The old roads. The ribbons of concrete and asphalt that once had carried thousands of cars, day and night. Now they were dark and empty. The car went through a village. It too was dark and empty. They swung on through countryside, without a light in it. And then there was a bigger village, and its dark windows stared at them like blind eyes. "All evacuated," said the driver. "Every village, town, farm, between here and New York was closed out two-three years ago." Wales, sitting hunched by the open window, watching the road unreel, saw an old farmhouse on the curve ahead. The headlights caught it, and he saw that all its window-shutters were closed. Someone, some family, had left that house forever and had carefully shuttered its windows--against doomsday. The poplars and willows and elms went by, and now and again there was a drifting fragrance of flowers, of blossoming orchids. Old apple-trees, innocently ignorant of world's end, were preparing to fruit once more. Wales felt a sharp, poignant emotion. He asked himself, as a world had been asking for five years, _Why did it have to be?_ There was only one answer. Far out in the dark lonesomeness of the solar system, far beyond man's new Martian colonies, the thousands of asteroids that swung in incredibly intricate and eccentric orbits--they were the answer. They had been shuttles, weaving fate's web. Kendrick had been the first to see it, to note the one big asteroid whose next passage near Jupiter would make its eccentricity of orbit _too_ great. With camera and telescope Kendrick had watched, and with the great electronic calculators he had plotted that orbit years ahead, and.... Wales had often wondered what Lee Kendrick had felt like when the first knowledge came to him, when the first mathematical formulae of doom came out on the calculator printing-tape. Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin, spelled out in an equation. An electronic computer, passionately prophesying the end of man's world.... "_In five years, the eccentricity of the asteroid Nereus will bring it finally across Earth's orbit at a point where it will collide with Earth. This collision will make our planet uninhabitable._" He well remembered the first stupefaction with which the world had received the announcement, after Kendrick's calculations had been proved beyond all doubt. "_No force available to us can destroy or swerve an asteroid so big. But in five years, we should be able to evacuate all Earth's people to Mars._" Kendrick, Wales thought now, had been able to give Earth the years of advance warning that meant escape, the years in which the tens of thousands of great rocket-ships could be built and the Marslift get under way. If mankind survived, it would be due to Kendrick's warning. Why should he vanish now? Wales suddenly became conscious that his driver was putting on the brakes. They were in the outskirts of Morristown.