“Max Blake teaches political theory at the U. We’d heard about him, Adam and I, and liked what we’d heard. So we enrolled. It was a disappointment at first. Whatever we’d expected, we didn’t get it. Professor Blake taught a slightly liberal but pretty orthodox course, and neither of us could dig the secret reputation he’d built up. For real leftist kicks, there were a dozen better classes. For brilliant remarks, great oratory, sly humor, almost every other full professor had him whipped. Blake was a washout. So pretty soon Adam decided to plant the needle, mostly out of boredom. He was a hell of a debater, following Schopenhauer’s bit to a T, and I’d never heard anyone get the best of him. He sounded off three days in a row, pulverizing certain theories that Blake was in the process of making—but it wasn’t a fight. ‘Very interesting point, Mr. Cramer,’ the old man would say and that would be it. We got fairly contemptuous of him finally. Then one day Blake mentioned that he was having an informal discussion at his home that night and that perhaps we’d be interested in attending. Adam didn’t want to, but we didn’t have anything else to do, so we dropped by. And that was the bomb.

“The daytime Blake was a masquerade, we saw: a masterful pose. The real Blake was a completely different person. These ‘informal discussions’ were his actual classes, and he reserved them for a handful of the sharpest students.

“It was here that he showed his wit, his thing with sarcasm—Adam tried to joust only once, but he was cut down; here that Blake came out as one of the most electric minds either of us had known. He threw off ideas like sparks. Finally they caught fire in Adam.”

“What sort of ideas?”

“Difficult to explain,” Haller said. “At first I was as knocked out as anyone else, but when I began to understand what it was he was saying, I took off. Blake was (and I haven’t heard that he’s changed) essentially a Fascist, in the way that he follows the theory that the Masses are incompetent to rule—you know. However, he’s a ‘leftist’ Fascist: he believes that the ‘small governing body of men’—expressed in fascist doctrine—is by nature a chimerical ideal. I’m quoting him now, I think. That’s one of his expressions: chimerical ideal. It comes simply to a rule of one man, and, according to Blake, even if that man is a tyrant, it’s better than any so-called democratic form of government. Hitler almost made it work, but Hitler—I am quoting now—was both ignorant and mad. Mussolini had brains, but he was pompous. They both had too much regard for humanity.”

“So that was the trouble,” Link said, grinning mirthlessly.