"Some of us will have to go on, Babs," he said one dwarf-lit half-night. "Blame it on fundamental biological law--in me, and the boys, too. Call it building an empire too big for any government. Maybe it's an intended step--toward some other condition still out of sight. No doubt we're far from the end of what we can become. I don't know. I don't really care. I'm just a man and glad of it. I only know how I feel, and I suspect that, deep down, you feel the same!" For a moment Barbara was angry and sad. She still had a woman's wish for permanence. She knew that Ed was thinking of other stars and their systems--red giants, flickering variables, bursting novae--a whole universe of mystery beckoning to a new kind of human. Even the ugly coal-sack clouds of cosmic dust could have their appeal. She herself was not beyond being intrigued by such things. She walked across her pleasant room, which had begun to bore her a little, as Ed knew. "I'm game," she said mildly. Inconceivably far off were other galaxies. Maybe Ed read her mind a little, as she thought of the vast, tilted swirl of the one in Andromeda, almost as big as their native Milky Way. It was the nearest, but so distant that all the light-years they had crossed could seem a mile by comparison. As a child she used to look at a picture of it and think that everything she could imagine, and much more, was there: books, musical instruments, summer nights, dark horror. Ed and she were like the pagan divinities dreamed up wistfully long ago. Yet now she felt very humble. "Ed--" "Yes?" "I was just wondering where God lives," she said. * * * * * ABOUT THE AUTHOR _Ray Gallun's stories have appeared in virtually every science-fiction magazine known to English-speaking man_--Galaxy, Astounding Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, Marvel Tales, Startling Stories, _etc._, _etc._, _plus_ Collier's, Family Circle, Utopia (_Germany_), _and various anthologies_. _He was born in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, in 1910, attended the University of Wisconsin, and has since spent most of his time, when not writing, traveling through the U. S., Mexico, Hawaii, Europe, and the Middle East. He is currently a resident of New York City._ * * * * * "AMONG THE BETTER SCIENCE-FICTION NOVELS." --_Wilmington News_ "Scientific experiments on the moon and an accidental lunar explosion that seared the earth triggers another tale from the imaginative pen of Raymond Z. Gallun, a familiar name to science-fiction readers. "The secret of life and the restoring to the living of victims of the holocaust initiate a conflict for Ed Dukas, Gallun's scientific pioneer of the future. Restoring persons through scientific methods, personality records and the memories of near kin, leaves one fatal flaw. They lack one indefinable quality--a divine spark, perhaps a soul.