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I think San-Lan held something of real affection for this sprightly little mite, who in spite of the sickening knowledge of rottenness she had already acquired at this early age, was the nearest thing to innocence I found in Lo-Tan.
This opinion impressed San-Lan greatly. I had expected him to snort his disgust, as the extreme school of evolutionists would have done in the Twentieth Century. But the idea was as new to him and the scientists of his court as Darwinism was to the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. So it was received with much respect.
For an instant San-Lan sat as though paralyzed. Then he leaped to his feet, facing the viewplate. "Let me see you!" he snarled. Instantly the mountain view disappeared and the Intelligence Officer appeared again, this time looking a little frightened. "Where is Lui-Lok?" he shouted. "Cut him in on my north plate. The commander who loses his city dies by torture. Cut him in. Cut him in!"
But men do have souls, San-Lan, and in their souls the Americans still cherished the spark of manhood, of honor, of independence. While the Hans have degenerated into a race of sleek, pampered beasts themselves, they have unwittingly bred a race of super-men out of those they sought to make animals. You have bred your own destruction. Your cities shall be blasted from their foundations.
San-Lan told me frankly that I would remain the latter only so long as I remained an object of serious study or mental diversion to himself or his court. I made bold to ask him what would be done with me when I ceased to be such. "Naturally," he said, "you will be eliminated. What else?
More than that, I think I won something nearer to genuine respect from those around me than any other Hans of that generation accorded to anybody. Among these was San-Lan himself, the ruler. In the end it was he who ordered the cessation of these tortures, and quite frankly admitted to me his conviction that they had been futile and that I was in many senses a super-man.
So perfectly did this mechanism operate, that the man might have been in the room with us. He made a low obeisance, then rose to his full height and looked at his ruler with malicious amusement. "Heaven-Born," he said, "I have the exquisite pain of reporting bad news." San-Lan gave him a scathing look. "It will be less unpleasant if I am not distracted by the sight of you while you report."
None of the details of this battle of the Ron-Daks were ever known in Lo-Tan. Not more than the barest outlines of the destruction of the survivors of Nu-Yok were ever received by San-Lan and his Council. And of course, at that time I knew no more about it than they did. Life in Lo-Tan, the Magnificent San-Lan's attitude toward me underwent a change.
Members of Strategy Board, Base Commanders of military units, and San-Lan himself, I understood, sat at similar desks in their private offices, on which all these views were duplicated, and in constant verbal and visual communication with one another and with the Executive Marshal.
San-Lan waved his hand in dismissal. The officer dissolved from view, and the mountains once more appeared, as though the whole side of the room were of glass. More slowly he paced back and forth. He was the caged tiger now, his face seamed with hate and the desperation of foreshadowed doom. "Driven out into the hills," he muttered to himself. "Not more than 10,000 of them left.
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