"I believe you'd offer up me—yourself—your own wife if it were necessary," he said.
"If it were necessary I shouldn't have the choice," said Tempest, unguessing the future.
But Dick walked out of the room whistling.
"We all have the choice, my son of a gun," he said. "And that's why we are so precious sure that there is a hell."
Tempest sat in the half-dark room for very long. This matter had brought him to the edge of understanding again, where he sought, painfully, blindly, as the human must always seek, for the reason of it all.
What was the secret, the solution behind all this brutality and unmeaningness? What was that Power which weaves and unweaves, makes and unmakes, gives to life and takes back to death? What does it mean by playing cat and mouse with man through all the endless centuries? What is that great resistless Power which draws us in over the rollers of the present to tear us up in the machinery of the future? And why, since all of life goes to feed the same mill, should there be such divers and nice complexities in our being? Tempest turned his mind on these men and women just under his hand. Dick, indifferent concerning his sins and the sins of others, yet whipped by a sudden trick of fancy into a merciless enforcer of the law. Ducane, the fine blustering shell of a man, with the soul of a louse, and yet capable of that strange redeeming love for his wife. Jennifer, herself blind on the rim of all the mysteries, deaf te the clamour of that sharp-toothed machine which is the future. Robison, animal and man in one, born to suffer for the more refined sins of others. What were they for? What was the great secret which would fuse all this muddle of flesh and spirit throughout the straining universe into that majestic all-conquering whole which alone could justify its being?
Tempest never asked himself if there was a meaning. He had come into that knowledge long since. But again and again, as now, he shaped half-aloud the question which belongs to the next step of the way.
"God—or whatever Great Power you call Yourself—
