"I don't know just what to do with you," Cal said a little sadly, ruefully. "Far as the E's are concerned, you've only been a minor nuisance, hardly worth noticing, but your intentions were dangerous. As far back as man's history goes the growth of police powers immediately preceded and caused the fall and destruction of each culture.
"It is a law of the nature of man that he will resist the ascendancy of any special me-and-mine group over him; that this resistance will grow until man will even destroy himself in the attempt to destroy that ascendancy. In more recent history it was the growth, extension, and severity of the police in controlling every activity of man that destroyed both the United States and Russia.
"Now you are attempting to rebuild that same police control in world government. The result will be the same. Man will destroy himself in trying to destroy you.
"We in E don't want that to happen. We see no need of it. We have already warned that the attitude of the police toward the public is the major cause of crime, that crime will increase with each increase of police power and severity until the whole structure rots and crumbles.
"Yet man has not yet progressed far enough to know how to maintain an organized society without some special body to enforce that organization. It's a problem which the E's haven't solved, probably because we know too little about the natural laws affecting the behavior of man. Perhaps it is still a field belonging to non-science, because science doesn't know enough yet to take hold of it.
"I would suggest, Gunderson, that you turn your talents and your organization to solving this problem of how to build an organized society instead of destroying it."
The chair where Gunderson had sat was empty.
E McGinnis looked at Cal; he too was sitting silent and immobile. But E science had inured him to shock. He waited because it was E Gray's show, and he was letting Cal handle it.
"Where is he now?" McGinnis asked when he saw the empty chair.
"Sitting at his desk in his office back on Earth," Cal said with a grin. "Our boy has a few things to think about."