Part 3

For there was no evil, no guile, no treachery--only a deep limpid pool of abiding faith and selfless love for mankind that transcended anything I had ever dreamed. There was anger, too, a clean bright anger at the stupidities and follies of mankind, impassioned yet impersonal, and oddly lacking in bitterness. He knew that I could snuff him out as easily as an acolyte snuffs a candle upon the Altar of Zard. Yet he neither shrank nor feared. And I realized with numbing shock that he had placed himself in my hands, knowing what I was, and what I would do. Frantically I tried to withdraw, but I was immersed in love, drowned in it, absorbed in a warm golden glow that rushed along the power that connected us.

I shuddered. Father of _Evil_? If he was evil, then every responding fiber of my heart and mind was evil too, and I was damned beyond redemption. With a groan I wrenched myself free. I could not kill him. Nor could I longer stand the shattering concepts of his mind. And with stark realization I faced the elemental truth that it was I, not he, who was wrong!

He looked down at me as I stood shrunken and defeated before him, and his eyes were kind. "It was a chance I had to take," he said softly. "And I was right. You were not conditioned beyond redemption." He sighed and placed his hand on my shoulder. It was warm and gentle, and I did not shrink from his touch. "There are many worlds," he murmured, "and it is getting late, and you _are_ unique. Another like you might not appear again. The plan would be useless without you, yet without your complete cooperation it would fail. So I opened my mind, dropped the screen which shielded me." He smiled wryly. "Desperate measures of a desperate man," he said with a trace of the old masking cynicism.

But I knew him now and could see behind the mask. A strange wonder filled me. I had tried to apply the Missionary Creed, but it was he who was the missionary and I the convert. Slowly I knelt and placed my hands in his as I would to a Bearer of the Word. "Show me the way, Master, and I will follow," I said.

He raised me to my feet. "No, Saul," he said. "Not that way. In the struggle to come, you will be the leader. Like your namesake."

THE END