Chandler paused and tried to find an answer. Rosie was not either belligerent or mocking. She was only sympathetically trying to reach his point of view. He shook his head silently. "Not meaning 'no'--meaning 'no comment'? Well, I don't blame you, love. But do you see that we're not altogether a bad thing? It's bad that there should be so much violence. In a way. Hasn't there always been violence? And what were the alternatives? Until we came along the world was getting ready to kill itself anyway." "There's a difference," Chandler mumbled. He was thinking of his wife. He and Margot had loved each other as married couples do--without any very great, searing compulsion; but with affection, with habit and with sporadic passion. Chandler had not given much thought to the whole, though he was aware of the parts, during the last years of his marriage. It was only after Margot's murder that he had come to know that the sum of those parts was a quite irreplaceable love. But Rosie was shaking her head. "The difference is all on our side. Suppose Koitska's boss had never discovered the coronets. At any moment one country might have got nervous and touched off the whole thing--not carefully, the way we did it, with most of the really dirty missiles fused safe and others landing where they were supposed to go. I mean, touched off a _war_. The end, love. The bloody _finis_. The ones that were killed at once would have been the lucky ones. No, love," she said, in dead earnest, "we aren't the worst things that ever happened to the world. Once the--well, the _bad_ part--is over, people will understand what we really are." "And what's that, exactly?" She hesitated, smiled and said modestly, "We're gods." It took Chandler's breath away--not because it was untrue, but because it had never occurred to him that gods were aware of their deity. "We're gods, love, with the privilege of electing mortals to the club. Don't judge us by anything that has gone before. Don't judge us by anything. We are a New Thing. We don't have to conform to precedent because we upset all precedents. From now on, to the end of time, the rules will grow from us." She patted her lips briskly with a napkin and said, "Would you like to see something? Let's take a little walk." She took him by the hand and led him across the room, out to a sundeck on the other side of the restaurant. They were looking down on what had once been a garden. There were people in it; Chandler was conscious of sounds coming from them, and he was able to see that there were dozens of them, perhaps a hundred, and that they all seemed to be wearing suntans like his own. "From Tripler?" he guessed. "No, love. They pick out those clothes themselves. Stand there a minute."