"Then you became embittered. You tried many 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 Preston Society."

"I had been attending meetings for six years."

"There weren't many members at the time, and finally you were elected Presidents. You put all your money and time into the crazy thing. It's become a mania." Moore beamed happily, as if solving an intricate equation. "This position—Quizmaster over billions of people, endless quantities of men and material... . And you see all this only as a means of expanding your Society."

Cartwright caught his breath.

"What are you going to do?" Moore persisted. "Print a few trillion copies of Preston's tracts? Distribute immense 3-D pictures of him? You already have one shrine—his remains in a wooden building in the Imperial slums—the remains of the saint, to be touched and prayed over. Is that what you're planning—a new religion? Are you going to organize vast armadas to search for his mystic planet? 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. Nineteen years old, read ancient books, painted pictures, wrote psychiatric stream-of-consciousness material."

"Poetry."

"He was Quizmaster one week; then the Challenge got him."

"I was thirteen when he was murdered."

"Remember what he had planned for mankind? Think back. Why does the Challenge-process exist? To protect us; it bestows and deprives indiscriminately. Nobody can hold power; nobody knows what his status will be next year, next week. Nobody can scheme to be a dictator. The Challenge protects us from something else—from incom- petents, from fools and madmen. No despots, no crack­pots."