What young Shortmire might have done as a human, they would consider a matter for local law--but the fact that human and Morethan had begotten offspring would interest them. The fact that the Morethans might have managed at last to get a spy on Earth would interest them. If Emrys would not surrender his birth certificate, they could get another from Clergal. Only, would the government's representative believe Hubbard enough to get that birth certificate? Or would they, like Dyall, dismiss him as a doddering old fool? The private humiliation had been hard enough; he hated to risk a public one. But it was his duty to tell officialdom of his suspicions, he knew miserably. Never again could he think with pride of himself as a worthy citizen if he didn't at least make the attempt. Never again could he let himself feel a justifiable jealousy of those with endowments superior to his, if he did not prove himself worthy of what he had. Well, there was no hurry; he would sleep on it. He was mistaken. In the morning, before he had even started to decide upon any course of action, the front desk called to announce that a Mr. Shortmire wished to see him. "Very well," the old lawyer said wearily into the machine, _to_ the machine, for it was the Dyall itself speaking. "Send him up." A short while later, there was a rap on the door. "Come in," Hubbard called. The door slid open. A man entered, a tawny golden youth with eyes like burnished metal. "Do you know who I am, Peter?" "Of course," Hubbard said, faintly disgusted, since he considered melodrama vulgar. "You're Emrys Shortmire." "You're wrong," the man said. "I'm Jan Shortmire." V Emrys Shortmire had gone home the night Dyall had shown him the portrait of his long-dead wife, and Emrys had dreamed, not of Megan Dyall, but of Alissa Embel, Megan's great-great-grandmother, whom he had wanted a hundred years before, and who had married Nicholas Dyall. Consciously, he had forgotten her, but at the back of his mind, she had, for over a century, walked hand in hand with his hatred. That night he understood what he had not realized then. He had completed the engines with which he had been tinkering for years with a real vengeance. He had taken the first starship out into space himself--when no one had faith in his engines, least of all himself--merely "to show her" what a great man he was, even if he died in the showing. In his spite, he had opened up the stars for mankind. And when he returned, years later, he found that Dyall, too, had stopped tinkering and had changed the pattern of his gadgets to one more acceptable to the public taste. Before, they had operated quite satisfyingly, but they had not been salable in the shape he had given them, and no manufacturer had been interested in leasing the patents. Now that he had yielded, manufacturers were falling all over themselves to get the right to produce his machines.