did
not want to be presented with the choice; he had no wish to be
one with those of the pit. But he had no intention of giving up
the great advantage which he now held over nature.

"I will have it both ways," he said. "I am already a
contradiction and an impossibility. The proverb was only the
early statement of the law of moral compensation: 'You can't take
more out of a basket than it holds.' But for a long time I have
been in violation of the laws and balances. 'There is no road
without a turning,' 'Those who dance will have to pay the
fiddler,' 'Everything that goes up comes down,' But are proverbs
really universal laws? Certainly. A sound proverb has the force
of universal law; it is but another statement of it. But I have
contradicted the universal laws. It remains to be seen whether I
have contradicted them with impunity. 'Every action has its
reaction.' If I refuse to deal with them, I will provoke a strong
reaction. The man without a face said that it was always a race
between full knowing and destruction. Very well, I will race them
for it."

They began to persecute him then. He knew that they were in a
state as accelerated from his as his was from the normal. To them
he was the almost motionless statue, hardly to be told from a
dead man. To him they were by their speed both invisible and
inaudible. They hurt him and haunted him. But still he would not
answer the summons.

When the meeting took place, it was they who had to come to him,
and they materialized there in his room, men without faces.

"The choice," said one. "You force us to be so clumsy as to have
to voice it."

"I will have no part of you. You all smell of the pit, of that
old mud of the cuneiforms of the land between the rivers, of the
people who were before the people."

"It has endured a long time, and we consider it as enduring
forever. But the Garden which was in the neighborhood--do you know
how long the Garden lasted?"

"I don't know."

"That all happened in a single day, and before nightfall they
were outside. You want to throw in with something more permanent,
don't you."

"No. I don't believe I do."

"What have you to lose?"

"Only my hope of eternity."

"But you don't believe in that. No man has ever really believed
in eternity."

"No man has ever either entirely believed or disbelieved in it,"
said Charles Vincent.

"At least it cannot be proved," said one of the faceless men.
"Nothing is proved until it is