And so, take it from there; I've tried to give back as good as I have gotten. I'm not going to discuss the politics of this whole conspiracy with you, nor do I want you to concern yourself with them. Politics is death. Above all, I beg you if you're at all pleased with this report not to be distressed over the situation I will probably be in by the time this reaches you. I've been ruthless with your reputation to advance my purposes; I've been ruthless with the careers of other people; I've been quite ruthless in sending some men some hundreds of men to deaths they could surely have avoided had it not been for me; I've put many others, including a number of children, into considerable jeopardy. With all this written against my name, I'd think it a monstrous injustice to get off scot-free.

And that is all I can say; I have an appointment in a few minutes. Thank you for your friendship and your help.

BLISS WAGONER

CHAPTER NINE: New York

CHAPTER NINE: New York

It is sometimes claimed that religious intolerance Is the fruit of conviction. If One be absolutely certain that one's faith is right and all others wrong, it 'seems criminal to permit one's neighbor? obvious error and perdition. I am tempted to think, however, that religious fanaticism often is the result not of conviction but rather of doubt and insecurity.

GEORGE SARTON

RUTHLESSNESS, ANNE had said, is what it takes. But Paige thought afterwards is it?

Does faith add up to its own fiat violation? It was all well enough to have something in which you could believe.

But when a faith in humanity in general automatically results in casual inhumanity toward individual people, something must have gone awry. Should the temple bell be struck so continually that it has to shatter make all its worshippers ill with terror until it is silenced?

Silence. The usual answer. Or was the fault not in faith itself, but in the faithful? The faithful were usually pretty frightening as people, Believers and humanitarians alike.

Paige's time to debate the point with himself had already almost run out and with it, his time to protect himself, if he could. Nothing had emerged from his soil samples. Evidently bacterial life on the Jovian moons had never at any time been profuse and consisted now only of a few hardy spores of common species, like Bacillus subtilis, which occurred on every Earthlike world and sometimes even in meteors. The--samples plated out sparsely and yielded nothing which had not been known for decades as, indeed, the statistics of this kind of research had predicted from the beginning.