"Can't you go a little easy on us, officer?" Eichmann took out his wallet. "A cop's salary ain't the greatest in the world, eh?" He nudged Hagbard insinuatingly.

"Are you trying to bribe me?" Hagbard asked sternly.

"Why not?" Harry Coin whined. "You got nothing to gain by killing me. Take the money and put me off the sub at the first island you pass."

"Well," Hagbard said thoughtfully, counting the money.

"I can get more," Harry added. "I can send it to you."

"I'm sure." Hagbard put the money in his clam-shell ashtray and struck a match. There was a brief, merry blaze, and Hagbard asked calmly, "Do you have any other inducements to offer?"

"I'll tell you anything you want to know about the Illuminati!" Harry shrieked, really frightened now, realizing that he was in the hands of a madman to whom money meant nothing.

"I know more about the Illuminati than you do," Hagbard replied, looking bored. "Give me a philosophic reason, Harry. Is there any purpose in allowing a specimen like you to go on preying on the weak and innocent?"

"Honest, I'll go straight. I'll join your side. I'll work for you, kill anybody you want."

"That's a possibility," Hagbard conceded. "It's a slim one, though. The world is full of killers and potential killers. Thanks to the Illuminati and their governments, there's hardly an adult male alive who hasn't had some military training. What makes you think I couldn't go out on the streets of any large city and find ten better-qualified killers than you inside an afternoon?"

"Okay, okay," Harry said, breathing hard. "I don't have no college education, but I'm not a fool either. Your men dragged me from Mad Dog Jail to this submarine. You want something, Ace. Otherwise, I'd be dead already."

"Yes, I want something." Hagbard leaned back in his chair. "Now you're getting warm, Harry. I want something but I won't tell you what it is. You've got to produce it and show it to me without any clues or hints. And if you can't do that, I really will have you killed. I shit you not, fellow. This is my version of a trial for your past crimes. I'm the judge and the jury and you've got to win an acquittal without knowing the rules. How do you like that game?"

"It ain't fair."

"It's more of a chance than you gave any of the men you shot, isn't it?"

Harry Coin licked his lips. "I think you're bluffing," he ventured finally. "You're some chicken-shit liberal who doesn't believe in capital punishment. You're looking for an excuse to not kill me."

"Look into my eyes, Harry. Do you see any mercy in them?"

Coin began to perspire and finally looked down into his lap. "Okay," he said hollowly. "How much time do I have?"

Hagbard opened his drawer and took out his revolver. He cracked it open, showing the bullets, and quickly snapped it closed again. He slipped the safety catch- a procedure he later found unnecessary with George Dorn, who knew nothing about guns- and aimed at Harry's belly. "Three days and three minutes are both too long," he said casually. "If you're ever going to get it, you're going to get it now."

"Mama," Coin heard himself exclaim.

"You're going to shit your pants in a moment," Hagbard said coldly. "Better not. I find bad smells offensive, and I might shoot you just for that. And mama isn't here, so don't call her again."

Coin saw himself lunging across the room, the gun roaring in mid-leap, but at least trying to get his hands on this bastard's throat before dying.

"Pointless," Hagbard grinned icily. "You'd never get out of the chair." His finger tightened slightly, and Coin's gut churned; he knew enough about guns to know how easy it was to have an accident, and he thought of the gun going off even before the bastard Celine intended it to, maybe even as he was on the edge of guessing the goddam riddle, the pointlessness of it was the final horror, and he looked again into those eyes without guilt or pity or any weakness he could exploit; then, for the first time in his life, Harry Coin knew peace, as he relaxed into death.

"Good enough," Hagbard said from far away, snapping the safety back in place. "You've got more on the ball than either of us realized."

Harry slowly came back and looked at that face and those eyes. "God," he said.

"I'm going to give you the gun in a minute," Hagbard went on. "Then it's my turn to sweat. Of course, if you kill me you'll never get off this sub alive, but maybe you'll think that's worthwhile, just for revenge. On the other hand, maybe you'll be curious about that instant of peace- and you'll wonder if there's an easier way to get back there and if I can teach it to you. Maybe. One more thing, before I toss you the gun. Everybody who joins me does it by free choice. When you said you'd come over to my side just because you were afraid of dying, you had no value to me at all. Here's the gun, Harry. Now, I want you to check it. There are no gimmicks, no missing firing pin or anything like that. No other tricks, either- nobody watching you through a peephole and ready to gun you down the minute you aim at me, or anything like that. I'm totally at your mercy. What are you going to do?"

Harry examined the gun carefully, and looked back at Hagbard. He had never studied kinetics and orgonomy as Hagbard had, but he could read enough of the human face and body to know what was going on in the other man. Hagbard had that same peace he himself had experienced for a moment.

"You win, you bastard," Harry said, tossing the gun back. "I want to know how you do it."

"Part of you already knows," Hagbard smiled gently, putting the gun back in the drawer. "You just did it, didn't you?"

"What would he have done if I did block?" Harry asked Stella in present time.

"Something. I don't know. A sudden act of some sort that scared you more than the gun. He plays it by ear. The Celine System is never twice the same."

"Then I was right, he wouldn't have killed me. It was all bluff."

"Yes and no." Stella looked past Harry and George, into the distance. "He wasn't acting with you, he was manifesting. The mercilessness was quite real. There was no sentimentality involved in saving you. He did it because it's part of his Demonstration."

"His Demonstration?" George asked, thinking of geometry problems and the neat Q.E.D. at the bottom, back in Nutley years and years ago.

"I've known Hagbard longer than she has," Eichmann said. "In fact, Galley and I were among the first people he enlisted. I've watched him over the years, and I still don't understand him. But I understand the Demonstration."

"You know," George said absently, "when you two first came in, I thought you were a hallucination."

"You never saw us at dinner, because we work in the kitchen," Galley explained. "We eat after everybody else."

"Only a small part of the crew are former criminals," Stella told George, who was looking confused. "Rehabilitating a Harry Coin- pardon me, Harry- doesn't really excite Hagbard much. Rehabilitating policemen and politicians, and teaching them useful trades, is work that really turns Hagbard on."

"But not for sentimental reasons," Eichmann emphasized. "It's part of his Demonstration."

"It's his Memorial to the Mohawk Nation, too," Stella said. "That trial set him off. He tried a direct frontal assault that time, attempting to cut through the logogram with a scalpel. It didn't work, of course; it never does. Then he decided: 'Very well, I'll put them where words can't help, and see what they do then.' That's his Demonstration."

Hagbard, actually- well, not actually; this is just what he told me- had started with two handicaps, intending to prove that they weren't handicaps. The first was that he would have a bank balance of exactly $00.00 at the beginning, and the second was that he would never kill another human being throughout the Demonstration. That which was to be proved (namely, that government is a hallucination, or a self-fulfilling prophecy) could be shown only if all his equipment, including money and people, came to him through honest trade or voluntary association. Under these rules, he could not shoot even in self-defense, for the biogram of government servants was to be preserved, and only their logograms could be disconnected, deactivated and defused. The Celine System was a consistent, although flexible, assault on the specific conditioned reflex- that which compelled people to look outside themselves, to a god or a government, for direction or strength. The servants of government all carried weapons; Hagbard's insane scheme depended on rendering the weapons harmless. He called this the Tar-Baby Principle ("You Are Attached To What You Attack").