"Sticks and stones," he said, lightly. "No, you won't convert me, Kil. Or anyone else."
"Yes we will," replied Kil, quietly. "We'll go out from here, now; all of us in the Project, one by one or two by two together, and talk to people in the world as I've talked here. We'll show them the way to search themselves for the road to personal maturity;" he paused, then added, "and Sub-E."
Mali stared at him.
"You think I'd let you do that?" he said. "Make one move, Kil, in that direction, and I press my button. And what can you do about that?"
"I can't do anything," said Kil.
Mali smiled, a grim statue's smile.
"But," said Kil, "there'll be someone—"
Mali stiffened.
"Who?"
Kil turned away. Murderer! his mind shrieked soundlessly at him. Murderer! He clamped his jaw tight against the sickness in his heart and spoke.
"There'll be a man," he said. "There'll be a man somewhere who's come to see you clearly at last for what you are, and what you're doing to the world and him. A man of dreams—" Kil's back was almost to Mali now. He spoke to the audience, but without seeing them, "a man of frustrated dreams, who's hunted his destiny for years, just wanting the one opportunity, the one chance to fulfill them. And now, when his eyes are cleared, he'll see at last the chance of it; the chance of making himself at last what he's lived to be and never been. And then he'll stop you, Mali."
Behind Kil, Mali's voice cut sibilantly across the silence.
"Are you a complete fool, Kil?" he said. "To dream of martyrs? And how can a martyr stop me?"
"I don't know," answered Kil, without turning. "I don't know. But when an idea becomes greater than a man; and a man is great enough to see that the idea is greater than himself, then there's nothing to stop him; not personal extinction or anything else. Because when you finally come to it, there's no point in living unless you have something to live for. The years of a lifetime are brief, after all. A man can fritter them away, or miser them up, or sometimes if he wants he can spend them all, all at once and together in one great purchase—" Kil looked out at the audience, "of a dream."
Behind him, Mali laughed loudly.
"Dream!", he said. "And dreamers!" Kil turned about to face him; and he went on. "Dreamers, Kil, are psychotics, people with poor, twisted, un-normal minds. I take good care they don't come too close to me.
"Are you sure?" said Kil. "How can you tell about men with dreams, Mali? You've never had any. So how can you say what this dream of his can mean to one man who carries the hope of the race in his hands, when he sees this moment of his, this short, soon-lost moment of his come up? How can you tell what will happen then?"
Toy took a sudden, ponderous half-step forward and Mali, without looking, gestured him back. Mali's eyes were still on Kil and they glittered feverishly.
"How can I tell?" he echoed. "Because I know what dreams are made of. They're made of air, less than air, of nothing. Only that."
"Only that?" asked Kil. "When they're inside a man?"
Mali laughed again; and his laughter rattled wildly about the walls. He threw his arms wide, leaving the box at his waist open and unhidden, except by the impenetrability of his armor.
"Attack me, then!" he cried. "You're the dreamer, Kil. Draw first, hero, and stop me; stop me now before I reach down and send this world you want so badly, to hell! Attack me! Conquer me! Conquer me with your dreams!"
In that second, while the world waited, Kil turned at last, meeting the eyes of Toy who stood like some great bulldog-man, pillar-legged beside Mali. The shielded candle-flame of hope within Kil leaped out, caught, and flared up afresh on the answer in those black eyes. Across the short space their gazes met in final, open understanding; heart bared to heart, the chalice and the sword.
And so the second one was convinced.
So in that same moment it was accomplished, what Kil had set out to do; and the giant swung about and stooped. Like a mother lightly snatching up her child, Toy caught Mali to his breast. His great arms locked beneath the outflung arms of Mali, hugging the smaller man to him, holding the slippery, intangible surface of Mali's body armor fast against the slipperiness of his own, locking the box and button away behind walls of muscle, from the frantically scrambling fingers.
And both mens armor flared—into white and fiery violence. Arcing on contact, forced and held together by the enormous strength of Toy, the equal and opposed magnetic fields flashed into violent electronic flame, shooting out in all directions so that an eye-searing nimbus of sparks coruscated from the clasping figures.
Locked together, they stood, two men straining in unheard struggle, motionless as statuary in a furnace, cooking in their armor. Now black smoke rolled upward on the tips of red flame as the overloaded insulation of the body circuits went, mixing in with the pale brilliance of the magnetic aurora.
Silent in the roaring midst, body to body, face to face, slayer and slain swayed in a deadly embrace. For a fractionary moment in the second of their dying, Toy's face showed clear of the ruddy smoke, his great head flung back, his eyes closed, his face a white offering to the god of his purpose. There was a calmness on his features, a look of peace, like that of someone who wins at last to his heart's desire. And then the burning insulation parted, the inner shields touched and coalesced in a sudden, flaring explosion of inconceivable heat that burnt them both like paper dolls and left the auditorium drifting with white smoke.
"This was fate," croaked Chase, "on our side. This was fate or great luck. This was—" his voice died as Kil's eyes raised to look at him. Kil's face was ravaged with pain and sorrow and his voice came emptily from the flat wasteland beyond all cries and whimpers.
"This was this," said Kil, with his fingers still on the carbonized shoulder before him, white with life against its blackness, "This was Toy. He was a man."
Epilogue
The warm air of the mountain meadow rocked in the drowsy heat of a June afternoon, and the weathered driver of the all-purpose bug, emerging from the hillside's small belt of pines into sunlight and the sound of shrilling crickets, stopped in surprise beside the young man and woman standing there. He thumbed aside the window and looked out. "Hey!" he said.
"Give us a ride?" asked the girl.
"Sure." He stared hard at the craggy face of the tall young man, his own brown visage deepening into sharper lines and wrinkles with the effort of memory. His eyes, burned blue by the sun, considered them as he rolled the door of the bug open. "Don't I know you?" he asked as they climbed up into the seat beside him."
"You gave me a ride to Duluth once," answered the young man, closing the door. "I'm Kil Bruner. This is my wife, Ellen."
"Pleased to meet you," said the old man, looking at the aquamarine eyes and blonde hair of the girl between them. "Sure, I remember now." He geared the bug and they started forward with a jerk. "What're you two kids doing way up here?"
"Talking to people," said Kil. He held up one tanned, bare wrist for the old man to see. "About their Keys. . . ."
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On the Run (Mankind on the Run) Page 16