"It is probable," said the priest resignedly. "Steve Chrisudis has been drinking heavily again this past week; also the two Moulios brothers."
He stepped over and turned the man's face up to the light.
The face was bloody and broken, the eyes sightless. It was Harkway. He had been dead long enough to grow cold.
One question of Harkway's kept coming back to Cudyk. "Would you live in a universe drenched with blood?"
Rack would, of course; for others there was a tragic dilemma. For them, the race had come to the end of a road that had its beginning in prehistory. Every step of progress on that way had been accomplished by bloodshed, and yet the goal had always been a world at peace. It had been possible to live with the paradox when the road still seemed endless: before the first Earth starships discovered that humanity was not alone in the universe.
Human beings were like a fragile crystalline structure, enduring until the first touch of air; or like a cyst that withers when it is cut open. The winds of the universe blew around them now, and there was no way to escape from their own nature.