Zen stared at the man, wondering what kind of a human he was. In the dim room, it was difficult to make out West's features. "It makes all the difference in the world. We believed in fairness. They ignored it. We believed in a better world. They would plunge us back into the night of barbarism. We believed in freedom. They wanted slaves. They set up a slave state and threw armed slaves against free men. We had no choice except to fight back." "I see nothing to argue in all you have said," West answered. "Nor is it to my purpose to attempt to justify the actions of the western democracies. They need no justification. Nor do the actions of the Asian Federation need justification. In their eyes, they were right." His voice was a low monotone of sound without the trace of an emotion in it. "Then what is your purpose?" Zen demanded. "First, to point out that the human race is one organism. Viewed in its totality, it is just that, an organism. All the billions of individuals who compose it are cells in that organism." "I am familiar with that theory," Zen answered. "A few crackpots have always insisted that we are a biological entity. But they have not succeeded in proving this." "Haven't they?" West said. The slightest touch of irony appeared in his voice. "Not so far as I know." "Is it possible, colonel, that you do not know everything?" West asked. "It is not only possible, it is obvious," Zen answered, unruffled by the cutting question. "If I knew everything, I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you. I would be out there winning a war." "The point I want to make, colonel, is that the human race is divided against itself. Historically, this has been going on since remote ages. War after war after war." "I do not see how America is responsible for the errors of history," Zen said. "We tried to avoid them. God knows we tried." Emphasis crept into his voice. "I did not say these were errors, colonel," West replied. "I merely said they were history." "But what point are you making if not the one that wars are mistakes?" Zen asked, surprised at the way the other's thinking had gone. "I am making the point that war seems to be the way the entity, the human race as a whole, evolves. The method of evolution revealed by history is the pitting of one part of the entity against another part, then letting them fight it out to see which is the more efficient." A touch of grimness sounded in the voice of the craggy man. In the dimly lighted room, his face was as bleak--and as lonely--as the granite outcropping at the top of a mountain. "This is a very savage philosophy," Kurt Zen commented. "If I may disagree with you again, colonel, I do not think that this philosophy is necessarily savage. True, a great many men die in fiendishly ingenious ways. A great many women and children suffer. True, this system produces hunger in the world, and a fear so deep and so intense that the heart is hurt even to contemplate it."