His barriers were down!!
I could penetrate his mind as though it were thinnest air, and in my brain the voice rang out loud, clear, quick, eager, triumphant!
Now—NOW!!—KILL!!!
I took his mind in mine, encompassing it. I held his life. One surge of power, one squeeze and he was dead. The Father of Evil—helpless in the grasp of righteousness.
I paused, savoring my triumph searching for the evil I knew lay concealed beneath the surface web of flashing thoughts. I probed beneath them, brushing aside his feeble defenses—and stopped—appalled!
For there was no evil, no guile, no treachery—only a deep limpid pool of abiding faith and selfless love for mankind that transcended anything I had ever dreamed. There was anger, too, a clean bright anger at the stupidities and follies of mankind, impassioned yet impersonal, and oddly lacking in bitterness. He knew that I could snuff him out as easily as an acolyte snuffs a candle upon the Altar of Zard. Yet he neither shrank nor feared. And I realized with numbing shock that he had placed himself in my hands, knowing what I was, and what I would do. Frantically I tried to withdraw, but I was immersed in love, drowned in it, absorbed in a warm golden glow that rushed along the power that connected us.
I shuddered. Father of Evil? If he was evil, then every responding fiber of my heart and mind was evil too, and I was damned beyond redemption. With a groan I wrenched myself free. I could not kill him. Nor could I longer stand the shattering concepts of his mind. And with stark realization I faced the elemental truth that it was I, not he, who was wrong!
He looked down at me as I stood shrunken and defeated before him, and his eyes were kind. "It was a chance I had to take," he said softly. "And I was right. You were not conditioned beyond redemption." He sighed and placed his hand on my shoulder. It was warm and gentle, and I did not shrink from his touch. "There are many worlds," he murmured, "and it is getting late, and you are unique. Another like you might not appear again. The plan would be useless without you, yet without your complete cooperation it would fail. So I opened my mind, dropped the screen which shielded me." He smiled wryly. "Desperate measures of a desperate man," he said with a trace of the old masking cynicism.
But I knew him now and could see behind the mask. A strange wonder filled me. I had tried to apply the Missionary Creed, but it was he who was the missionary and I the convert. Slowly I knelt and placed my hands in his as I would to a Bearer of the Word. "Show me the way, Master, and I will follow," I said.