Now we return to the beginning of the story. Not for the sake of confusion, but merely to pick up a most important thread. Remember the Camera Forum scene? And Los Angeles? Los Angeles, if you are following the mood of this story, is mere dust and collapse by now. Nevertheless, we return to the vanished metropolis and to the Forum, the three young men of the FBI, and to the lost-looking scientist with the galvanometer and other trivia—the scientist whom you probably never noticed, having been lost in the spell of her. The lost-looking scientist was happy, too.
His happiness lay in that he had come to a conclusion, one affecting Achilles Maravain. His conclusion was that Maravain was scientifically explainable. Not just his feats; not just the decimation he wrought upon police; not just the prisons in which he enveloped prisons. No—more than that—the works. Everything about Achilles Maravain—his personality; his attitude toward life, love and literature—all down to his very kneejerks.
First and most important of all, our Achilles had an inferiority complex. Definitely. The proposition that anyone who had actually, with reason, been called John Smith all his life did not have an inferiority complex was fantastic. But the man's actions proved it beyond doubt: he picked on criminals, insane, and the sick because he felt inferior to them, and compensated thus. Amazing logic? Well, everyone thought so at the time, although as you can see, it was really extraordinarily simple.
But, at the time, everyone was amazed, even the scientist himself. He gloried in it, glowed and, entering further into the spirit and tempo of his theories, babbled out point after telling point. Argued. Philosophized. He quoted statistics about the ratio of invention to the inferiority-complex and compared it with the results Achilles had obtained. He proved that ultra-vibrational force-walls—this being essentially what Achilles had developed for the demolition of law and order and for the production of honestagawd, fool-proof, tamper-proof prisons—were Machiavellian, Mephistophelian, and just plain hellish. Why invent them, then, except to demonstrate a superiority the inventor really didn't feel?
The scientist meditated further, brooded, calculated, grunted awhile and then predicted—or, as he put it: prognosticated—that Achilles would declare himself a dictator.
Which Achilles did.
In this, however, there was a flaw; here lay his weakness. Not in the actual fact that he protested himself the greatest and wisest of men, but that he attempted wiles. He didn't come out with it forthrightly; he wasn't blunt as he had been with his interesting massacres. He proved himself cagey, contemptible, striking the Humanitarian pose. He was, he stated, producing all these absorbing newspaper stories for man's own good. Or, rather, Man's. Man with a capital M. A document he issued, long and scholarly. It reeked; it stank; it was crawling with hypocrisy and shoddy diplomacy. He took some thirty thousand words to indicate that pestilence, famine, and war was in existence. That thieving, murder, and kindred rot was also in evidence. He dithered about the general theme that this was horrible. Tediously he pedanted, hedging around concerning the Perfect State, eventually coming out into the open with his own private Perfect State plan. Revised and condensed it still reeked. Get rid of all the misfits and criminals and the insane. Prison up the squarepegs and breed them out. And then direct democracy just as the Greeks had.
Apparently he had never heard of economics. No one had told him that Greek democracy existed on the basis of a slave system. No one had told him of other things that had either been thought of, worked out, or had evolved according to the scientific laws concerning economics and society since the time of the Greeks. Achilles Maravain was stuck on Homeric Greek democracy—only he indicated that he, personally, would be Democrat Number One.
Again we bewilder the reader with a thread from the beginning. Again we return to the Los Angeles Camera Forum Scene. This time to call to the mind of the elated reader that succulent item of femininity that first claimed our attention with her sprightly uncovering of Achilles Maravain as the seemingly innocuous John Smith.