“We all move in our own lights, in our own way,” I said. He was standing so close above me that I could not get to my feet to face him as my instincts urged me. It was as if he held me physically pinned in my chair, beneath him. * ‘If it weren’t for my Creed I wouldn’t be here now. Perhaps you don’t know what happened to me and my brother-in-law at the hands of one of your Groupmen on New Earth-”
“I know.” The two words were merciless. “You’ll have been apologized to, some time since, for that. Listen to me, Newsman.” His thin lips quirked slightly in a sour smile. “You are not Anointed of the Lord.”
“No,” I said.
“In those who follow God’s word, there may be a cause to believe that they act from faith in something more than their own selfish interests. But in those without the Light, how can there be any faith to anything but themselves?” The quirking smile on his own lips mocked his own words, mocked at the canting phrases in which he called me a liar-and dared me to deny the sophistication in him that had permitted him to see through me.
I stiffened this time with a look of outrage.
“You’re sneering at my Newsman’s Creed only because it isn’t your own!” I snapped at him.
My outburst moved neither him nor his quirk of a smile.
“The Lord would not choose a fool to be Eldest over the Council of our Churches,” he said-and turning his back on me, walked back around to sit down once more behind his desk. “You should have thought of that before you came to Harmony, Newsman. But at any rate you’know it now.”
I stared at him, almost blinded by the sudden brilliance of my own understanding. Yes, I knew it now-and in knowing it, suddenly saw how he had delivered himself out of his own mouth into my hands.
I had been afraid that he might turn out to have no weakness of which I could take advantage as I had taken advantage of lesser men and women with my words. And it was true-he had no ordinary weakness. But by the same token he had an extraordinary one. For his weakness was his strength, that same sophistication that had lifted him to be ruler and leader of his people. His weakness was that to have become what he was, he had to be as fanatic as the worst of them were-but with something more, as well. He had to have the extra strength that made him able to lay his fanaticism aside, when it came to interfere in his dealing with the leaders of other worlds–with his equals and opposites between the stars. It was this, this he had unknowingly admitted to me just now.
Unlike the furious-eyed, black-clad ones about him, he was not limited to the fanatic’s view of the universe that painted everything in colors of either pure black or pure white. He was able to perceive and deal in shades between-in shades of gray, as well. In short, he could be a politician when he chose-and, as a politician, I could deal with him.
As a politician, I could lead him into a politician’s error.
I crumpled. I let the stiffness go out of me suddenly as I sat in my chair with his eyes newly upon me. And I heaved a long, shuddering breath.
“You’re right,” I said in a dead voice. I got to my feet. “Well, it’s no use now. I’ll be going-”
“Go?” His voice cracked like a rifle shot, stopping me. “Did I say the interview was over? Sit down!”
Hastily I sat down again. I was trying to look pale, and I think I succeeded. For all I had suddenly understood him, I was still in the lion’s cage, and he was still the lion.
.”Now,” he said, staring at me, “what did you really hope to gain from me-and from us who are the Chosen of God on these two worlds?”
I wet my lips.
“Speak up,” he said. He did not raise his voice, but the low, carrying tones of it promised retribution on his part if I did not obey.
“The Council-” I muttered.
“Council? The Council of our Elders? What about it?”
“Not that,” I said, looking down at the floor. “The Council of the Newsman’s Guild. I wanted a seat on it. You Friendlies could be the reason I could get it. After Dave-after what happened to my brother-in-law-my showing with Wassel that I could do my job without bias even to you people-that’s been getting me attention, even in the Guild. If I could go on with that-if I could raise public opinion in the other seven systems in your favor-it’d raise me, too, in the public eye. And in the Guild.”
I stopped speaking. Slowly I looked up at him. He was staring at me with harsh humor.
“Confession cleanses the soul even of such as you,” he said grimly. “Tell me, youVe given thought to the improvement of our public image among the cast-aside of the Lord on the other worlds?”
“Why, that depends,” I said. “I’d have to look around here for story material. First-”
“Never mind that now!”
He rose once more behind his desk and his eyes commanded me to rise also, so I did.
“We’ll go into this in a few days,” he said. His Torquemada’s smile saluted me. “Good-day for the present, Newsman.”
“Good-day,” I managed to say. I turned and went out, shakily.
Nor was the shakiness entirely assumed. My legs felt weak, as if from tense balancing on the edge of a precipice, and a dry tongue clung to the roof of my dry mouth.
I puttered around the town the next few days, ostensibly picking up background material. Then, on the fourth day after I had seen Eldest Bright, I was called once more to his office. He was standing when I came in, and he remained standing, halfway between the door and his desk.
“Newsman,” he said abruptly, as I came in, “it occurs to me that you can’t favor us in your news reports without your fellow Guild members noticing that favoring. If this is so, what good are you to me?”
“I didn’t say I’d favor you,” I answered indignantly. “But if you show me something favorable on which I can report, I can report on it.”
“Yes.” He looked hard at me with the black flames of his eyes. “Come and look at our people, then.”
He led me out of his office and down an elevator tube to a garage where a staff car was waiting. We got in and its driver took us out of the Council City, through a countryside that was bare and stony, but neatly divided into farms.
“Observe,” said Bright dryly as we went through a small town that was hardly more than a village. “We grow only one crop thickly on our poor worlds-and those are the bodies of our young men, to be hired out as soldiers that our people may not starve and our Faith endure. What disfigures these young men and the other people we pass that those on the other worlds should resent them so strongly, even while hiring them to fight and die in their foreign wars?”
I turned and saw his eyes on me with grim amusement, once again.
“Their-attitudes,” I said cautiously.
Bright laughed, a short lion’s cough of a laugh deep in his chest.
“Attitudes!” he said harshly. “Put a plain word to it, Newsman! Not attitudes-pride! Pride! Bone-poor, skilled only in hand toil and weapon-handling, as these people you see are-still they look as if from lofty mountains down on the dust-born slugs who hire them, knowing that those employers may be rich in worldly wealth and furniture, fat in foodstuffs and padded in soft raiment-yet when all peoples pass alike beyond the shadow of the grave, then they, who have wallowed in power and wealth, will not be endured even to stand, cap in hand, below those gates of silver and of gold which we, who have suffered and are Anointed, pass singing through.”
He smiled at me, his savage, predator’s smile, across the width of the staff car.
“What can you find in all you see here,” he said, “to teach a proper humbleness and a welcome to those who hire the Bespoken of the Lord?”
He was mocking me again. But I had seen through him on that first visit in his office, and the subtle path to my own end was becoming clearer as we talked. So his mockery bothered me less and less.
“It isn’t pride or humbleness on either side that I can do much about,” I said. “Besides, that isn’t what you need. You don’t care what employers think of your troops, as long as they hire them. And employers will hire them, if you can make your people merely bearable-not necessarily lovable, but bearable.”