"Your brother was killed!" Loathing was in Jean Harlon's eyes. "And you can sit there, and talk calmly about it?"
Anger and grief unsteadied the Falcon's voice for a moment.
"What the hell should I do—beat my chest and swear vengeance! Val knew the cards were stacked against us; he knew that both of us had lived past our appointed times. He played the game as he saw it, and died with few regrets. Hell, yes, I can talk calmly; now I've got a job to do, I've got to finish the thing for which he and hundreds of thousands of others have died!"
He turned to the space-scanner, saw that the Kent-Horter had escaped the IP ships, felt the burning of unshed tears in his eyes. He sat silently for a moment, then whipped about as the girl's words caught at his mind.
"—dreaming fools," she was saying. "What more could they ask than they already have. They eat, they sleep, they have amusements and medical care. Their lives are as perfect as science can make them."
"Science!" Curt Varga's tone flicked like a whip-lash. "You can't run people's lives as though they were bits of unfeeling machinery. Every man has the right to control his own destiny."
Anger was in Jean Harlon's face then, too. "You blind atavistic fool," she blazed, "people cannot rule themselves! Read your histories, find in them the truth about self-government. Why, until science took the reins of power, millions died in ghastly wars for fanatical leaders whose greed for world dictatorial power was an insane fixation."
The Falcon's face was like chiseled granite. He silenced the girl with a brief motion of his hand. His voice was grave with the strength of his heart-felt belief in the thing he had made his life.
"I have no desire to convert you," he said quietly. "Conversion comes to but a few. You've got to know deep in your heart that what I say is the truth. There were wars, holocausts started by the mad dictators of the Twentieth Century. But when they were over, then democracy began to win the long struggle that had always been hers. And although other wars came through the years, always life became better for all peoples. But then science became a master instead of a servant, and the few rulers of science became the rulers of the universe. That would have been all right, had the rule been a beneficient one—but it was twisted and distorted by the descendants of our hereditary Food Administrators until it throttled and murdered all initiative and ambition and free-thinking. It strangled God-given freedom."
Curt Varga went suddenly silent, feeling the red creeping upward from his collar. He avoided the girl's eyes, crushed out the still butt of his cigarette.