Ed saw this garish picture more clearly than ever before. His strange little body fairly quivered with it. He looked at Mitchell Prell, who had come beside him now, where the pieces of apparatus that made up the interior of a small receiving set loomed, and he saw in his face the puzzled, tired fear of a scientist whose researches had always aimed at doing good. Just then Ed Dukas, micro-android, was far from separated from the Big Earth as he used to know it. So now, in desperation, he clutched at a vision which had once seemed almost a fact. "Freeman," he said, "maybe men can't back down or co-operate with supermen. Doing that can seem like embracing extinction. But hasn't there always been an obvious thing for _us_ to do?" "Umhm-m--you mean _we_ should back down," Freeman replied softly. "Set out for the wide-open spaces that we were meant for. Leave the poor clodhoppers behind. Young fella, could be that you and me see things bigger. For others like us, it ought to be like that, only it ain't--yet. Most of the new people are butcher, baker and candlestick maker, Earth-born, and Earth-tied in their minds, like anybody. There's a ship, sure. But the stars are still awful far off, and never touched, and you can go addled just thinkin' about them. Lots of our sort would leave in their own sweet time, same as regular folks, sure. It's in their blood. You might say they got wings. But who really knows how to use 'em yet? And crowd our kinfolks off their home world? When they're spunky and sore like any human being? Nope. Sorry!" Ed's faint hope faded before the old android's realism. For years the movement of migration had been farther and farther outward into space. It was at once a fact, a dream and a philosophy, like getting nearer to the Eternal Unknown. But most of the worth-while solar system was already owned by the original dominant species. Beyond was only the distance, not a beaten path at all, an untried and fearsome novelty. One star ship was about completed, yes. Fast it would be, but its speed would still fall far short of the velocity of light. So the nearer stars were decades, centuries, millenniums away. An idea so familiar that it seems almost an accomplished fact can lose some of its charm in the hard glare of real obstacles. Ed felt something like a chill inside him. Though he knew the strangeness of a micro-cosmic viewpoint, others did not have this training and boldness for the unknown. He saw the majority of them balking fatally. But he still had to try _something_, to change as much of this as he could--if he could change any of it at all. "I don't know whether or not to blame you and the others for the revenge you say is rigged here and elsewhere, Freeman," he said. "I can see why both sides felt driven to do it. But I'm going to borrow your newscast facilities, Freeman. Or someone else's. Because rumor can be a powerful force. And I think I can give it a little push."