"Android," he said. "They worship you, Sutton. They made a religion out of you. Because, you see, you gave them hope to cling to. You gave them something equal, something that made them, in one way, the equal of Man."
"I take it," Sutton said, "you don't believe a thing I wrote."
"Should I?"
"I do," said Sutton.
Dean said nothing.
"You have taken the thing I wrote," said Sutton, evenly, "and you are trying to use it to fashion one more rung in the ladder of Man's vanity. You have missed the point entirely. You have no sense of destiny because you gave destiny no chance."
And he felt foolish even as he said it, for it sounded so much like preaching. So much like what the men of old had said of faith when faith was just a word, before it had become a force to really reckon with. Like the old-time Bible-pounding preachers, who wore cowhide boots and whose iron-gray hair was rumpled and whose flowing beard was stained with tobacco juice.
"I won't lecture you," he said, angry at the smooth way Dean had put him on the defensive. "I won't preach at you. You either accept destiny or you ignore it. So far as I'm concerned I'll not raise a hand to convince any single man. The book I wrote tells you what I know. You can take it or you can leave it…it's all the same to me."
"Sutton," said Dean, "you're batting your head against a stone wall. You haven't got a chance. You're fighting humankind. The whole human race against you…and nothing's ever stood against the human race. All you have is a pack of measly androids and a few renegade humans…the kind of humans that used to swarm to the old Cult-worships."
"The empire is built on androids and robots," Sutton told him. "They can throw you for a loss any time they want to. Without them you couldn't hold a single foot of ground outside the Solar system."