He stopped speaking. For a long moment there was no sound at all; and then he took a single step backwards and stood still.
"That's all," he said quietly, "that I've come here to say to you. That's all there is. The rest, the decision, I leave to you."
He stopped speaking and stood in silence, looking at them a moment longer. A long moment of silence hung on the air of the amphitheater. Then he turned and walked off the platform to the chairs from which Hal, Amid and Padma rose to face him.
Behind him, in the amphitheater, the silence continued.
"I'd like to speak privately to these people," said Hal.
Bleys smiled, a gentle tired smile, nodding.
"I'll see to it," said Amid, answering even before Bleys had nodded. He turned to the Other. "If you'll come with me?"
He led the tall man out by the door in through which he had brought Hal, a short few minutes earlier. Hal stepped up on the platform, walked to the front of it and looked at the audience.
"He doesn't hope to convince you, of course," Hal said to them. "He does hope he might be able to lull you into wasting time which his group can put to good use. I know - it's not necessary to point that out to you; but having been in the habit of being able to take the time you need to consider a question sometimes makes it hard to make decisions in little or no time."
He was searching his mind for something to say that would reach them as he had finally reached the Grey Captains at Foralie; and he suddenly realized that what he was waiting for was some response from them to what he had already said. But this was not a single room with a handful of people all within easy sight and sound of his voice. Here, he must simply trust to his words to do the job he had set them, as Bleys had been forced to do a few moments before. He remembered the mental image that had come to him in his final moments before parting with Amanda - of being for a brief time at the hub of a great, inexorably turning wheel. But this place in which he now stood was no longer at that hub - nor were these who sat here as his audience.
"The river of time," he said, "often hardly seems to be moving about us until we see the equivalent of a waterfall ahead or suddenly find the current too strong for us to reach a shore. We're at that point now. The currents of history, which together make up time's current as a whole have us firmly in their grip. There's no space left to look about at leisure for a solution, each in his own way. All I can do is tell you what I came to say.
"I've just come from the Dorsai," he said. "They've made their preparations there now for this last fight. And they will fight, of course, as they've always fought, for what they believe in, for the race as a whole - and for you. What I've come to ask you is whether you're willing to make an equal contribution for the sake of what you've always believed in."
He suddenly remembered the first stanza of the Housman poem, carved above the entrance to the Central Administrative Offices in Omalu on the Dorsai. He shook off the memory and went on.
"They've agreed to give up everything they have, including their lives, so that the race as a whole may survive. What I've come to ask of you is no less - that you strip yourselves of everything you own and everything you've gained over three hundred years so that it may be given away to people you do not know and whom you've never spoken to; in the hope that it may save, not your lives, but theirs. For in the end you also will almost surely have to give your lives - not in war, like the Dorsai, perhaps - but give them up nonetheless. In return, all I have to offer you is that hope of life for others, hope for those people to which you will have given everything, hope for them and their children, and their children's children, who may - there can be no guarantee - once more hope and work for what you hope now."
He paused again. Nothing had changed, but he no longer felt so remote from his audience.
"You've given yourselves for three hundred years to the work and the hope that there's a higher evolutionary future in store for the human race. You haven't found it in that time; but the hope itself remains. I, personally, share that hope. I more than hope - I believe. What you look for will come, eventually. But the only way to it now is a path that will ensure the race survives."
The feeling of being closer to his audience was stronger now. He told himself that he was merely being moved by the emotion of his own arguments, but nonetheless the feeling was there. The words that came to him now felt more like words that must move his listeners because of their inarguable truth.
"There was a time," he said, "in the stone-age, when an individual who thought in terms of destruction could possibly smash in the heads of three or even four human beings before his fellows gathered about him and put it beyond his power to do more damage. Later, in the twentieth century, when the power of nuclear explosive was uncovered and developed for the first time, a situation was possible in which a single person, working with the proper equipment and supplies, could end up with the capability of destroying a large metropolitan area, including possibly several millions of his fellow human beings. You all know these things. The curve that measures the destructive capability of an individual has climbed from the moment the first human picked up a stick or stone to use as a weapon, until now we've come to the point where one man - Bleys - can threaten the death of the whole race."
He took a deep breath. "If he achieves it, it won't be a sudden or dramatic death, like that from some massive explosion. It will take generations to accomplish, but at its end will be death, all the same. Because for Bleys and those who see things as he does, there is no future - only the choice between the present as they want it or nothing at all. He and those like him lose nothing in their own terms by trading a future that is valueless for them for a here and now that sees them get what they want. But the real price of what they want is an end to all dreams - including the one you all have followed for three hundred years. You, with all the wealth and power you still have, cannot stop them from getting what they want; the Dorsai can't stop them, nor, by themselves, can all the other groups and individuals who are able to see the death that lies in giving up dreams of the future. But all together we can stop them - for the saving of those who come after us."
He let his eyes search from one side of what he saw as the amphitheater to the other.
"So I'm asking that you give me everything you have - for nothing in return but the hope that it may help preserve, not you, but what you've always believed in. I want your interstellar credit, all of it. I want your interstellar ships, all of them. I want everything else that you've gained or built that can be put to use by the rest who will be actively fighting the Others from now on - leaving you naked and impoverished to face what they will surely choose to do to you in retaliation. You must give it, and I must take it; because the contest that's now shaping up can only be won by those who believe in the future if they work and struggle as one single people."
He stopped talking.
"That's all," he said, abruptly.
He turned and left the platform. There was no sound from the audience to signal his going. Amid had returned and was standing waiting for him with Padma.
In silence they left the amphitheater through a doorway different from the one by which they had entered. Hal found himself walking down a long, stone-walled corridor, with an arched roof and a waist-high stretch of windows deeply inset in the full length of wall on his right. They were actual windows, not merely open space with weather control holding the cold and the wind at bay; and their glass was made up of diamond-shaped panes leaded together. The stone was gray and cold-looking; and beyond the leaden panes, he could see in the late-afternoon light that the white flakes were still falling thickly, so that the snow was already beginning to soften and obliterate the clear outlines of trees, paths and buildings.