"Not me. My demons. Maxwell demons--or Greco demons, they should be
called. He talked about them; I use them. When they're not using me.
This time, they burned down half the city."
"I remember now," I said. The papers had been full of it.
"They got loose," he said grimly. "But that's not the worst. You'll
have to earn your million a year, Virgie."
"What do you mean, they got loose?"
He shrugged. "Controls aren't perfect. Sometimes the demons escape. I
can't help it."
"How do you control them in the first place?"
He sighed. "It isn't really what you would call controls," he said.
"It's just the best I can do to keep them from spreading."
"But--you said sometimes you separate metals, sometimes you get
energy. How do the demons know which you want them to do, if you say
you can't control them?"
"How do you make an apple tree understand whether you want it to grow
Baldwins or Macintoshes?"
* * * * *
I gawked at him. "Why--but you don't, Greek! I mean it's either one or
the other!"
"Just so with demons! You're not so stupid after all, are you? It's
like improving the breed of dogs. You take a common ancestral mutt,
and generations later you can develop an Airedale, a dachshund or a
Spitz. How? By selection. My demon entities grow, they split, the new
entities adapt themselves to new conditions. There's a process of
evolution. I help it along, that's all."
He took the little slab of gold from me, brooding.
Abruptly he hurled it at the wall. "Gold!" he cried wildly. "But who
wants it? I need _help_, Virgie! If gold will buy it from you, I'll
pay! But I'm desperate. You'd be desperate too, with nothing ahead but
a sordid, demeaning death from young age and a--"