Ed and his companions talked in this manner to their acquaintances, spoke on street corners, sent letters to newscast agencies. And they won many people over. The trouble was that they, and others like them, could not reach everybody. Their Earth remained beautiful. There were hazy hills covered with trees; there were soaring spires. The unrest was an undercurrent. This was a time of choosing of sides, and of buildup, while there was a sense of helpless slipping onward toward what few could truly want. Voices with another, harsher message were raised. Tom Granger was hardly alone there, either. Tracts were passed out as part of their method: _What Is Our Heritage?_; _The Right to Be Human_; _Technology Versus Wisdom_. Perhaps directly out of such a mixture of truth and crude thinking the assassinations began. There were thousands in scattered places. One day Ed Dukas pushed into a knot of curious onlookers and saw the body of one of the first of these. There, in the same park where Ed had first met Abel Freeman, it had been found in the early morning. A Midas Touch blast had torn it in half. "It's Howard Besser, a machinist who lives in the same building with me," a man in the crowd offered. "He died once in the lunar explosion. Now it happened again. That's no joke, even though he can be brought back." Ed saw the victim's torn flesh. It _looked_ like flesh. But broken bones had little metallic glints in them. Could you avoid remembering that, mated to like, these beings of vitaplasm could even reproduce their kind, to help increase their number? Had persons like Tom Granger planned even this dramatization of a difference? Bits of this flesh still squirmed, hours after violence. Granger had made progress. Growing public attention had won him the privilege of orating on the newscast. It was he who had first talked about vampires and androids--together, and to a world-wide audience. He also accomplished an important part in winning the legal suppression of labs creating human forms in vitaplasm. "It was desecration," he declared in his speech. "It is a tragedy that we could not clamp down the lid sooner. There are an estimated seventy million of these 'improvements on nature' now in existence. And there are many hidden establishments still producing more. Can we ever destroy them all? It is criminal to lock a human soul in such substance. If, of course, the soul truly remains human, as it was meant to be...." Granger's voice was always gentle. Yet to his listeners it suggested dark, lonesome places where there is danger. Which was true. For now other killings had started. Familiar human blood was spilled. On a pavement Ed saw a grim legend smeared in red beside a corpse: "WHO WILL INHERIT THE UNIVERSE? RETRIBUTION. ONE GOOD TURN DESERVES ANOTHER."