Cartwright closed the door and turned to face Moore. "Now we can get this settled once and for all."
Moore smiled confidently. "Anything you say, Mr. Cartwright. You're the boss."
"I'm not your boss."
"No, that's so. A few of us stayed loyal to Reese."
"You must think a lot of him."
Moore's expression showed that he did.
"Reese Verrick is a big man, Mr. Cartwright. He's done a lot of big things."
"What do you want me to do? Give him back his position?" Cartwright heard his own voice waver with emotion. "I'm here and I'm staying here. You can't intimidate me! You can't laugh me out!"
Cartwright tried to keep his hands from shaking. He was excited; he could hardly speak. And he was afraid.
"You can't operate this," Moore said quietly. "This isn't your line. What are you? I examined the records. You were born on 5 October, 2140, outside the Imperial Hill. You've lived there all your life; this is the first time you've been on this side of Earth, let alone on another planet. You had ten years of nominal schooling in the charity department of the Imperial Hill. From high school onwards you took courses, in welding, and electronic repair and that sort of thing. After you left school you designed a few circuit improvements but the Directorate rejected your patents."
"The improvements," Cartwright said with difficulty, "were used a year later."
"Then you became embittered. You tried many times to win a classification but you never had enough theoretical knowledge. When you were forty-nine you gave up. When you were fifty you joined this Preston Society."
"I had been attending meetings for six years."
"There weren't many members at the time, and finally you were elected Presidents. You put all your money and time into the crazy thing. It's become a mania." Moore beamed happily, as if solving an intricate equation. "This position—Quizmaster over billions of people, endless quantities of men and material... . And you see all this only as a means of expanding your Society."
Cartwright caught his breath.
"What are you going to do?" Moore persisted. "Print a few trillion copies of Preston's tracts? Distribute immense 3-D pictures of him? You already have one shrine—his remains in a wooden building in the Imperial slums—the remains of the saint, to be touched and prayed over. Is that what you're planning—a new religion? Are you going to organize vast armadas to search for his mystic planet? Are we all going to spend our time combing space for his Flame Disc, or whatever he called it. Remember Robin Pitt, Quizmaster number thirty-four. Nineteen years old, read ancient books, painted pictures, wrote psychiatric stream-of-consciousness material."
"Poetry."
"He was Quizmaster one week; then the Challenge got him."
"I was thirteen when he was murdered."
"Remember what he had planned for mankind? Think back. Why does the Challenge-process exist? To protect us; it bestows and deprives indiscriminately. Nobody can hold power; nobody knows what his status will be next year, next week. Nobody can scheme to be a dictator. The Challenge protects us from something else—from incom- petents, from fools and madmen. No despots, no crackpots."
"I'm not a crackpot," Cartwright muttered hoarsely.
"You think you can adjust yourself to your new status?" Moore asked.
"Yes!"
"You have twenty-four hours. That's about how long it takes to convene a Challenge Convention and pick the first candidate. There should be a lot to choose from."
Cartwright's thin body jerked. "Why?"
"Verrick has offered a million dollars to the one who gets you. The offer stands... until you're dead."
Cartwright was vaguely aware that Wakeman had come into the lounge and was moving up to Moore. The two of them walked away.
A million gold dollars! There'd be plenty of takers. The best minds would gamble their lives for that, in a society that was a constant gamble, an unceasing lottery.
Wakeman came over to him, shaking his head. "What a distorted mind—bodies, bombs, assassins. We sent him off."
"What he said is true," Cartwright gasped. "I have no place here."
"His strategy is to make you think that."
"But it's true!"
Wakeman nodded reluctantly. "I know. That's why it's good strategy. We have a good plan, too, I think. You'll know about it later."
The battered, weary ore freighter left the regular commercial lanes as it moved towards the side of Mars. Jupiter was on the far side of the sun; the lanes were at a minimum density, split between the two planets. When out of the slowly-moving stream of transports the ship began to reach significant velocities. Its bulkheads rattled. Metallic dust rained down in the drumming corridors as it sped through a void of silence, darkness, emptiness.
In the gloomy hold the fifty men and women who made up the Preston Society sat in a nervous circle, waiting timidly for Konklin to begin.
Konklin studied the bookshelf that Bruno Jereti had erected.
"Here they are," he said. "The Dispossessed. Mathematics of Madness. The Unicorn. Flame Disc." He dragged down a bulky binder. "His books, all his unpublished notes, his records; drawings he made of his vision, his computations, instructions, analysis, poetry, his philosophy—everything." He turned to the expectant people, "What'll it be tonight?"
"Flame Disc," Janet Sibley said quickly. "It's so inspiring."
Konklin slid the well-worn copy down and flipped it open, sat on a heap of bedding, and glanced around.
"Go ahead," Mary Uzich said eagerly. "We need something to buck us up."
In a throbbing baritone, Konklin read aloud from the concluding section of John Preston's last book.
"In the far reaches of space He has placed another world, an untouched Disc, a Second Earth, hidden and concealed from prying eyes. There He has put it, safe in dusky reaches, the terrifying dead regions, where the coward-folk dare not venture. He knew that gibbering vampires, their own guilt, would pluck at them, would torment them in their shoddy tin ships, until they maddened and died—and returned empty-handed..."
"That part," Groves interrupted ponderously, "refers to Herman R. Ewing, the navigator on the 'eighty-nine expedition. He went insane from space fear. He claimed that the ship was being pursued by fabulous space monsters."
Konklin read on, carried away by the fervour of the dead founder of the Society.
"This Disc, this glowing orb, for all eyes yet somehow hidden, was sent to swim in the sea of meteor dust and galactic wastes throughout the ages. Until at last a brave crowd, would venture forth. Giants, with the courage of giants... ."
Chapter IV
Ted benteley stood by the kitchen door inhaling warm smells. The Davis house was pleasant and bright. Al Davis, minus his shoes, was sitting contentedly before the television set in the living room. His pretty brown-haired wife, Laura, was preparing dinner.
"If that's protine," Benteley said to her, "it's the best job of adulteration I've smelled."
"We never have protine," Laura answered briskly. "You can taste it no matter how they disguise it. It's terrible costly to buy natural foods, of course, but it's worth it."
"Protine," Al said, overhearing her, "saved the ordinary people from starvation back in the twentieth century. Allow me to pass on a few facts."
"Please do!"
"Protine isn't a natural algae. It's a mutant that started out in culture tanks in the middle East and gradually crept on to a variety of fresh-water surfaces."