"Such crowds are only our raw materials, one of the raw materials to be shaped to our program."
I looked around the table and shook my head. "No wonder they insult me and accuse us of betraying them ..."
There was a sudden movement.
"Repeat that," Brother Jack shouted, stepping forward.
"It's true, I'll repeat it. Until this afternoon they've been saying that the Brotherhood betrayed them. I'm telling you what's been said to me, and that it why Brother Clifton disappeared."
"That's an indefensible lie," Brother Jack said.
And I looked at him slowly now, thinking, If this is it, this is it ... "Don't call me that," I said softly. "Don't ever call me that, none of you. I've told you what I've heard." My hand was in my pocket now, Brother Tarp's leg chain around my knuckles. I looked at each of them individually, trying to hold myself back and yet feeling it getting away from me. My head was whirling as though I were riding a supersonic merry-go-round. Jack looked at me, a new interest behind his eyes, leaned forward.
"So you've heard it," he said. "Very well, so now hear this: We do not shape our policies to the mistaken and infantile notions of the man in the street. Our job is not to ask them what they think but to tell them!"
"You've said that," I said, "and that's one thing you can tell them yourself. Who are you, anyway, the great white father?"
"Not their father, their leader. And .your leader. And don't forget it."
"My leader sure, but what's your exact relationship to them?"
His red head bristled. "The leader. As leader of the Brotherhood, I am their leader."
"But are you sure you aren't their great white father?" I said, watching him closely, aware of the hot silence and feeling tension race from my toes to my legs as I drew my feet quickly beneath me. "Wouldn't it be better if they called you Marse Jack?"
"Now see here," he began, leaping to his feet to lean across the table, and I spun my chair half around on its hind legs as he came between me and the light, gripping the edge of the table, spluttering and lapsing into a foreign language, choking and coughing and shaking his head as I balanced on my toes now, set to propel myself forward; seeing him above me and the others behind him as suddenly something seemed to erupt out of his face. You're seeing things, I thought, hearing it strike sharply against the table and roll as his arm shot out and snatched an object the size of a large marble and dropped it, plop! into his glass, and I could see the water shooting up in a ragged, light-breaking pattern to spring in swift droplets across the oiled table top. The room seemed to flatten. I shot to a high plateau above them and down, feeling the jolt on the end of my spine as the chair legs struck the floor. The merry-go-round had speeded up, I heard his voice but no longer listened. I stared at the glass, seeing how the light shone through, throwing a transparent, precisely fluted shadow against the dark grain of the table, and there on the bottom of the glass lay an eye. A glass eye. A buttermilk white eye distorted by the light rays. An eye staring fixedly at me as from the dark waters of a well. Then I was looking at him standing above me, outlined by the light against the darkened half of the hall.
"... You must accept discipline. Either you accept decisions or you get out ..."
I stared into his face, feeling a sense of outrage. His left eye had collapsed, a line of raw redness showing where the lid refused to close, and his gaze had lost its command. I looked from his face to the glass, thinking, he's disemboweled himself just in order to confound me ... And the others had known it all along. They aren't even surprised. I stared at the eye, aware of Jack pacing up and down, shouting.
"Brother, are you following me?" He stopped, squinting at me with Cyclopean irritation. "What is the matter?"
I stared up at him, unable to answer.
Then he understood and approached the table, smiling maliciously. "So that's it. So it makes you uncomfortable, does it? You're a sentimentalist," he said, sweeping up the glass and causing the eye to turn over in the water so that now it seemed to peer down at me from the ringed bottom of the glass. He smiled, holding the tumbler level with his empty socket, swirling the glass. "You didn't know about this?"
"No, and I didn't want to know."
Someone laughed.
"See, that demonstrates how long you've been with us." He lowered the glass. "I lost my eye in the line of duty. What do you think of that?" he said with a pride that made me all the angrier.
"I don't give a damn how you lost it as long as you keep it hidden."
"That is because you don't appreciate the meaning of sacrifice. I was ordered to carry through an objective and I carried it through. Understand? Even though I had to lose my eye to do it ..."
He was gloating now, holding up the eye in the glass as though it were a medal of merit.
"Not much like that traitor Clifton, is it?" Tobitt said.
The others were amused.
"All right," I said. "All right! It was a heroic act. It saved the world, now hide the bleeding wound!"
"Don't overevaluate it," Jack said, quieter now. "The heroes are those who die. This was nothing -- after it happened. A minor lesson in discipline. And do you know what discipline is, Brother Personal Responsibility? It's sacrifice, sacrifice, SACRIFICE!"
He slammed the glass upon the table, splashing the water on the back of my hand. I shook like a leaf. So that is the meaning of discipline, I thought, sacrifice ... yes, and blindness; he doesn't see me. He doesn't even see me. Am I about to strangle him? I do not know. He cannot possibly. I still do not know. See! Discipline is sacrifice. Yes, and blindness. Yes. And me sitting here while he tries to intimidate me. That's it, with his goddam blind glass eye ... Should you show him you get it? Shouldn't you? Shouldn't he know it? Hurry! Shouldn't you? Look at it there, a good job, an almost perfect imitation that seemed alive ... Should you, shouldn't you? Maybe he got it where he learned that language he lapsed into. Shouldn't you? Make him speak the unknown tongue, the language of the future. What's mattering with you? Discipline. Is learning, didn't he say? Is it? I stand? You're sitting here, ain't I? You're holding on, ain't I? He said you'd learn so you're learning, so he saw it all the time. He's a riddler, shouldn't we show him? So sit still is the way, and learn, never mind the eye, it's dead ... All right now, look at him, see him turning now, left, right, coming short-legged toward you. See him, hep, hep! the one-eyed beacon. All right, all right ... Hep, hep! The short-legged deacon. All right! Nail him! The short-changing dialectical deacon ... All right. There, so now you're learning ... Get it under control ... Patience ... Yes ...
I looked at him again as for the first time, seeing a little bantam rooster of a man with a high-domed forehead and a raw eye-socket that wouldn't quite accept its lid. I looked at him carefully now with some of the red spots fading and with the feeling that I was just awakening from a dream. I had boomeranged around.
"I realize how you feel," he said, becoming an actor who'd just finished a part in a play and was speaking again in his natural voice. "I remember the first time I saw myself this way and it wasn't pleasant. And don't think I wouldn't rather have my old one back." He felt in the water for his eye now, and I could see its smooth half-spherical, half-amorphous form slip between his two fingers and spurt around the glass as though looking for a way to break out. Then he had it, shaking off the water and breathing upon it as he walked across to the dark side of the room.
"But who knows, Brothers," he said, with his back turned, "perhaps if we do our work successfully the new society will provide me with a living eye. Such a thing is not at all fantastic, although I've been without mine for quite a while ... What time is it, by the way?"