The ancient one would smile and say, "Then I am content," and recombine into fog. And Emrys would wonder whether the Morethans had not _known_ before they granted him his heart's desire that it would turn to dust and ashes when he had it. Then he would dismiss the thought, telling himself maybe he'd been too impatient for pleasure. After all, how could he, sprung full-blown into a quasi-alien society, hope to become an integral part of it all at once? So he had waited ... one year, two years, three years. At the end of the fourth, the plague had struck. And he had stayed on Earth, because going to another planet somehow did not seem worthwhile. He was able to take care of his house alone, since the servants had been primarily for show, and the great Dyall machine--which was all the house, essentially, was--could run itself. Whenever a part of it broke down, he repaired it himself, glad of the opportunity to have something to do with his hands. Finally he realized that he must be immune; hence a lifetime waited ahead of him. So he turned to learning, for the vast libraries of tapes and books remained changeless amid the disaster. He read and he learned a great deal, and if he could not derive pleasure from this, at least there was a deep intellectual appreciation that almost took its place. The doctors on Ndrikull, the most advanced of the other planets, at last managed to find a serum that would kill the plague--that is, they maintained it was their serum that had killed it. Some suggested that the virus had died because Earth's environment had eventually proved hostile to it. But Earth did not die, even though most of its people had, because the great machines that took care of it--the Dyall machines--had kept functioning. Gradually, most of the people who had fled to the other planets came back, and those who had survived in the country returned to the cities. Earth was restored to its former splendor as the social and political capital of the Galaxy, though Ndrikull now was the financial center and rivaled Earth for artistic honors. But still Emrys stuck to his books. Once in a while, he would sink himself for a week or a month in what would be, for other men, physical pleasure, just to see if his reactions had changed, but they had grown even more impersonal. * * * * * When Emrys Shortmire had been ten years on Earth, he eventually ran into Nicholas Dyall, at the opening of a scientific exposition. As soon as he saw Dyall in the crowd, he turned to go, but Dyall had seen him at the same time, and hurriedly limped across the room. "You must be Emrys Shortmire," he declared, in a voice of surprising resonance for so old a man. "You look so much like Jan, I couldn't be mistaken." Grasping his stick with one hand for support, he extended the other to Emrys, who could not refuse it. "But you are so young...."