"One is up the same cobbled road five miles, the third is further still by some five hundred miles." "I am glad I live here with you, alone." The boy's head nodded sleepily. "I do not like the men from Terra. They are despoilers." "They have always been. But someday," said the old man, "they will meet their doom. They have blasphemed enough, have they. They cannot _own_ planets as they have and expect nothing but greedy luxury for their sluggishly squat bodies. Someday----!" His voice rose high, in tempo and pitch with the Piper's wild music. Wild music, insane music, stirring music. Music to stir the savage into life. Music to effect man's destiny! "Wild-eyed Piper on the hill, Crying out your rigadoons, Bring the savages to kill 'Neath the waning Martian moons!" "What is that?" asked the boy. "A poem," said the old man. "A poem I have written in the last few days. I feel something is going to happen very soon. The Piper's song is growing more insistent every night. At first, twenty years ago, he played on only a few nights of every year, but now, for the last three years he has played until dawn every night of every autumn when the planet is dying." "Bring the savages?" the boy sat up. "What savages?" "There!" Along the star-glimmered mountain tops a vast clustering herd of black, murmuring, advancing. The music screamed higher and higher. "Piper, pipe that song again! So he piped, I wept to hear." "More of the poem?" asked the boy. "Not my poem--but a poem from Earth some seventy years ago. I learned it in school." "Music is strange." The little boy's eyes were scintillant with thought. "It warms me inside. This music makes me angry. Why?" "Because it is music with a purpose." "What purpose?" "We shall know by dawn. "Music is the language of all things--intelligent or not, savage or educated civilian. This Piper knows his music as a god knows his heaven. For twenty years he has composed his hymn of action and hate and finally, tonight perhaps, the finale will be reached. At first, many years ago, when he played, he received no answer from the subterrane, but the murmur of gibbering voices. Five years ago he lured the voices and the creatures from their caves to the mountain tops. Tonight, for the first time, the herd of black will spill over the trails toward our hovel, toward the road, toward the cities of man!"