"I am sure of myself. The mongrels can manage a successful revolt. But with the information I can give you, you could put down that revolt. I can't say about the next revolt, or the one after that, or any of the revolts that will go on as long as there are men who have minds for figuring out reasons for revolting. If you try to force the information from me, I'll take the poison."
"Would you really do that?"
He nodded.
"We could go out there and get the information directly from the mongrels."
"From them, you would find out nothing. The mongrels don't know anything. Only the leaders know, the scientists, the secret underground. You would never find them. The revolt is latent in every man beyond these walls, in every man and woman and child. The leaders know how to bring out that latent desire to revolt, when the time comes. There will be adequate weapons, too. Like the ones those three ships were blasted with."
He touched her throat. He felt the stirring of the pulse. A flush rose to her cheeks. "Show me why you haven't grown old during this last hundred years, Rhone, as I have."
Her face was near his. He could see the trembling in her lips, the enigmatic brightness of her eyes. "You're attractive," she whispered. "And that's odd, that a mongrel could be attractive."
"There are differences among the mongrels," Danton said. He moved his hands down her arms. She shivered a little. "And maybe there's a need in you that makes me seem something I'm not."
"That may be, yes. Maybe it isn't so easy to live forever. We have all you would think anyone would want here. But there are so few of us. And the men—always the same, with faces the same and walks the same and—"
"Then you really are the same Rhone, the Oligarch of a century ago?"