The crowd clamored threateningly and rocked to the stage.
"Son of a bitch," Giles screeched, yanking a Kalet laser from under his armpit.
"Kill them," Ashinik screamed. "They can't harm you!"
People were pushing at the stage.
"One more step and we will shoot," Giles shouted.
"Stop!" Bemish cried out.
Strangely, the crowd stopped for a moment.
Bemish turned to the crowd spreading his palms — a local greeting gesture.
"What are you blaming me for?" he asked. "Not all the Earthmen, just me, you know, I can't be responsible for every conman born on the other side of the sky. What do you blame me personally for, Terence Bemish, the Assalah construction director?"
Jumbled shouts came out of the crowd.
"They beat the villagers… Walk around drunk… Took the land away… Make a lot of money…"
"Ah, make a lot of money!" Bemish shouted. "Why don't you make a lot of money? Have I offered you a job? I have! I have hundreds of jobs for you! Whose fault is it that you make less? Is it mine? Or is it those who don't allow you to work at the construction?"
The crowd was getting restless. It was evident that the idea about the sect being guilty of current problems had indeed popped in various minds, especially the young ones but nobody had said it aloud and it's as if an unsaid idea doesn't really exist.
"There is no order at the construction," a cry came out of the crowd.
Bemish raised his hand.
"You are right. I was not able to establish order at the construction."
And he turned to Ashinik.
"Will you be able to establish it?"
"The god is capable of everything and I am his servant here, in the village," Ashinik said.
"Excellent," Bemish said, "Your adherents are right. I can't maintain order at the construction. The sovereign, after all, can't maintain order in this whole country, who am I to maintain order in the spaceport? Scoundrels and cads trickled in to the construction and I can't figure out who the culprits are. So, I am asking you, Ashinik, to become my vice-president, fire everybody you would like to and hire everybody you would like to."
The zealot looked somewhat shocked.
"I can't serve demons," Ashinik said.
"In this case," Bemish said, "You will be responsible for the every binge, fight and depravity happening at the spaceport. Since, if you worked at the construction, you would be able to prevent this depravity. Why do you refuse to do good for the people? Can't you do this? Why then do you muddle people's minds calling yourself a man of power? Don't you want to do this? Why do you call yourself a pious man then?"
The grey crowd looking like a huge centipede with burning eyes made of the torches turned and moved and voices reached Bemish, standing on the stage.
"If Ashinik became a boss, everything would be really different."
Ashinik was silent. Bemish waited — what kind of man is he and what's stronger in him — the desire to hurt the people from the stars or the desire to help the peasants.
"You know my beliefs, Mr. Bemish," Ashinik uttered. "Do you think I will exchange them for your window they disburse money from?"
"I," Bemish said, "Believe in the freedom of conscience. The freedom of conscience is not, when you let your employees believe in what you like, it's when you let your employees believe what they want to. If you want to consider me a demon — go ahead. If you are afraid that a close encounter with me will weaken your beliefs, then they aren't worth much."
"All right," Ashinik said, "I accept your offer."
"You are nuts, Bemish," Giles said dismally.
Annoyed Kissur weighed the gun in his hand and threw it down the black Adera well.
"You are a fool, Terence," he said, "and all of you, Earthmen, are fools. It looks like your chicanery is of more use than your weapons."
The next day, the old bandit was taken to the capital in a truck. On its way, a crowd of peasant zealots stopped the truck, pulled the bandit out and dragged him to the village, somehow the bandit happened to be torn apart on the way.
Not informing local police, Bemish called special troops in masks but with an evident barbarian accent from the capital — mostly they were Kissur's ex-warriors — and they scoured the hired workers' barracks mercilessly fishing everybody suspicious out. They found about fifty such people, beat them senseless, deposited them in a net and attached the net to a freight helicopter. The helicopter made three triumphal circles above the spaceport and flew to the capital.
Afterwards Bemish let Ashinik and his zealots into the barracks. He gave full power to Ashinik and he proved to be right. The young fanatic was a great manager and his intelligence service seemed to know the background of each worker. They knew who in the barracks was a perspective zealot cowed by the bandits and the thieves, who was an honest worker away from all these catfights, who had robbed an Iniss bank last year and who had begged in Upper Kharaine. Ashinik just brought Bemish the lists of workers to be fired and Bemish initialed them without asking for any explanations that he wouldn't get anyway.
The same day, Shavash called Bemish and insistently demanded the arrest of all of the zealots. Bemish refused saying that they was necessary to exterminate the bandits. Shavash said that he would give Bemish two weeks to finish the bandits off and then Bemish should consecutively arrest all the zealots for abusing their authority, lynching and sadistic treatment of their subordinates. Actually, Shavash didn't suggest this plan out loud but rather pretended that it had been Bemish's plan from the very beginning. To destroy one infection using another one and then to write off all the depravities that had happened during the extermination of the former to the latter.
During that week, order and cleanliness came to rule the construction. Bemish didn't entertain any illusions about the methods the zealots used to attain this cleanliness — he saw how two janitors were whipping their colleague for a rug that he hadn't washed at his shift's end — they whipped him bloody with cries and brined whips.
For two weeks, Bemish wordlessly signed Ashinik's requests including a request for buying, at the company's expense, three hundred meters of white silk and three white geese even though Bemish was totally aware that white silk would be used for belts the zealots covered with spells and wore on their bodies and the three geese would be used for the divination about the demons' fate.
In the beginning of the third week, Bemish found his new human resources manager sitting and reading an acetylene welder construction and repair manual that a zealot, considering acetylene welding to be a phantom and illusion, was not supposed to do.
The next day, a highly placed committee from a Federation financial advisory body arrived. The committee was supposed to study Weian economics and collect data on the Galactic Bank target loan provided by the Federation. From Bemish's point of view, this endeavor was pointless since he hadn't seen a single target loan yet that was used for purposes other than the construction of suburban villas for the officials in charge of the credit distribution. The loans were humongous and the villas came out luxurious. And since the loans were guaranteed by the state, the Federation officials didn't give a damn what they were used for.
The committee landed in Assalah spaceport and expressed a desire to examine the finished buildings and also the construction's next stage, separated from the spaceport's operating part by steel mesh.
The committee was absolutely impressed with the order at the construction site. Parting with Bemish, the committee head, the Galactic Bank of Development Assistance vice-chairman, told him that he had a brilliant trade union leader.
"It's incredible! Terence, where have you found this treasure? Have you seen how the workers listen to him? They listen to him holding their breath as if he was a prophet, and he is not even twenty yet!"
The vice-president said that this guy should immediately get a scholarship and go to Havishem or Harvard and promised to write him a reference letter.
Upon the committee's departure, Ashinik asked Bemish why Shavash hadn't arrived with the Earthmen, since he had mostly been responsible for the distribution of the above mentioned loans. Bemish answered that Shavash had been busy. In fact, Shavash had called an hour before the flight and said that he would come on one condition only — if he could take back with him Ashinik's head in a sack. Shavash expressed himself exactly this way — "head."
"Do you know," Shavash asked, "That these Following the Way guys organized the last attempt at my assassination?"
"How would I know," Bemish snapped back, "If you hanged completely different people for it?"
The next day, Bemish saw the Okuri company stock price skyrocketing and it happened since Okuri perchance had secured from the sovereign the rights to develop copper deposits recently found in the Chakhar mountains. Bemish called Shavash to find out if Okuri had really gobbled this chunk or if somebody was spreading the rumors to pick some dough and to find out if there really was any copper ore in the Chakhar Mountains to begin with.
"I will exchange information about Okuri on Ashinik's balls," Shavash said.