"Did they?" said di Facino. "Did they tell you so?"
"They showed me so," said Hal. The strange sense of strength in him carried him forward irresistibly. It was as if someone else spoke through him to them; and the exasperation within him had given way now to a diamond-hard sense of logic. "Sending me here with their message, which they had little hope you'd agree to, guaranteed I'd have a chance to give you my side of things, without their having in any way endorsed it. If it turned out you accepted me, they'd have no choice but to accept me, too, in the long run. If you didn't, they had no responsibility for what I said to you on my own."
"But," said Ke Gok, "we haven't accepted you."
"You'll have to accept someone, if you're going to deal with the situation," Hal said. "You were the one who just said a few moments ago that you'd have stopped the Others before this if you'd known how. The plain fact is you don't know how. I do - perhaps. And there's no time to wait around for other solutions. This late in the day, even all the strength that can be joined against the Others may not be enough. You and the Exotics are in the same camp whether you like it or not - if you don't face that, you and they are going to perish singly, as you're both on the road to perishing now. Only unlike the Exotics, you Dorsai are a people of action. You can't close your eyes to the need for it, when that need crops up. Therefore, the only hope for you and them is that someone will come along who can lead you both, together - and no one has, but me."
"The necessity to accept someone," said the cadaverous man, "hasn't been proven, yet."
"Certainly it has." Hal looked directly into the almost-black pupils of the other's eyes. "The Dorsai is already beginning to starve. Slowly… but it's beginning. And you all know that starvation is being caused deliberately by the Others, who are also doing other things to other people. Clearly, this is no problem that can be kept contained between you and the Others, only. It's a case of one part of the human race, spread over many worlds, against the other part. You don't need me to tell you that, you can see it for yourself."
"But," said Lee, softly, "there's no guarantee it has to explode into Armageddon, with what that would mean for all our people - who are the fighters."
"Take another look if you believe it doesn't have to," said Hal. "The situation's been developing for over thirty years. As it develops, it grows exponentially, both in numbers of peoples involved and in complexity. How else can it end except in Armageddon? Unless you and the Exotics and those like you are willing to abandon everything you've believed in, to suit the Others; because that's the only thing the Others'll settle for, in the end."
"How can you be sure of that?" said Lee. "Why shouldn't the Others stop before they push it that far?"
"Because if they do, they'll be the ones to be wiped out in a generation; and they know it," said Hal. "They're riding a tiger and don't dare get off. There's too few of them. The only way to make life safe for themselves, as individuals, is to make the worlds - note, I said worlds, all the worlds - safe for all of them together. That means changing the very face of human society. It means the Others as masters and the rest of humanity as subordinates. They know that. For everything you love, you have to know it, too."
There was a long moment of silence in the room. Hal sat waiting, still strangely gripped by the clarity and fierceness of thought that had come on him.
"It's still only a theory of yours - this idea of historical confrontation between two halves of the human race," said Miriam Songhai, heavily. "How do you expect us to trust something like this, that no one ever proposed before?"
"Check it out for yourselves," said Hal. "It doesn't take Exotic calculations to see when and how the Others started, how they've progressed, and where they must be headed. You know better than I how the credit and other reserves of your society are dwindling. The time's coming when the Others'll own the souls of everyone who might hire you, off-world. What happens to the Dorsai, then?"
"But this idea of them as a historical force, with all the dice loaded in their favor against us," the cadaverous man said, shaking his head, "that's leaving common sense for fantasy."
"Would you call it a fantasy, what's already happened on all the worlds but Old Earth? And it hasn't happened there only because the Others have to get the other worlds under control first," Hal answered. "The Others' specialty is to attack where there's no counter. There's no present defense against them. How else could they explode the way they have, into a position of interstellar power in just thirty standard years?"
He paused and looked deliberately around the table at all the faces there. There was a strange brightness, almost a light of triumph in Amanda's eyes.
"Against their charisma, and the pattern of their organization," he went on, "none of our present cultures have any natural defense. If you could put all of the Others on trial in an interplanetary court right now, I'd be willing to bet you couldn't find legal cause to indict one of them. Most of the time they don't even have to suggest what they want done. They bind to them people with exactly the characters they want, put each in the specific situation each one is best suited for, and each one does exactly what the Others want, on his or her own initiative."
Hal turned to speak to the table as a whole.
"Look at the large picture, for your own sakes," he said. "Think. The Exotics could have handled in its beginning any ordinary economic attempt to dominate all the worlds. You could have handled early any purely military threat. But against the Others you've both been helpless; because they haven't attacked in those forms. They've attacked in a new way, one never anticipated; and they're winning. Because the pattern of human society is changing, as it's always done; and the old, as always, can't resist the new."
He paused.
"Face that," he said. "You, the Exotics, the Friendlies, everyone else who lives by an older pattern, can't resist the Others as you've resisted other enemies until now. If you try going that way, you'll lose - inevitably - and the Others will win. But the possibility is there for you to resist them successfully, and win, if you let yourself become part of the new historical patterns that are shaping up into existence right now."
He paused again; and this time he waited for comment or objection, a response of any kind. But none came. They sat silent, watching him.
"The Others aren't aliens," he said. "They're us, with a difference. But that difference can be enough to give them control as things stand. Again, as I say, it's simply one more instance of the old giving way to the new; only the problem in this case is that the new way the Others want to bring in is a blind alley for the race. Humanity as a whole can't survive in stasis, with one Master to millions of slaves. If it's made to go that way, it'll die."
He paused. None of them made the slightest movement or sound. They only continued to watch him.
"We can't allow that," he went on, "but not allowing it doesn't mean we can keep things as they are. That would also mean stasis - and a race death. So, we have to acknowledge simply what is. Once more, the face of human society is changing, as it's always done; and as always we'll have to change with it or go by the boards. Here on the Dorsai you're going to have to be prepared to let go of many things, because you're a Splinter Culture that always held to tradition and custom. But that adaptation will have to be made, for the sake of your children's children. Because, I tell you again, what's at stake isn't the hard-won ways of the Dorsai, or those of the Friendlies or the Exotics, but the survival of the whole human race."
Chapter Forty-eight
Hal stopped talking at last, and waited for a response. But this time, the silence from his listeners continued. They were looking now at the tabletop before them, at the wall or window opposite them, in any direction, in fact, but at him or at each other.