Carefully unwashed, draped in a bit of spotted fur and armed with a crude stone axe, I was billed as "the ferocious last caveman, the Atavar of Mars." My part, as I sat glowering and jangling my chain, was to listen for any chance mention of Mars' murdered sister, Earth. Jeron Roc listened, as he sold the tickets. Kel did, as he limped about to display the mermaid of Procyon and the liquid man and the anthropophagous flower and the Atavar. Then Kel, in a cracked, aged voice, would sing his ballads of space. He would crack jokes--some of them, to my weary knowledge, old a million years ago. And at last, with Setsi spinning about his head like a colored flame, he would break into a dance routine. After the show, then, while we were loading the other exhibits and striking the tent, Setsi read the minds of all who would pay to enter Kel's little booth. And no thought of Earth escaped her. In this way we searched planet after planet for any survivors of the mother world. And we found trace, indeed, of a few, perhaps a score in all, who had escaped when that strange agency of Malgarth's flung the Earth into the Sun. Eagerly, patiently, we followed down each clue. And always we found that the robot police and the Galactic Guard had been before us. The survivor, in every case, had been tracked down--and had died as a traitor. But none of the dead was certainly Verel Erin. In that lay the thin and thinning thread of hope. That was a weary, bitter time. Those planets where actual revolt had flamed out were closed by quarantine. Not even our unsuspected circus ship could pass the fleets of the Galactic Guard. But, even on the happier planets we were allowed to visit, the lot of man was cruelly hard. The robots, everywhere, had seized all possible advantage. Men were being ruthlessly pressed into unemployment, starvation--annihilation. "Malgarth is cunning," said Kel Aran. "He begins slowly. He makes a test, to see if the Stone is still a threat. He tries to destroy all who might know of it--all Earthmen. Then he drives men to revolt, one planet at a time, here and there--and crushes them. He dupes the Emperor, and sends the Galactic Guard to put down the rebels. He would set man against man--until only two are left!" And I knew that his hope was ebbing. Despair bit weary lines into his lean face, until there was need of little make-up to turn him into old Naralek. An increasing bitterness shadowed his eyes. "There's an old proverb," he said, "about the futility of searching for a needle in a planet of pins. But that is easier than finding one fugitive lost in a hostile universe." "Who is probably," put in the grave Saturnian, "already dead."