"The only avenue of escape for humanity is...."
He had stopped there, because he had realized suddenly that he had been deliberately deceiving himself; that there was no avenue. The scheme he had meant to propose and develop in the rest of the book had one thing in common with those he had demolished in the first pages. It would not work.
Cudyk thought of those phantom chapters now, and was grateful that he had not written them. He had meant to propose that the exiles should band together on some unpeopled planet, and rear a new generation which would be given all the knowledge of the old, save for two categories: military science and astronomy. They would never be told, never guess that the bright lights of their sky were suns, that the suns had planets and the planets people. They would grow up free of that numbing pressure; they would have a fresh start.
It had been the grossest self-deception. You cannot put the human mind in chains. Every culture had tried it, and every culture had failed....
He pulled open a drawer of his desk and put the manuscript into it. A folded note dropped to the floor as he did so. Cudyk picked it up and read again:
You are requested to attend a meeting which will be held at 8 Washington Avenue at 10 hours today. Matters of public policy will be discussed.
It was not signed; no signature was needed, nor any threatened alternative to complying with the "request". Cudyk glanced at his wristwatch, made on Oladi by spidery, many-limbed creatures to whom an ordinary watch movement was a gross mechanism. The dial showed the Galactic Standard numerals which corresponded to ten o'clock.
Cudyk stood up wearily and walked out past the carved screen. He said to Nick, "I'll be back in an hour or so."
Eight Washington Avenue was The Little Bear, half a block from the corner where he had first met Harkway, a block and a half from the spot where Harkway's corpse had been left in a doorway. Two more associations, Cudyk thought. After twenty-five years, there were so many that he could not move a foot in the Quarter, glance at a window or a wall, without encountering one of them. And this was another thing to remember about a ghetto: you were crowded not only in space but in time. The living were the most transient inhabitants of the Quarter.