Seu's lips barely moved. He looked past Cudyk, inspecting the crowd with polite interest. "I had him kidnapped," he said happily. "He's tied up, in a safe place. There won't be any meeting today."
Seu had been seen. Someone a few rows ahead called, "Where's Harkway, Mayor?"
"I don't know," Seu said blandly. "He told me he would meet me here—said he had an errand to do. Probably he's on his way now."
Under cover of the ensuing murmur, he turned to Cudyk again. "I didn't want to do it," he said. "It will mean trouble, sooner or later; maybe almost as much trouble as if Harkway had been killed. But I had to make a choice. Do you think I did the right thing, Laszlo?"
"Yes," said Cudyk, "except that I wish you had told me earlier."
Seu smiled, his heavy face becoming for that instant open and confiding. "If I had, you wouldn't have been so sincere when you talked to Harkway."
Cudyk smiled in spite of himself. He relaxed in his chair, savoring the relief that had come when he'd learned that Harkway was not going to die. The tension built up, day by day, almost imperceptibly, and it was a rare, fleeting pleasure when something happened to lower it.
He saw the mayor looking at his watch. The crowd was growing restless: in a few more minutes Seu would get up and announce that the meeting was cancelled. Then it would be all over.
Seu was rising when a new wave of sound traveled over the audience. Out of the corner of his eye Cudyk saw men turning, standing up to see over the heads of their neighbors. Seu spoke a single, sharp word, and his hand tightened on the back of his chair.
Cudyk stood. Someone was coming down the center aisle of the room, but he couldn't see who it was.
Those who had stood earlier were sitting down now. Down the aisle, looking straight ahead, with a bruised jaw and a bloody scratch running from cheekbone to chin, came James Harkway.
He mounted the platform, rested both hands on the low speaker's stand, and turned his glance across the audience, once, from side to side. There was a collective scraping of chairs and clearing of throats, then complete stillness. Harkway said:
"My friends—and enemies."
Subdued laughter rippled across the room.
"A few of my enemies didn't want me to hold this meeting," said Harkway. "Some of my friends felt the same way. In fact, it seemed that nobody wanted this meeting to take place. But here you all are, just the same. And here I am."
He straightened. "Why is that, I wonder? Perhaps because regardless of our differences, we're all in the same boat—in a lifeboat." He nodded gravely. "Yes, we're all in a lifeboat—all of us together, to live or die, and we don't know which way to turn for the nearest land that will give us harbor.
"Which way shall we turn to find a safe landing? To find peace and honor for ourselves and our children? To find safety, to find happiness?"
He spread his arms. "There are a million directions we could follow. There are all the planets in the galaxy! But everywhere we turn, we find alien soil, alien cultures, alien people. Everywhere except in one direction only.
"Our ship—our own planet, Earth—is foundering, is sinking, that's true. But it hasn't—yet—sunk. There's still a chance that we can turn back, make Earth what it was, and then, from there—go on! Go on, until we've made a greater Earth, a stronger, happier, more peaceful Earth—till we can take our place with pride in the galaxy, and hold up our heads with any other race that lives."
He had captured only half their attention, and he knew it. They were watching him, listening to what he said, but the heads of the audience were turned slightly, like the heads of plants under a solar tropism, toward the side of the chamber where Rack and his men sat.
Harkway said, "We all know that the Earth's technical civilization is smashed—broken like an eggshell. By ourselves, we could never put it back together. And if we do nothing, no one else is going to put it back together for us. But suppose we went to the other races in the galaxy, and said—"
A baritone voice broke in quietly, "'We'll sell our souls to you, if you'll kindly give us a few machines!'"
Rack stood up—tall, muscular, lean, with deep hollows under his cheekbones, red-grey hair falling over his forehead under the visor of his cap. His short leather jacket was thrown over his shoulders like a cloak. His narrow features were grey and cold, the mouth a straight, hard line. He said, "That's what you want us to tell the vermin, isn't it, Mr. Harkway?"
Harkway seemed to settle himself like a boxer. He said clearly, "The intelligent races of the galaxy are not devils and do not want our souls, Mr. Rack."
Rack ignored the "Mr." He said, "But they'd want certain assurances from us, in return for their help, wouldn't they, Mr. Harkway?"
"Certainly," said Harkway. "Assurances that no sane man would refuse them. Assurances, for example, that there would be no repetition of the Altair Incident—when a handful of maniacs in two ships murdered thousands of peaceful galactic citizens without the slightest provocation. Perhaps you remember that, Mr. Rack; perhaps you were there."
"I was there," said Rack casually. "About five hundred thousand vermin were squashed. We would have done a better job, but we ran out of supplies. Some day we'll exterminate them all, and then there'll be a universe fit for men to live in. Meanwhile—" he glanced at the audience—"we're going to build. We're building now. Not with the vermin's permission, under the vermin's eye. In secret. On a planet they'll never find until our ships spurt out from it like milt from a fish. And when that day comes, we'll squash them down to the last tentacle and the last claw."
"Are you finished?" asked Harkway. He was quivering with controlled rage.
"Yes, I'm finished," said Rack wearily. "So are you. You're a traitor, Harkway, the most miserable kind of a crawling, dirt-eating traitor the human race ever produced. Get down off the platform."
Harkway said to the audience, "I came here to try to persuade you to my way of thinking—to ask you to consider the arguments and decide for yourselves. This man wants to settle the question by prejudice and force. Which of us is best entitled to the name 'human?' If you listen to him, can you blame the Niori if they decide to end even this tiny foothold they've given you on their planet? Would you live in a universe drenched with blood?"
Rack said quietly, "Monk."
The squat man stood up, smiling. He took a clasp knife out of his pocket, opened it, and started up the side of the room.
In the dead stillness, another voice said, "No!"
It was, Cudyk saw with shock, Tom De Grasse. The youngster was up, moving past Rack—who made no move to stop him, did not even change expression—past the squat man, turning a yard beyond, almost at the front of the room. His square, almost childish face was tight with strain. There was a pistol in one big hand.
Cudyk felt something awaken in him which blossomed only at moments like this, when one of his fellow men did something particularly puzzling: the root, slain but still quasi-living, of the thing that had once been his central drive and his trademark in the world—his insatiable, probing, warmly intelligent curiosity about the motives of men.
On the surface, this action of De Grasse's was baldly impossible. He was committed to Rack's cause twice over, by conviction and by the shearing away of every other tie; and still more important, he worshipped Rack himself with the devotion that only fanatics can inspire. It was as if Peter had defied Christ.
The three men stood motionless for what seemed a long time. Monk, halted with his weight on one foot, faced De Grasse with his knife hand slightly extended, thumb on the blade. He was visibly tense, waiting for a word from Rack. But Rack stood as if he had forgotten time and space, staring bemused over Monk's shoulder at De Grasse. The fourth man, Spider—bones and gristle, with a corpse-growth of grey-white hair—stood up slowly. Rack put a hand on his shoulder and pressed him down again.