3

"Sometimes," said Krause, "I am afraid of you."

Carstall sat silent with the corners of his mouth tucked in. He knew that Krause was not in the least afraid of him. Why should he be?

Carstall dismissed the topic of Krause and his fear. The vision of a dirty–faced little boy miserably and viciously jabbing a penholder at his school–mate occupied his mind. He had not thought of Rud in that way for years.

"The Stink," he said at last, and then weighing the one word against the other: "Superman? Divus Caesar? The truth I suppose lies in between…

"The fact is, Krause, I am right about his quality and you are right about his scale. Poor little devil he was, just a poor little murderous devil at heart and he was blown out by the chances of life, as little urchins used to blow out frogs. Just a nasty, frightened kid, greedy but frightened, horribly afraid of violence, always in a panic, living in an age of panic and expanded a million, a billion times. Until in a world of utter cowardice, he filled the sky. He killed a multitude of people, he destroyed institutions, traditions, boundaries, in his terror and praise the stars! they were institutions that had to be destroyed. Or at least he was the instrument—

"Those dear old institutions, social classes, private property, religious cant, patriotism!…They had become shelters for every slinking meanness in the human make–up.

"I have watched these Dictators from their beginning when I was a schoolboy, to now when they are all over and done with. I've lived through it all. And the books! The lying, cringing Hero–worship! All these fellows had the same quality of being driven to do something, feeling that they were creatures of destiny, they all began like that, and then, not being able to understand, not being able to give themselves simply to the thing that gripped them, they went mad. History, Krause, is a case–book for the alienist. Thus far. All began as demagogues, all of them began like men aware of and feeling for and being used by some drive—Rud was driven highest and furthest. He was the ultimate dictator. I compared him just now to a frog blown out by an urchin…Yes…But what was it really, Krause, that inflated him?…What was it, Krause?"

"Call it the Spirit of Mankind," said Krause.

"Spirit of Mankind? Not a bit of it! Not even the Spirit of Life…I don't care for that word, spirit…Forces of which we still haven't the faintest understanding made him and used him. As they made and use us. He had to live, it seems, and certainly he had to be killed…His kind asks for killing and our sort has to kill them…The pattern of life requires it. And as for the pattern of life! How can we know? What can a man know of reality beyond the life that is in him while he lives?

"Here after two brief generations of conflict and destruction we are in a renascent world. No doubt now of the renascence. New standards and a new scale. The Blood Dance of the Dictators quite over and done. Dead already, all of them now, as dead as last year's mutton. Think of their last days!…

"But they had to dance, of course. They had to dance in their turn…

"We are going on to a new way of living altogether. Who can doubt it? People may make another legend of our Rud, a greater Caesar, a mightier Alexander? A Moses? Maybe they will. Yet I question that. He had a pathetic greed for fame, had Rud. I hope he isn't away somewhere in space, waiting for his press–cuttings…Or eavesdropping on us…

"Queer lot these twentieth–century Dictators. They broke out like wasps in a dry summer. Conditions favoured them. A peculiar species they were. A crescendo of scavengers because the unadapted world was rotten with shabby evasions and make–believes. It asked for blow–flies and wasps. Not a loyalty, not a religion left that was not dead and stinking. These Dictators were master stinks, stinks like burning rubber and creosote, in a world of cowardly skunks. Superficially like gangster chiefs, they were, or like the pronunciamento bosses of those little old republics there used to be in South America, or Greek tyrants. But only superficially. More like Caesars, but not really like them. Spreading further and less intense…In the human community, a difference in scale means a difference in kind. As in most other things. They weren't simply blown–out frogs, they were burst frogs, inflated to nothing and burst; they were just the skins and faces of men.

"When these scientific historians who are coming along with their biology and their psychology, when they have done with your God–Caesar–Rud, Krause, he will be left with about as much greatness and divinity and as little power over men's imaginations as the wired–up skeleton of a deinosaur in a museum. Just a memorial of reptilian energy, vestiges of a slobber in the mud. Remarkable, but no precedent for us…

"Very anthropocentric our values are still…We still don't stand up to the truth, Krause. Measured against infinity, is a deinosaur any greater than an ant? The ratio is the same. Ants are in the pattern of life just as much as deinosaurs—and our noble selves. We're too snobbish. We do our brother under God, the ant, an injustice. We blackball him for the Ethical Club. We are spiritual, we say, and all that, while he's just a little bit of clockwork instinct. The only real gentry, the Lords of Creation, God's chosen animals are we! More particularly we of the upper classes. We who crawled at the feet of the Dictators and were too currish to make an end of war. Pink rats, Krause! Diseased pink rats! If we had to be, then surely those great handsome deinosauria and deinotheria had to be—they had to play their part. The ants too are playing their part. Every little ant. Has to. And the little Stink I knew at school, playing his part, became the Marvel of Mankind.

"He ended war for ever. He did. He rationalised property and money. He inaugurated the Age of Plenty. He reconstructed world education. None of that was his original work. It had all been thought of before. It was already there as the common–sense of mankind. Much of it had not been simply thought of; it had been thought out and planned. Bodisham digested it all for him. Only we hadn't the courage and honesty. He was needed somehow to make it real. He—eventuated it. After all he had—a certain desperation. There was honesty in him, honesty in the frantic fear that drove him on, honesty in his hate of subjugation. He liberated and he was frightened by the freedoms he had released. He did what he had to do, and doing it, lost touch with his fellow–creatures. And at last he became a public danger and we did not know what to do with him. Until the arsenic I gave him made his poor little heart beat very fast and then stopped it altogether. The Stink. Master of the World."