And you're the only one who is stopping us, Trevor had told him. You're the one man standing in the way of Man. You're the stumbling block. You are keeping men from being gods.
But all men did not think as Trevor did. All men were not tangled in the blind chauvinism of the human race.
The delegates from the Android Equality League had talked to him one noon, had caught him as he stepped off the elevator on his way to lunch, and had stood ranged before him as if they expected him to attempt escape and were set to cut him off.
One of them had twisted a threadbare cap in his dirty fingers and the woman's hair had dangled and she had folded her hands across her stomach, as determined, stolid women do.
They had been crackpots, certainly. They were fervent crusaders in a cause that held them up to a quiet and devastating scorn. Even the androids were not sympathetic to them, even the androids for whom they were working saw through the human ineffectiveness and the gaudy exhibitionism of their efforts.
For the human race, thought Sutton, cannot even for a moment forget that it is human, cannot achieve the greatness of humility that will unquestioningly accord equality. Even while the League fought for the equality of androids, they could not help but patronize the very ones that they would make equal.
What was it Herkimer had said? Equality not by special dispensation, not by human tolerance. But that was the only way the human race would ever accord equality…by dispensation or by overweening tolerance.
And yet that pitiful handful of patronizers had been the only humans he might have turned to for help.
A man who twisted his cap in grimy fingers, an old, officious woman and another man with time heavy on his hands and nothing else to do.
And yet, thought Sutton…and yet, there is Eva Armour.