Justine thought it out quickly. If Ortine could actually control him, save when he was unconscious or on the rim of sleep, there would have been no need to bring him to Belvoir at all.
Ortine met his gaze frankly—and Justin, from his long experience of judging living beings, some of whom were perhaps as devious as Ortine himself, decided the other was lying—or at any rate revealing but an expedient fraction of the truth.
Why, he wondered, didn't Ortine simply kill Deborah or himself. The answer to that was obvious. If he could have done so he certainly would have—especially after Justin and Deborah had balluxed up his whole scheme.
Which meant that he couldn't, for all the miracle of his ship and his polymorphism and his ability to span time at will. Justin wondered why his host was so helpless, decided he might as well accept the fact.
"All right," he said, "so it's a stalemate—correct?"
"I wouldn't be too sure," said Ortine. His eyes turned toward Deborah but he spoke to Justin. "The matter of inbred belief is or can be a vital factor. I believe you have heard, in your own enlightened era"—there was a trace of irony in the phrase—"of primitive Haitians and Africans who have succumbed to voodoo for no other reason than that they believed in it and thought someone had put a death-curse on them."
"I have heard of them," said Justin. "But I've been thinking of another factor in our first discussion. We discussed your so-called madmen—but what of sane men?"
"What of them?" Ortine looked troubled.
"Let's look at some of the most successful," Justin offered. "For instance, Ghengis Khan. Now there was a sane man—he fought only for self preservation. And each time he won a victory he was forced to preserve it and himself by winning more. So he destroyed a continent and caused the deaths of, say, fifty million innocent people. He left marks on the world that are still with us—the deserts of Central Asia, the fear-psychology of Russia under Czar or Commissar. Do you call him insane?"
Ortine made an impatient gesture, said, "Of course he was sane. It was his time and environment, not himself, that were at fault."