*

"You have a low opinion of the human race, don't you?" Chambers said.
"You think you can beat them into a mire of helplessness and fear."

Chambers rose from his chair, pounded his desk for emphasis.

"But you can't do it, Stutsman. Men have tried it before you, from the
very dawn of history. You can destroy their homes and kill their
children. You can burn them at the stake or in the electric chair, hang
them or space-walk them or herd them into gas chambers. You can drive
them like cattle into concentration camps, you can keep the torture
racks bloody, but you can't break them.

"Because the people always survive. Their courage is greater than the
courage of any one man or group of men. They always reach the man who
has oppressed them, they always tear him down from the place he sits,
and they do not deal gently with him when they do. In the end the
people always win."

Chambers reached across the desk and caught Stutsman by the slack of the
shirt. A twist of his hand tightened the fabric around Stutsman's neck.
The financier thrust his face close to the wolfish scowl. "That is what
is going to happen to you and me. We'll go down in history as just a
couple of damn fools who tried to rule and couldn't make the grade.
Thanks to you and your damned stupidity. You and your blood purges!"

Patches of anger burned on Stutsman's cheeks. His eyes glittered and his
lips were white. But his whisper was bitter mockery. "Maybe we should
have coddled and humored them. Made them just so awful happy that big
bad old Interplanetary had them. So they could have set up little bronze
images of you in their homes. So you could have been sort of a solar
god!"

"I still think it would have been the better way." Chambers flung
Stutsman from him with a straight-armed push. The man reeled and
staggered across the carpeted floor. "Get out of my sight!"

Stutsman straightened his shirt, turned and left.

Chambers slumped into his chair, his hands grasping the arms on either
side of his great body, his eyes staring out through the window from
which flooded the last rays of the afternoon Sun.

* * * * *

Drums pounded in his brain ... the drums of rebellion out in space, of
rebellion on those other worlds ... drums that were drowning out and
shattering forever the dream that he had woven. He had wanted economic
dictatorship ... not the cold, passionless, terrible dictatorship that
Stutsman typified