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      “Now will you leave?” he asked. “If you like, I will tell her that we fought and you almost beat me, but I knocked you unconscious and carried you back to your ship.”

      “No,” I said, “either I go around you or go over you, but I am going through.”

      He dropped into a crouch, arms extended.

      “It is a sin to lay hands on a holy man,” he rumbled, “but I will stop you, Gallinger.”

      My memory was a fogged window, suddenly exposed to fresh air. Things cleared. I looked back six years.

      I was a student of the Oriental Languages at the University of Tokyo. It was my twice-weekly night of recreation. I stood in a thirty-foot circle in the Kodokan, the judogi lashed about my high hips by a brown belt. I was Ik-kyu, one notch below the lowest degree of expert. A brown diamond above my right breast said “Jiu-Jitsu” in Japanese, and it meant atemiwaza, really, because of the one striking-technique I had worked out, found unbelievably suitable to my size, and won matches with.

      But I had never used it on a man, and it was five years since I had practiced. I was out of shape, I knew, but I tried hard to force my mind tsuki no kokoro, like the moon, reflecting the all of Ontro.

      Somewhere, out of the past, a voice said, “Hajime, let it begin.”

      I snapped into my neko-ashi-dachi cat-stance, and his eyes burned strangely. He hurried to correct his own position—and I threw it at him!

      My one trick!

      My long left leg lashed up like a broken spring. Seven feet off the ground my foot connected with his jaw as he tried to leap backward.

      His head snapped back and he fell. A soft moan escaped his lips. That’s all there is to it, I thought. Sorry, old fellow.

      And as I stepped over him, somehow, groggily, he tripped me, and I fell across his body. I couldn’t believe he had strength enough to remain conscious after that blow, let alone move. I hated to punish him any more.

      But he found my throat and slipped a forearm across it before I realized there was a purpose to his action.

       No! Don’t let it end like this!

      It was a bar of steel across my windpipe, my carotids. Then I realized that he was still unconscious, and that this was a reflex instilled by countless years of training. I had seen it happen once, in shiai. The man had died because he had been choked unconscious and still fought on, and his opponent thought he had not been applying the choke properly. He tried harder.

      But it was rare, so very rare!

      I jammed my elbow into his ribs and threw my head back in his face. The grip eased, but not enough. I hated to do it, but I reached up and broke his little finger.

      The arm went loose and I twisted free.

      He lay there panting, face contorted. My heart went out to the fallen giant, defending his people, his religion, following his orders. I cursed myself as I had never cursed before, for walking over him, instead of around.

      I staggered across the room to my little heap of possessions. I sat on the projector case and lit a cigarette.

      I couldn’t go into the Temple until I got my breath back, until I thought of something to say.

      How do you talk a race out of killing itself?

      Suddenly—

      —Could it happen! Would it work that way? If I read them the Book of Ecclesiastes—if I read them a greater piece of literature than any Locar ever wrote—and as somber—and as pessimistic—and showed them that our race had gone on despite one man’s condemning all of life in the highest poetry—showed them that the vanity he had mocked had borne us to the Heavens—would they believe it—would they change their minds?

      I ground out my cigarette on the beautiful floor, and found my notebook. A strange fury rose within me as I stood.

      And I walked into the Temple to preach the Black Gospel according to Gallinger, from the Book of Life.

      *

      There was silence all about me.

      M’Cwyie had been reading Locar, the rose set at her right hand, target of all eyes.

      Until I entered.

      Hundreds of people were seated on the floor, barefoot. The few men were as small as the women, I noted.

      I had my boots on.

      Go all the way, I figured. You either lose or you win—everything!

      A dozen crones sat in a semicircle behind M’Cwyie. The Mothers.

       The barren earth, the dry wombs, the fire-touched.

      I moved to the table.

      “Dying yourselves, you would condemn your people,” I addressed them, “that they may not know the life you have known—the joys, the sorrows, the fullness. —But it is not true that you all must die.” I addressed the multitude now. “Those who say this lie. Braxa knows, for she will bear a child—”

      They sat there, like rows of Buddhas. M’Cwyie drew back into the semicircle.

      “—my child!” I continued, wondering what my father would have thought of this sermon.

      “ . . . And all the women young enough may bear children. It is only your men who are sterile. —And if you permit the doctors of the next expedition to examine you, perhaps even the men may be helped. But if they cannot, you can mate with the men of Earth.

      “And ours is not an insignificant people, an insignificant place,” I went on. “Thousands of years ago, the Locar of our world wrote a book saying that it was. He spoke as Locar did, but we did not lie down, despite plagues, wars, and famines. We did not die. One by one we beat down the diseases, we fed the hungry, we fought the wars, and, recently, have gone a long time without them. We may finally have conquered them. I do not know.

      “But we have crossed millions of miles of nothingness. We have visited another world. And our Locar had said ‘Why bother? What is the worth of it? It is all vanity, anyhow.’

      “And the secret is,” I lowered my voice, as at a poetry reading, “he was right! It is vanity, it is pride! It is the hubris of rationalism to always attack the prophet, the mystic, the god. It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us. —All the truly sacred names of God are blasphemous things to speak!”

      I was working up a sweat. I paused dizzily.

      “Here is the Book of Ecclesiastes,” I announced, and began:

      “‘Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man . . . ’”

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