"I told you you were an Other," said Bleys.
"Not exactly," said Hal. "If you remember, you left me to infer it. But I'm splitting hairs. In a sense you were right. In one sense I am an Other, being a blend of all that's new as well as all that's old in the race. But I'm not the kind of Other who's Everyman. Your kind, if it survives, are at best going to be a transient form of human. Mine, if it does, will be immortal."
"I'm sorry," said Bleys, gracefully, "I don't have a kind. I'm my own unique mixture of Exotic and Dorsai, only."
"No," said Hal. "You did have an Exotic and a Dorsai as parents of your father. But your mother's family, which raised you on Harmony, was pure Friendly, and it's that which dominates in you."
Bleys looked at him as if from an impossible distance.
"In what records did you find that fairy tale?"
"In none," said Hal. "The official records of your birth and movements all show what you fixed them to say."
"Then what makes you say something like this?"
"The correct knowledge," said Hal. "An absolute knowledge that comes from joining together bits and pieces of general records that hadn't been tampered with - because there was no reason to tamper with them - at the Final Encyclopedia. I put them together only a year ago, and then made deductions from them using something I taught myself during my first trial of life. It's called intuitive logic."
Bleys frowned slightly. Then his frown cleared.
"Ah," he said; and was silent for a long moment, looking a little aside from Hal. When he spoke again, his voice was thoughtful and remote. "I believe what you're talking about may be what I've been calling interval thinking."
"The name hardly matters," said Hal.
"Of course not. So," Bleys' gaze came back to him, openly, "there's more to learn about you than I'd imagined. But tell me, why place so much emphasis on the fact that part of what I am by inheritance and upbringing may be Friendly?"
"For one reason, because it explains your ability of charisma, as well as that of those Others who have it to some extent or another," said Hal. "But I'd rather you called yourself faith-holder than Friendly. Because, more than anyone on all the worlds suspects, it's a form of faith-holding that rules you. You never were the bored cross-breed whose only concern was being comfortable during his own brief years of life. That was a facade, a false exterior set up in the first place to protect you from your older half-brother, Danno - who would have been deathly afraid of you if he'd suspected you had a purpose of your own."
"He would, indeed," murmured Bleys. "Not that I'm agreeing with these fancies and good-nights of yours, of course."
"Your agreement isn't necessary," said Hal. "As I was saying, you used it first to protect yourself against Danno, then to reassure the rest of the Others that you weren't just using them for your own private purposes. Finally, you're using it still to blind the peoples of the worlds you control to that personal goal that draws you now more strongly than ever. You're a faith-holder, twisted to the worship of a false god - the same god under a different mask that Walter Blunt worshipped back in the twenty-first century. Your god is stasis. You want to enshrine the race as it is, make it stop and go no farther. It's the end you've worked to from the time you were old enough to conceive it."
"And if all this should be true," Bleys smiled again. "The end is still the end. It remains inevitable. You can think all this about me, but it isn't going to make any difference."
"Again, you, of all people, know that's not so," answered Hal. "The fact I understand this is going to make all the difference between us. You developed the Others and let them think that the power they gained was all their own doing. But now you'll understand that I'm aware it was mainly accomplished with recruits who were simply non-Other, native-born Friendlies with their own natural, culturally developed, charismatic gift to some degree, working under your own personal spell and command. Meanwhile, covered by the appearance of working for the Others, you've begun to spread your own personal faith in the inevitably necessary cleansing of the race, followed by a freezing of it into an immobility of changelessness." Hal stopped, to give Bleys a chance to respond. But the Other man said nothing. "Unlike your servants and the Others who've been your dupe," Hal went on, "you're able to see the possibility of a final death resulting from that state of stasis, if you achieve it. But under the influence of the dark part of the racial unconsciousness whose laboratory experiment and chess piece you are - as I also am, on the other side - you see growth in the race as the source of all human evils, and you're willing to kill the patient, if necessary, to kill the cancer."
He stopped. This time there was a difference to the silence which succeeded his words and lay between the two of them.
"You realize," said Bleys at last, softly, "that now I have no choice at all but to destroy you?"
"You can't afford to destroy me," said Hal, "even if you could. Just as I can't afford to destroy you. This battle is now being fought for the adherence of the minds of all our fellow humans. What I have to do, to make the race understand which way they must go, is prove you wrong; and I need you alive for that. You have to prove me wrong if you want to win, and you need me alive for that. Force alone won't solve anything for either of us, in the long run. You know that as well as I do."
"But it will help." Bleys smiled. "Because you're right. I have to win. I will win. There's got to be an end to this madness you call growth but which is actually only expansion further and further into the perils of the physical universe until the lines that supply our lives will finally be snapped of their own weight. Only by putting it aside, can we start the growth within that's both safe and necessary."
"You're wrong," said Hal. "That way lies death. It's a dead end road that assumes inner growth can only be had at the price of giving up what's made us what we are over that million years I mentioned. Chained and channeled organisms grow stunted and wrong, always. Free ones grow wrong sometimes, but right other times; because the price of life is a continual seeking to grow and explore. Lacking that freedom, all action, physical and mental, circles in on itself and ends up only wearing a deeper and deeper rut in which it goes around and around until it dies."
"No," said Bleys; and his face, his whole body seemed to shrug off Hal's words. "It leads to life for the race. It's the only way that can. There has to be an end to growth out into the physical universe, and a change over to growth within. That's all that can save us. Only by stopping now and turning back, only by stopping this endless attempt to enlarge and develop can we turn inward and find a way to be invulnerable in spite of anything the universe might hold.
"It's you who are wrong," said Bleys; and his face, his whole body seemed to harden and take on a look of power that Hal had never seen it show before. "But you're self-deluded. Besotted with love for the shiny bauble of adventure and discovery. Out there - "
He stabbed one long finger back into the gray mist that obscured his end of the tunnel, at the upper side of the shield-wall.
" - out there are all things that can be. How can it be otherwise? And among all things have to be all things that must be unconquerable by us. How can it be otherwise? All they that take the sword shall perish by the sword - and this is a sword you keep reaching for, this so-called spirit of exploration and adventure - this leaping out into the physical universe. Is the spirit of mankind nothing more than a questing hound that always has to keep finding a new rabbit to run after? How many other races, in this infinity, in this eternity, do you think haven't already followed that glittering path? And how many of those do you suppose have become master of the universe, which is the only alternate ending to going down?"