Besides, belatedly, after years, there were voices, speaking out of wireless equipment in a way that Ed and Barbara Dukas and Mitchell Prell had reason to remember. That this world was now haunted by beings that floated with the dust in the air was a fact which in itself had an eerie, nomadic charm. Three tiny beings. No, now there were four. "Hello! Did you guess that we came with you on the star ship?... But we stayed on that first planet. Then we visited others. Once we slept under a glacier--we don't know how long. Now we have built another biological workshop. So we will not be lonely. There will be many of us. I see you have done well. What comes next?" Ed had the odd and startling impression of having been spoken to by himself. But he and a tiny speck of the clay of the half-gods were entirely distinct, even if their names were the same. The vast difference in size, enforcing separate thought patterns to meet the problems of different environment, had widened the gap further. "It's us!" Barbara said. Mitchell Prell and Nancy were also present just then, in the Dukas house. Perhaps the visitors had waited for them to be there. "I know who you mean," Nancy remarked. "Your little folk, Mitch. Tell them something. Or do they embarrass you by being so strange? Have you forgotten?" Prell laughed somewhat unsteadily. Other interests had long ago taken his attention away from the small regions that were within the reach of android powers. "They're special friends," he said. "We won't have any trouble talking to them. Hello yourselves!" So it was, for an hour. There was a mood of elfin charm, of expanded dimensions, of soft, rich colors; of physical laws wonderfully different in effect. The memory was haunting. But the larger Ed and Barbara had no present wish to return to that fantastic land. It was not their destiny. "So long for now...." The voices faded away playfully. But as Sirian time built Terran years, they were occasionally heard again, bearing a note of challenge. The new city had grown huge. The surrounding country was becoming populous. And the inevitable happened, like part of a plan implanted in the nature of man from the beginning--to grow, to reach out, to be bigger in all things than he was before, though perhaps even to imagine the final goal itself was still beyond his intelligence and his experience. Now a more rugged body only made the drives stronger and the outcome more sure. Still orbiting around this first colonial world, outside the old solar system and linked to the history of Earth, was the star ship, kept always in careful order. But on a small, jagged moon, a larger, better craft was under construction. It would have thrilled ancient blood; it could stir an android more. Something sultry began to ache in Ed Dukas's mind at the thought of restraint.