"The one thing that bothers me is this: it looks like I'm going to give Weaver Wainwright his story after all, although there's a chance I can save something for the Star-Times. I suspect he'll take you off somewhere and have you killed, but the moment he leaves this office with you, you'll be denounced in the Star-Times. Wainwright won't be killing a top reporter. He'll be killing a member of the Anti-Newspaper League."
"You're crazy," McLeod said. "It might have sounded bad, but it was all part of the same thing. I wanted to gain their confidence and—"
"And offer me in your place to Wainwright's hatchetmen? That's interesting."
"I was lying to them."
"No. You're lying to me. I'll tell you this, Darius. It comes as a great disappointment. Suddenly, all at once, a man finds his organization is riddled with subversives. That's bad enough, but at least he has one man he can trust. He thinks. He thinks, Darius. But he's wrong there, too. Now he can trust no one. Perhaps he'll have to fire his entire staff and start from the beginning again. But it's the one man, the Judas, who hurts most. Even if Wainwright gets you and gets his story—and I get mine—I'll never be able to trust anyone again. Don't you see the position you've put me in? I'm a lonely man, Darius."
McLeod stood up and leaned across the desk. "We've both been playing God all our lives. What do you think happens when a God loses his worshippers?"
"I haven't lost them. Just the acolytes. There are others."
"There are the people," McLeod said. "Waiting for the medical cures we promise them but never give. The farmers, praying to their own God while we ruin their crops capriciously to scoop the World. The dead citizens of a dozen bombed out cities in a dozen unnecessary wars. The people who haven't read Ortega y Gasset and maybe never even heard of him and can't be convinced they're too stupid to seek their own destinies."
"Ortega was right. Mass man can't discriminate. He's incapable of logical, creative thought. He blunders from catastrophe to catastrophe and grovels at the feet of demagogues."