“I repeat, I’m sorry to have had to put you through an emotional mincer. But you survived, and you would have survived even if you hadn’t, in a manner of speaking.
“What I had to do was to insure that you would be capable of operating the tower and could be trusted not to be corrupted by the great power in your hands. I believed that you could pass the test, but my thinking, my wishing, didn’t make it so. I had to give you the practice of power. It’s not what a person says but what he does that reveals his true character.
“You did fail in some things. You should have resurrected your comrades who died during the expedition to the tower. I’m sure that, if events hadn’t stopped you, you would have done so soon. I was disappointed, however, because I wanted to put them through the test too.”
“Most of them would have done what we did,” Burton said.
“I know, but I wanted them to prove themselves in the field.”
“They proved themselves along the way,” Burton said. “Just as we did.”
“To a point,” Loga said. “But the ultimate test was how they would behave in the tower. Turpin, for instance, was not selective enough in resurrecting his friends. Nor were you, Li Po. You erred grievously in resurrecting Star Spoon.”
Li Po shrugged. “How was I to know?”
“Have you learned your lesson?”
“I am even quicker at learning than I am to take offense,” the Chinese said. “If I could do it over again, I would make sure that the Computer would give those we brought in no powers that could be used against me.”
“Very good. But would you also make sure that you had no powers that you could use against others? They’re a danger to you as well as to the others. Your powers might be seized by others despite all your precautions.”
“Somebody has to be in charge,” Li Po said. “Somebody has to possess the powers, somebody who can be trusted with them.”
“The point is,” Burton said, “are we to be trusted now?”
“What if you resurrected somebody who seemed to be trustworthy but proved not to be? That person might take away your powers and use them for purposes that you would reject because they would be bad.”
He sipped again and then began pacing back and forth as he talked.
“You’re thinking that my disappearing was criminal because it resulted in the erasure of the body-recordings and, so, the loss of immortality for almost all of the resurrected. That is not so, and I’m disappointed that you could believe that I would permit such a horrible thing. What really happened is—”
“You had the Computer make a duplicate of itself or a duplicate already existed,” Burton said. “The duplicate has the records. Or there is only one Computer, but it gave us false reports.”
Loga stopped pacing and looked at Burton with amazement, then burst out laughing.
“When did you think of that?”
“A minute ago.”
“I did have a backup Computer made before I disappeared.”
“Then it was no test for us when we first entered the tower and prevented the Computer from dying? Goring’s sacrifice was in vain?”
“No, that was for real. It frightened me so much that I at once had the backup made. Actually, the backup has become the primary since I let you use the first one as your toy.”
“It seems to me,” Frigate said, “that it would have been standard engineering procedure to install the backup from the very beginning of this project.”
“We thought that the Computer could not malfunction, not to any dangerous extent, anyway. We thought that it was invulnerable.”
“Yes, and the Titanic was declared unsinkable.”
“What about the Mongolian woman whom Nur killed?” Alice said.
“Ah, her! She was part of the plot to confuse and mystify you. Someone had to be held responsible for my death, and she was placed so that you would think that she was responsible. You would then have to try to find out who and what she was, but there was no way that you could do that.”