"Hold that," he said. Butler looked at him. The agent had not made a sound. McLeod went back to his position beyond Blunt.
"Now," asked Kirk, out of a white face, "you sick your hoods on me, and decent people?"
"You call that fanatic decent?" asked Blunt, nodding at the blackclad Butler . "How decent would he have been if he'd shot me, or Paul? As he would have, if Burt hadn't stopped him."
"It makes no difference," said Kirk. Before their eyes, with a remarkable effort of will, they saw the man pull himself together. He repeated himself more calmly. "It makes no difference. None of this makes any difference. There are still only sixty thousand of you. That's not enough to wreck the world."
"Kirk," said Blunt, "you know I enjoy arguing with you. You make such a fine straight man."
"The credit goes to you as the comic," said Kirk, dryly.
"Now, that's more like it," said Blunt, nodding his head thoughtfully. "You see, Kirk, I want to break you. If I can get you nicely broken, I can enlist you in tearing this civilization up by the roots and get it done twice as fast. Otherwise, I wouldn't waste tune talking with you like this."
"I assure you," said Kirk, "I don't feel the least bit broken."
"You aren't supposed to... yet," said Blunt.
"All I see so far," said Kirk, "is a series of adult-scale Halloween tricks."
"For example?" asked Blunt. "Paul, here?"
Kirk glanced at Paul and for a moment hesitated.
"I don't believe in the supernatural," he said.
"Nor do I," said Blunt. "I believe in the Alternate Laws. Under their power, I created Paul. Didn't I, Paul?"
"No," said Paul. "Creation isn't that easy."
"I beg your pardon," said Blunt. "Let me put it this way then - I built you. I brought you to life. How much do you remember?"
"I remember dying," said Paul. "I remember a tall figure wearing the cape and hat you're wearing now, who brought me back to life."
"Not brought you back," said Blunt. "The real Paul Formain is dead - you knew that?"
"I know it now," said Paul. "I investigated."
"I had tracers on a number of youngsters like him for over fifteen years," said Blunt, "waiting for an opportunity. Odds were with me. Sooner or later one was bound to die under convenient conditions."
"You could have rescued him from that sailboat while he was still alive," said Paul.
"I could have," said Blunt. He looked squarely at Paul. "I think you know why I wouldn't do such a thing. I got to him in time for the moment of his death. I got several cells from his body, living cells. Under the powers of the Alternate Laws, I regrew from each of those cells a living body."
"More?" ejaculated Kirk, staring in something like horror at Paul. Blunt shook his head.
"Living," he said, "but not alive, any more than the dying body I took them from was alive in the true sense. The conscious personality of a living human being is something more than an arithmetical total of the consciousness of its parts." He gazed at Paul for a second without speaking, then said slowly, "Under the Alternate Laws I sparked his life with a portion of my own."
There was a silence in the room, so complete that it seemed that for a moment everyone there had ceased breathing.
"I made another me," said Blunt. "His body, his memories, his skills were those that belonged to the boy who had just died. But in essence, he was me."
"In one essence," corrected Paul, "I was you."
"The most important essence, then," said Blunt. "That was why your body wouldn't take an arm graft. Your body's cells had used up their ability to make large adjustments and repairs in forming you."
"He has two arms now," said Kirk.
"This isn't the original body I started him in," said Blunt. "I assume he had to leave the first one on New Earth?" He looked inquiringly at Paul.
"By your cane," said Paul.
"Yes," said Blunt. "That cane."
"What cane?" asked Kirk.
"The cane that killed Malorn," said Paul. He gazed with a still face at Blunt. "The cane with which he killed Malorn."
"No," said McLeod, from behind Blunt. "I did it. It took someone who knew how to handle it like a single-stick. Walt just twisted the Alternate Laws to let me do it."
"But why?" cried Kirk. "Murder, canes, New Earth!
I don't understand." He stared. "To educate Paul in..."
He broke off.
"You're breaking very nicely, Kirk," said Blunt, turning his head briefly toward the World Engineer and then coming back as always to look at Paul. "You see how little you know? Even your Supe didn't inform you that it had used the accelerator down in its guts to ship Paul off to a planet circling Sinus and its companion star. Ill tell you the rest now and we'll see how you stand up to it." He nodded at the curtained window. "Open that," he said to Eaton White.
The colorless little man hesitated.
"Go ahead," said Kirk, harshly.
White reached in among the folds of the curtains, and down. They drew back revealing a wall-wide window above a low ledge about two feet high.
"All the way," said Blunt.
White reached and pressed again. The whole window slid down into and through the ledge. The hot air of the steamy night outside welled into the conditioned coolness of the room.
"Look!" said Blunt. "Listen out there." He pointed with his stick at the bulking darkness of the Complex outside, lighted here and there dimly. On the hot still air came the sound of chanting, the "Hey-ha! Hey-ha!" of a marching society. And from closer by, out of sight somewhere twelve stories below the window ledge, came a long drawn-out howl from something human that had gone a long ways back toward the animal.
"Look," said Blunt. Turning, he threw his cane out the window. Wheeling, spinning about the axis of its center point, the two rotating ends blurred themselves into scalloped, raking wings. The center acquired a rodent body, and a bat-shape instead of what had been a stick beat upward blackly against the dim glow of the Complex, turned and swooped back, gliding into the room to end up a stick in Blunt's hand again.
"Sixty thousand, you said," said Blunt to Kirk. "The unstable groups, organizations, and elements in this world of ours total nearly one-fifth the world population. For forty years the Chantry Guild has primed them for this moment of final breakdown. One-fifth of the world is out of its senses tonight, Kirk."
"No," said Kirk. "I don't believe it. No, Walt."
"Yes, Kirk." Blunt leaned on his cane again. His dark eyes under the eaves of his aging eyebrows bored in on the other man. "For centuries now you and your kind kept the hound of Unreason chained and locked away from the world. Now we've set him loose again - loose for good. From now on, there'll be no certainty to existence. From now on there'll always be the possibility that the invariable laws won't work. Reason and past experience and the order of the community will fail as guides, and the individual will be left with nothing to anchor to, only himself."
"It won't work," said Kirk. "Those streets out there are mostly empty. We moved too fast for you, my staff and the Super-Complex. Lack of light, lack of comfort, lack of services - people are hiding in their rooms now, because we forced them there. They can only hide so long; then the basic needs - hunger, reaction against boredom - will take over. They'll come out in the daylight and see how little your Halloween tricks have changed the essential structure of their lives. They'll adjust and learn to live with the necessarily small percentage of your magic in the same way they live with the small possibilities of other freak accidents or being struck by lightning."