Lying there, with sleep far from his pillow, he sought to arrange his mind and put his affairs in order. He felt it likely that he would never leave that room alive, but the premonition did not lessen his scorn of others. For that remorseless mind there could be no hereafter. The position he took up was that of a philosopher known to the recent past: “He knew there had been one ice age, and he believed there was going to be another.” A bundle of primal instincts, he merely followed his appetites. Saul Hartz had an appetite for power. Up till the very moment of entering that room he had considered himself beyond good and evil. But as he lay, waves of thought leaped upon him from those walls. Conspiracy was in the air. Certain forces meant to break him. And how easy to achieve. A drop of poison in a cup of coffee, a knife, or a pistol shot, a knock on the head in the dark, a push, neatly timed, onto a live rail of the Underground, and all would be over. So far as the Colossus was concerned, that would be the end. Let it be so. After all, he had read the Riddle of the Sphinx. Knowing all, there was nothing to know. He pressed a button of his devil’s machine, and wheat rose five shillings a bushel in Europe; he pressed another button, and half a continent was removed from the comity of nations. But what did it matter? In the sight of Saul Hartz the planet Earth was but a grain of sand on the tideway of eternity. Organic life was a negation of a negation, yet from the first, he had been ready to pay a full price for supreme power. But now it had come to him, it wrought no appeasement of the cosmic sense. Man he was and man he must remain. It was probable that he was entering upon his last hours, but he made no oblation to a God in which he did not believe. Pursuing the laws of reason with remorseless logic, he had made of himself a god. At the dawn of consciousness he had seen the self in pictures, till now, at the threshold of the night of time, he saw himself as antichrist. His brain, as he had always known, was adapted just a little better to the modern one-hell-of-a-muss than that of any other adventurous insect. It enabled him to get, with a minimum of effort, all the things he sought in the material world. They did not bring happiness, but he did not look for it. Such an abortion as man had no claims to beatitude. For man in his very nature was a hybrid, a contradiction, a grotesque in whom the elements must be ever at war. Let him never seek peace on earth, and as far as heaven was concerned, granting that it existed, what a place of exquisite boredom it must be! Long hours the Colossus lay searching his heart and then, finally, he drew the bedclothes over his head and decided to go down fighting. To go down fighting--that would be the ultimate bliss for one who made no terms with life. After all, the lust for power was greater than the will to live.