For the ultimate object of Malgarth, they believed, was the total extirpation of mankind. On every planet the agencies of the far-flung Corporation had been growing more wealthy, at the expense of human owners. The robot legions of Malgarth's Space Police were gathering power. Everywhere it was becoming more and more difficult for a mere human being to own anything, to find a job, to feed himself and his dependents, or even to get into the relief lines to receive synthetic gruel. "Why waste with human labor?" ran an old slogan of the Corporation. "Let a robot do your work--efficiently." And now the very existence of mankind, said Jeron Roc, seemed a waste to Malgarth. The Corporation's loftily-named "technomitanization" campaign was in reality a cunning and ruthless effort to supplant mankind. Jeron Roc, navigator of the _Barihorn_, was a native of Saturn. He was massively tall, dark-skinned, with the piercing eyes of intellectual power. He came of a proud and ancient family; his father had been the foremost astronomer of the solar system--until a new edict of the Emperor reserved scientific research for the robots alone. "The will of Malgarth is now the law of the Empire," he explained. "For the Corporation owns nine tenths of the property in the Empire. Without the taxes paid by the robots, the Emperor and his bureaucrats would starve. Therefore the fleets of the Galactic Guard support the outrageous claims of the Corporation." The proud old savant, anyhow, had refused to surrender his observatory. A mob of robots from the local agency stormed the building, smashed priceless instruments, and killed the old astronomer. Returning from the great university on Titan--because another imperial edict had closed it to human students--Jeron Roc found the burned ruins of the observatory still smoking, and saw his father's body under the iron heel of a robot policeman. * * * * * The disruptor gun had flamed of itself in his hand. The technomaton exploded with a blue flicker of hydrogen. Dazed by his audacity, Jeron fled--for he had destroyed Corporation property and resisted the Space Police, hence was twice liable to death--and at last escaped into space. Of the two others, I had not learned so much. But Rogo Nug, who served the atom-converter generators and space-contraction drive of the _Barihorn_, was a veteran "space-rat." A brown little wisp of a man, thin lips purpled with the roots called _goona-roon_ which he chewed incessantly, he cursed picturesquely if sometimes lewdly by the anatomical divisions of the Emperor and the mechanical parts of Malgarth. He could not recall the planet of his birth. But his father, a stevedore of space, had been executed for the crime of striking against the Corporation; his mother, cut off relief for "harboring traitorous sympathies," perished; and Rogo Nug had become an orphan waif of the space-ways.