We took all that was best in thousands of years of yearning and striving for the right, he thought, and we made it into the Inquisition and the Star Chamber and the NKVD. We fattened our own children for each generation's slaughter. And yet we are not all evil. Astereos is right: if the other races had been like ourselves, it would have been bearable; or if we ourselves had been creatures of pure darkness, conscienceless, glorying in cruelty--then we could have made war on the Galaxy joyfully, and if we failed at least there would have been an element of grandeur in our failure. Olaf Stapledon had said this once, he remembered--that there was an artistry in pure, uncontaminated evil, that it was in its own way as real an expression of worship as pure good. The tragedy of human beings, then, was that they were not wholly tragic. Jumbled, piebald parcels of contradictions, angels with asses' ears.... What was that quotation from Bierce? _The best thing is not to be born...._ Someone brushed by him, and Cudyk looked up. He was at the intersection of Ceskoslovensko and Washington; he had come three blocks past his apartment without noticing where he was going. Chong Yin's was only a few doors to his left; perhaps he had been heading there automatically. But the doors were closed, he saw; seven or eight Chinese were standing in the street outside, and as Cudyk watched, Seu Min came down the stairs from the living quarters over the tea room. The other Chinese clustered around him for a moment, and then Seu appeared again. The others slowly began to disperse. Cudyk went to meet him. The mayor's face looked strained; there were new, deep folds of skin around his eyes. "What is it, Min?" said Cudyk. Seu fell in beside him and they walked back up the street. "Chong killed himself about an hour ago," said the Chinese. How many does that make? Cudyk thought, frozen. Six, I think, in the last two months. He had not known Chong well--the old man had been a north-country Chinese, not Westernized in the least, who spoke only his own language. Now that he thought of it, Cudyk realized that he did not know who Chong's close friends had been, if he had had any. He had always been the same spare, stooped figure in skull-cap and robe, courteous, unobtrusive, self-contained. He had a family; a wife, rarely seen, and six children. Somehow Cudyk felt that he would have been less surprised to hear that Moulios had committed suicide, or Moskowitz, or even Seu himself. My mistake, he told himself. I allowed myself to think of Chong as an institution, not as a man. "Have you some whisky?" asked Seu abruptly. "Yes," said Cudyk, "of course." "Let us go and drink it," Seu said. "I'm very tired." It occurred to Cudyk that he had never heard Seu say that before. They turned the corner at Athenai and climbed the stairs to his apartment. Seu sighed, and dropped heavily into a chair while Cudyk went to get the bottle and glasses.