Then Kyrsis said: "You leave me no choice, Earthman. I see I must tell you Gadar's secret." "_Gadar--?_" Her lips twitched. "Yes, Earthman. Gadar, the dark star--the star hurled into your solar system from across the void: cold, bleak, barren, uninhabited Gadar." "You mean that you--your people--are of Gadar?" The silver woman nodded. "Yes. When our star cooled, in the course of that endless voyage across the void, we had no choice but to burrow deeper and deeper, like animals--cutting ourselves away from the awful cold of outer space, hunting desperately for the last dim vestiges of warmth at our planet's core. Then, when at last we had come into the family of your sun, we saw no reason to let it be known that we existed. For we knew the thing we had to do if we were still to live, and we knew that if you knew it, Gadar would be doomed." "Then--this is Gadar? We are inside it now--deep down below the surface?" "So deep that even the echographs of your Federation's exploration parties did not find us. Here, for a million years, we have built our civilization." A new glint came to the woman's violet eyes, a note of excitement to her voice. "The things we have done, Shane! The incredible things! You will never believe them until you see them. We have conquered time and space and matter--" "And the child is dead," Shane said. "The child--" Kyrsis broke off, and a shadow crossed her face. "Yes, the child is dead." * * * * * Unspeaking, the Earthman waited. His temple veins no longer throbbed, but his jaw was hewn of granite. Kyrsis said: "There are so many things your childish science knows that are not true--and one of them is the nature of life." Shane studied her, narrow-eyed. "So? In what way?" "You think that life comes into being when certain conditions are correct. But we know otherwise." "I hear only words, not meaning," Shane clipped coldly. "Of course. Because the whole pattern of your thinking is based on false assumptions." The silver woman groped for words. "The thing I seek to say, too simply, is that life is not a creature of conditions. It is an entity, a basic element, a product of the whole great cosmic process of creation. Either it exists in a place, or it does not." She shrugged. "Your solar system has it." "And Gadar--?" "Gadar had it once, ten million years ago. But life is like any other resource. You use it up. It dissipates and scatters, transmuted into useless forms by a process that not even our science can reverse." Her voice fell. "Then, Shane, your planet dies." Shane stared at her. "So you bought slaves--"