"Haven't they?" West said. The slightest touch of irony appeared in his voice.
"Not so far as I know."
"Is it possible, colonel, that you do not know everything?" West asked.
"It is not only possible, it is obvious," Zen answered, unruffled by the cutting question. "If I knew everything, I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you. I would be out there winning a war."
"The point I want to make, colonel, is that the human race is divided against itself. Historically, this has been going on since remote ages. War after war after war."
"I do not see how America is responsible for the errors of history," Zen said. "We tried to avoid them. God knows we tried." Emphasis crept into his voice.
"I did not say these were errors, colonel," West replied. "I merely said they were history."
"But what point are you making if not the one that wars are mistakes?" Zen asked, surprised at the way the other's thinking had gone.
"I am making the point that war seems to be the way the entity, the human race as a whole, evolves. The method of evolution revealed by history is the pitting of one part of the entity against another part, then letting them fight it out to see which is the more efficient." A touch of grimness sounded in the voice of the craggy man. In the dimly lighted room, his face was as bleak—and as lonely—as the granite outcropping at the top of a mountain.
"This is a very savage philosophy," Kurt Zen commented.