The Titans interfered with no one. When they traveled outside their galaxy, they were prepared to defend themselves, but they did not desire conflict. And only space police kept the vigil.... Shellon was telling him this mentally and Rik understood.... For a thousand years there had been a pattern of slowing up in the Titans' Time-stream. The women remained unchanged. But in comparisons-of-ability charts which were kept for every individual, the near retrogression of males was discovered. Titan males were healthy and amiable--but with less and less driving force. And as the male drive lessened drastically, a picked group of women left Avol in search of males with the forceful characteristics Titans must regain to stop their drift backwards. Shellon was one of those women.... She had left her dimension to seek such a male, but after a century of fruitless search--for the life-form to which Titan and Earthmen belonged, was rare, as Rik's galaxy already had learned--she was returning to Titan when they had met the _Perseid_. "Six men," Shellon said to Rik Guelf, "were aboard the _Perseid_. My friend, Berna, was with me when we found her helpless, her piles miniature suns. And of the six aboard, only Eiler Guelf was alive." Rik felt a sudden release from the force which had rendered him so weak. Now he stood erect again. And Shellon was seated again, the robe drawn over her shoulders once more. "The atomic piles of the _Perseid's_ drive had overheated. There was no chance to jettison them before the life-boats fused to their compartments. We had great difficulty in rescuing your father. He was seriously injured. "When we knew that we should not be able to treat your father there, we turned our ship back to Avol." She paused. "Here we had to change him to our dimension to treat him. When he recovered, he chose to stay a Titan." Shellon smiled. "It could be that Berna was the influence that caused him to make that decision. But aside from that, Eiler Guelf is doing many things he had longed to do in your Galaxy but was never able to do. Creative things. Titans respect men who create, who add to the betterment of others. Such creativeness is encouraged here. "We live in peace on Titan and Titans do not have any urge to ruthlessness of any sort. And our span of life is ten thousand years." Now she paused. Rik Guelf was trembling. "If I become a Titan ..." raced through his mind. Then he thought of Galactic Service and his years with it, of the years spent preparing for the service, of men who had spent their lives serving it. * * * * * He had never seen Earth, but many of the men he had served with had been demoted at the whim of some sector director or other political bigwig down there on Earth. There was outlawry aplenty there, they knew. And the Galaxy Service had the job of fighting Earth's battles--some of them battles against organized outlaws. And the outlaws were renegade Earthmen.