Now the flush was leaving the handsome man’s face, and the face was settling into grim, contemptuous lines.
“The dignity of the individual, the right to make choices, to exist as a free man — that’s been done away with in your empire as a matter of business policy. All the old laws protecting the individual have been scrapped. There’s no law you recognize, King, except your own. And in carrying out your laws you’re judge, jury, and firing squad. And what kind of laws are they that you create, administer, and execute? Laws to perpetuate your own power.”
“It’s such a small island,” said King Bendigo in a murmur.
“It covers the planet,” retorted his scrawny brother. “You needn’t act the amused potentate for the benefit of the Queens. That kind of remark is an insult to their intelligence as well as mine. Your power extends in every direction, King. Just as you’re cynical about the sovereignty of individuals, you’re cynical about the sovereignty of nations. You corrupt prime ministers, overthrow governments, finance political pirates, all in the day’s work. All to feed orders to your munitions plants—”
“Ah, I wondered when we’d get to that,” said his brother. “The unholy munitions magnate, the international spider — Antichrist with a bomb in each hand. Isn’t that the next indictment, Judah?”
Judah made thin fists on the cloth. “You’re a plausible rascal, King. You always have been. The twist of truth, the intricate lie, the wool-pulling trick — you’re a past master of that difficult technique. But it doesn’t befog the issue. Your sin isn’t that you manufacture munitions. In the world we live in, munitions are unfortunately necessary, and someone has to manufacture them. But to you the implements of war are not a necessary evil, made for the protection of a decent society trying to survive in a wolves’ world. They’re a means of getting astronomical profits and the power that goes with them.”
“The next indictment,” said his brother with a show of gravity, “is usually that I create wars.”
“No, you don’t create wars, King,” said Judah Bendigo. “Wars are created by forces far beyond your power, or the power of a thousand men like you. What you do, King, is take advantage of the conditions that create wars. You stoke them, blow on them, help them go up in flame. If a country’s torn by dissension, you see to it that the dissension breaks out into open revolt; if two powers, or two groups of powers, are at odds, your agents sabotage the negotiations and work for a shooting war. It doesn’t matter to you which side is right; right and wrong have no meaning in your dictionary except as they represent conflicts, which mean war, which mean profits. That’s where your responsibility lies, King. It’s as far as one man’s responsibility can go. It’s too far!”
Judah’s fists danced as he leaned toward his brother. “You’re a murderer, King. I don’t mean merely the murders you’ve committed on this island, or the murders your thugs have committed here and there throughout the world in your execution of some policy or deal of the moment. I mean the murders, brother, of which historians keep a statistical record. I mean the war murders, brother. The murders arising out of the misunderstandings and tensions and social and economic stresses which you encourage into wars. You know what you are, King? You’re the greatest mass-murderer in history. Oh, yes, I know how melodramatic it sounds, and how you’re enjoying my helplessness to keep it from sounding so! But the truth is that millions of human beings have died on battlefields which would never have been except for you. The truth is that millions upon millions of other human beings have been made slaves, stripped of the last rag of their pride and dignity, thrown naked into your furnaces and on your bone piles!”
“Not mine, Judah, not mine,” said his brother.
“Yours! And you’re not through, King. You’ve hardly begun. Do you think I’m blind merely because I’m drunk? Do you think I’m deaf just because I shut my ears to your factory whistles? Do you think I don’t know what you’re planning in those night sessions in your Confidential Room? Too far, King, you go too far.”
Judah stopped, his lips quivering. King deliberately edged the bottle of Segonzac closer to him. Judah wet his lips.
“Dangerous talk, Judah,” said King gently. “When did you join the Party?”
Judah mumbled: “The smear. How could I be a member of the Party when I believe in the dignity of man?”
“You’re against them, Judah?”
“Against them, and against you. You’re both cut from the same bolt. The same rotten bolt. Any means to the end. And what end? Nobody knows. But a man can guess!”
“That’s typically muddled thinking, Judah. You can’t be against them and against me, too. I’m their worst enemy. I’m preparing the West to fight them—”
“That’s what you said the last time. And it was true, too. And it’s true now. But a twisted truth that turns out to be no truth at all. You’re preparing the West to fight them, not for the reason that they’re a menace to the free world, but because they happen to be the current antagonist. Ten years from now you’ll be preparing the West — or the East, or the North, or the South, or all of them put together! — to fight something or someone-else. Maybe the little men from Mars, King! Unless you’re stopped in time.”
“And who’s going to stop me?” murmured King Bendigo. “Not you, Judah.”
“Me! Tonight at midnight I’m going to kill you, King. You’ll never see tomorrow, and tomorrow the world will be a better place to live in.”
King Bendigo burst into laughter. He threw back his handsome head and laughed until the spasm caused him to double up. He put his fists on the table’s edge and heaved to his feet. There were actually tears in his eyes.
Judah’s chair went over. He scrambled around the corner of the table and sprang at his brother’s throat. His hands slipped. He beat with his thin fists on that massive chest. And as his little blows drummed away, he screamed with hate and outrage. For a moment King was surprised; his laughter stopped, his eyes widened. But then he only laughed harder. He made no attempt to defend himself. Judah’s fists kept bouncing off him like rubber balls from a brick wall.
Then Max’l was there. With one hand he plucked the shrieking, flailing little man from his master and thrust Judah high in the air, holding him up like a toy. Judah dangled, gagging. The gagging sounds made Max’l grin. He shook Judah as if the little man were made of rags, shook him until his face turned blue and his eyes popped and his tongue stuck out of his mouth.
Karla whimpered and put her hands to her face.
“It’s all right, darling,” wheezed her husband. “Really it is. Judah doesn’t mind punishment. He loves it. Always did. Gets a real kick out of a beating — don’t you, Judah?”
Max’l flung the little man halfway across the dining-room. Judah struck a wall, thudded to the floor, and lay still.
“Don’t you worry,” Max’l said, grinning at his master. “I take care of him. After I eat.”
And he sat down and seized his fork.
“Don’t be more idiotic than nature made you, Max. When the time comes — midnight, did he say? — he’ll be blind drunk and about as deadly as an angleworm.” King glanced at the heap in the corner. “That’s the trouble with democracy, Queen. You’re one of the intellectual, liberal, democratic world, aren’t you? You never get anywhere. You stick your chin out and happily ask for another crack on the jaw. You poison yourselves into a coma with fancy talk, the way Judah poisons himself with alcohol. All you do is jabber, jabber, jabber while history shoots past you into the future.”
“I think we had a little something to do with the orbit of history, Mr. Bendigo,” Ellery found himself saying, “not so very long ago.”