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wrought up. And he was afraid.
    “You can’t operate this,” Moore said quietly. “This isn’t your line. What are you? I examined the records. You were born October 5, 2140, outside the Imperial Hill. You’ve lived there all your life; this is the first time you’ve been on this side of Earth, let alone on another planet. You had ten years of nominal schooling in the charity department of the Imperial Hill. You never excelled in anything. From high school on you dropped courses that dealt with symbolization and took manual shop courses. You took welding and electronic repair, that sort of thing. You tried printing, for a while. After you got out of school you worked in a turret factory as a mechanic. You designed a few circuit improvements in plimp board design, but the Directorate rejected your patents as trivial.”
    “The improvements,” Cartwright said with difficulty, “were incorporated in the bottle itself, a year later.”
    “From then on you were bitter. You serviced the bottle at Geneva and saw your own designs in operation. You tried over five thousand times to win a classification, but you never had enough theoretical knowledge. When you were forty-nine you gave up. When you were fifty you joined this crackpot outfit, this Preston Society.”
    “I had been attending meetings six years.”
    “There weren’t many members at the time, and you finallywere elected president of the Society. You put all your money and time into the crazy thing. It’s become your driving conviction, your mania.” Moore beamed happily, as if cracking an intricate equation. “And now you hold this position, Quizmaster, over a whole race, billions of people, endless quantities of men and material, maybe the sole civilization in the universe. And you see all this only as a means of expanding your Society.”
    Cartwright choked futilely.
    “What are you going to do?” Moore persisted. “Print a few trillion copies of Preston’s tracts? Distribute immense 3-D pictures of him and spread them all over the system? Supply statues, vast museums full of his clothing, false teeth, shoes, fingernail parings, buttons, shrines for the faithful to visit? You already have
one
monument to go to: his worldly remains, in a broken-down wooden building in the Imperial slums, his bones on exhibit, the remains of the saint, to be touched and prayed over.
    “Is that what you’re planning: a new religion, a new god to worship? Are you going to organize vast fleets of ships, send out endless armadas to search for his mystic planet?” Moore saw Cartwright flinch white; he plowed on, “Are we all going to spend our time combing space for his Flame Disc, or whatever he called it? Remember Robin Pitt, Quizmaster number thirty-four? He was nineteen years old, a homosexual, a psychotic. He lived with his mother and sister all his life. He read ancient books, painted pictures, wrote psychiatric stream-of-consciousness material.”
    “Poetry.”
    “He was Quizmaster one week; then the Challenge got him—thank God. He was wandering around the jungle back of these buildings, gathering wild flowers and writing sonnets. You’ve read about that. Maybe you were alive; you’re certainly old enough.”
    “I was thirteen when he was murdered.”
    “Remember what he had planned for mankind? Think back. Why does the Challenge-process exist? The whole bottle system is to protect us; it elevates and deprives at random, chooses random individuals at random intervals. Nobody can gain power and hold it; nobody knows what his status will be next year, next week. Nobody can plan to be a dictator: it comes and goes according to subatomic random particles. The Challenge protects us from something else. It protects us from incompetents, from fools and madmen. We’re completely safe: no despots and no crackpots.”
    “I’m not a crackpot,” Cartwright muttered hoarsely. The sound of his own voice amazed him. It was weak and forlorn, without conviction.