Stranger in a Strange Land

as the next one will probably be worse. Ben, you undervalue Joe Douglas."
                "He's a cheap, courthouse politician, with morals to match!"
                "Yes. And besides that, he's ignorant to six decimal places. But he is also a fairly able and usually conscientious world chief executive-better than we could expect and probably better than we deserve. I would enjoy a session of poker with him . . . for he wouldn't cheat and he wouldn't welch and he would pay up with a smile. Oh, he's an S.O.B.-but you can read that as 'Swell Old Boy,' too. He's middlin' decent."
                "Jubal, I'm damned if I understand you. You told me yesterday that you had been fairly certain that Douglas had had me killed . . . and, believe me, it wasn't far from it! . . . and that you had juggled eggs to get me out alive if by any chance I still was alive . . . and you did get me out and God knows I'm grateful to you! But do you expect me to forget that Douglas was behind it all? It's none of his doing that I'm alive-he would rather see me dead."
                "I suppose he would. But, yup, just that-forget it."
                "I'm damned if I will!"
                "You'll be silly if you don't. In the first place, you can't prove anything. In the second place, there's no call for you to be grateful to me and I won't let you lay this burden on me. I didn't do it for you."
                "Huh?"
                "I did it for a little girl who was about to go charging out and maybe get herself killed much the same way-if I didn't do something. I did it because she was my guest and I temporarily stood in loco parentis to her. I did it because she was all guts and gallantry but too ignorant to be allowed to monkey with such a buzz saw; she'd get hurt. But you, my cynical and sin-stained chum, know all about those buzz saws. If your own asinine carelessness caused you to back into one, who am I to tamper with your karma? You picked it."
                "Mmm ... I see your point. Okay, Jubal, you can go to hell-for monkeying with my karma. If I have one."
                "A moot point. The predestinationers and the free-willers were still tied in the fourth quarter, last I heard. Either way, I have no wish to disturb a man sleeping in a gutter; I assume until proved otherwise that he belongs there. Most do-gooding reminds me of treating hemophilia-the only real cure for hemophilia is to let hemophiliacs bleed to death . before they breed more hemophiliacs."
                "You could sterilize them."
                "You would have me play God? But we're veering off the subject. Douglas didn't try to have you assassinated."
                "Says who?"
                "Says the infallible Jubal Harshaw, speaking ex cathedra from his belly button. See here, son, if a deputy sheriff beats a prisoner to death, it's sweepstakes odds that the county commissioners didn't order it, didn't know it, and wouldn't have permitted it had they known. At worst they shut their eyes to it-afterwards-rather than upset their own applecarts. But assassination has never been an accepted policy in this country."
                "I'd like to show you the backgrounds of quite a number of deaths I've looked into."
                Jubal waved it aside. "I said it wasn't a policy. We've always had political assassination-from prominent ones like Huey Long to men beaten to death on their own front steps with hardly a page-eight story in passing. But it's never been a policy here and the reason you are sitting in the sunshine right now is that it is not Joe Douglas' policy. Consider. They snatched you clean, no fuss, no inquiries. They squeezed you dry-then they had no more use for you . . . and they could have disposed of you as quietly as flushing a dead mouse down a toilet. But they didn't. Why not? Because they knew their boss didn't really like for them to play that rough and if he became convinced that they had (whether in court or out), it would cost their jobs if not their necks."
                Jubal paused for a swig. "But consider. Those S.S. thugs are just a tool; they aren't yet a Praetorian Guard that picks the new Caesar. Such being, whom do you really want for Caesar? Courthouse Joe whose basic indoctrination goes back to the days when this country was a nation and not just a satrapy in a polyglot