Oh, it wasn't hatred, at first. Mere annoyance. He killed them in a routine sort of way at first. But they kept coming back. Always there were _kifs_. In his larder, wherever he did it. In his bed. He sat the legs of the cot in dishes of gasoline, but the _kifs_ still got in. Perhaps they dropped from the ceiling, although he never caught them doing it. They bothered his sleep. He'd feel them running over him, even when he'd spent an hour picking the bed clean of them by the light of the carbide lantern. They scurried with tickling little feet and he could not sleep. He grew to hate them, and the very misery of his nights made his days more tolerable by giving them an increasing purpose. A pogrom against the _kifs_. He sought out their holes by patiently following one bearing a bit of food, and he poured gasoline into the hole and the earth around it, taking satisfaction in the thought of the writhings in agony below. He went about hunting _kifs_, to step on them. To stamp them out. He must have killed millions of _kifs_. But always there were as many left. Never did their number seem to diminish in the slightest. Like the Martians--but unlike the Martians, they did not fight back. Theirs was the passive resistance of a vast productivity that bred _kifs_ ceaselessly, overwhelmingly, billions to replace millions. Individual _kifs_ could be killed, and he took savage satisfaction in their killing, but he knew his methods were useless save for the pleasure and the purpose they gave him. Sometimes the pleasure would pall in the shadow of its futility, and he would dream of mechanized means of killing them. He read carefully what little material there was in his tiny library about the _kif_. They were astonishingly like the ants of Terra. So much that there had been speculation about their relationship--that didn't interest him. How could they be killed, _en masse_? Once a year, for a brief period, they took on the characteristics of the army ants of Terra. They came from their holes in endless numbers and swept everything before them in their devouring march. He wet his lips when he read that. Perhaps the opportunity would come then to destroy, to destroy, _and destroy_. Almost, Mr. Smith forgot people and the solar system and what had been. Here in this new world, there was only he and the _kifs_. The _baroons_ and the _marigees_ didn't count. They had no order and no system. The _kifs_-- In the intensity of his hatred there slowly filtered through a grudging admiration. The _kifs_ were true totalitarians. They practiced what he had preached to a mightier race, practiced it with a thoroughness beyond the kind of man to comprehend. Theirs the complete submergence of the individual to the state, theirs the complete ruthlessness of the true conqueror, the perfect selfless bravery of the true soldier. But they got into his bed, into his clothes, into his food. They crawled with intolerable tickling feet.