"How?" Cragin's voice was touched with the mixed overtones of curiosity and incredulity. "By their own right. Through methods of their own." "That's a hell of a scientific answer," Cragin said. "It is no answer at all!" the girl said. She took a step forward toward the intruder, and there was high color in her cheeks. Only his cloak moved. "Perhaps you control your own destinies, if that is what you care to think. But not ours! For the use of your machinery, we will gladly repay you, in any medium that you desire that we are capable of supplying. But our role isn't that of intruder or wrong doer; it is simply one of desperation. With your machines, our planet, its life, might be saved. If you know of life, you know of the high value men put upon it. If you believe in--" "Save your breath, honey. I think the bull of the woods here is trying to work up an angle. He's a phony. All he's got here are a bunch of damn good telescreens, and they've never moved anything yet.... Right, Buster?" The figure in scarlet mail moved then. There was no sound, and hardly a show of motion as his fingers played over a switch-studded panel. The telescreens came to life. In each were pictured solar systems, some binary; one with three suns. All were circled about with planets turning in a precise geometry of motion. With barely a nod, the figure singled out the screen in which the binary and its brood of planets shown like so many pin-points of light rolling in eerie slow motion through Infinity. A finger flick that Cragin could not follow and-- Three planets suddenly plunged headlong; in seconds there was a blinding flash. Even as he shielded his eyes, Cragin knew that he had been witness to the destruction of an entire system. Although it had been light-years distant, and the telescreen had relayed the coruscations of its destruction instantaneously, Cragin knew that there was no way to deny what he had seen. "Ours is the power," the voice said, "of life and of death." He wanted desperately to convince himself that it was all part of the same colossal fake--that it was simply one of the most fabulous illusions ever devised behind which to direct a system or galaxy-wide bootlegging net. It had to be that. It had to be, he realized with uncomfortable suddenness, because if it were not, it represented a science which had no regard for the laws that impeded men; one that had risen to far greater heights than that of which men boasted so proudly. And that of course could not be. It was that knowledge alone which had made life worth the living for centuries. Perhaps, when she had refused to speak of what she had seen, Lin Griffin had been wiser than he thought. But she had said-- Cragin felt himself becoming sickeningly mixed up. And whether he wanted to believe his own senses or not, he knew that here was no phony, no fake, no illusion. Realizing it hurt like hell. * * * * *