then?" said Jason. "Why didn't he kill all of us?"
"Because it's to his advantage to pretend that he only opens people's eyes to the right way to live," said Hal, hearing an echo of Walter the Inteacher in the words even as he said them. He had not consciously stopped to think the matter out, but Jason's question had automatically evoked the obvious answer. "Even his convinced followers feel safer if he is always right, always merciful. What he did with us, there, wasn't because we were important, but because the two men with him on the platform were important - to him. There're really only a handful of what you call the Belial-spawn, compared to the trillions of people on the fourteen worlds. Those like Nigel don't have the time, even if they felt like it, to control everyone person ally. So, whenever possible they use the same sort of social mechanisms that've been used down the centuries when a few people wanted to command many."