"So now you brew up monsters like yourselves, to attack us. I wouldn't be like you if it was the last way to be alive." "Oh, no, brother? Those creatures must be yours. What makes you so good? Born with your own hide, eh? The elite. With jelly for insides, and a mean nature." Talk swiftly led to flying fists. But who could hurt an android with a human fist? Before their hardened knuckles a human jaw could become mush. Still, there were heavier primitive weapons. Then, by progression, weapons that were not so primitive. Ed didn't try any more to quell the trouble. He watched it, walked around it and away from it. The wise and careful thinking that he had been taught to believe in seemed to have deserted his kind. The stars were only a remote fancy, lost in the chaos of local emotion. Feeling beaten, Ed finally got home. This was the evening when he told himself that anything could happen at any moment--that morning might not even come. On the newscast, he heard the report that the first star ship--to be aimed perhaps at Proxima Centauri or Sirius--was within weeks of completion out there on its asteroid. There were infinite heights to this era of his. And terrifying depths. This was the evening when, fearing that the spoken word could no longer be heard through the din of clashing hatreds, Ed Dukas decided to write letters. He meant to begin with a letter to Les and then write to his father, whose eyes had turned backward toward archaic simplicities. He wanted to write to Granger, asking again for calm. But he had only completed a few paragraphs to Les when that kid nickname of his appeared on a blank sheet of his paper. From nowhere: "_Nipper._" Only Mitchell Prell, unheard from for ten years, had ever called him that. His uncle. A likable little man, tainted by accusations, but part of the once thrilling thoughts of the future. Mitchell Prell had belonged to the onward surging and reaching of science--and its stumbling. The lunar blowup had come as a forerunner of the first leap to the stars. And the human-and-android animosity had resulted from the mastery of the forces of life. Wonder becoming horror. White turning black. Till you hardly knew what to believe in, except that, being alive, you had to go on trying to make things right. For an hour Ed Dukas sat in his room. Nothing more appeared on the paper which he had clamped under his microscope. "_Nipper._" That was all. Silly name of his childhood. Often he looked around him, as though expecting someone to appear. Several times he said softly, "Uncle Mitch, you must be here, someplace...." There was no answer. The muttering tumult in the streets--the shouts, the occasional rush of feet, the curses and yells--masked the arrival of Tom Granger. Ed was startled from his preoccupation to find Granger almost at his elbow. With him was a man who looked like a plain-clothes police official. In the background, grim and frightened, was Ed's mother.