It was disheartening to realize that even though he had attained the stars, Man had not yet sloughed off the instincts and habits of the ape from which he sprang. Man's genius had blazed a path across the spaceways, Man's bravery had established new colonies from scorching Mercury to frozen Uranus. SSP lightships bridged the chasms between and beyond; even now the concentrated rays of faraway Sol were steaming the rimy crust off Pluto that Earth's miners might extract the valuable ores revealed by the spectroscope. But with the growth of the colonies, Man's ever latent cupidity had come into play. This past half century, thought Dan Mallory with a sort of savage anger, had been nothing but one long, bloody era of warfare between the forces of law and the outlawry of the greedy. Now there was this uprising on the first satellite of Jupiter; Io. A charming little world. A pleasant Earth-like orb, spinning quietly about its gigantic parent. Up to this time, its natives had never been troublesome. Squat, muscular creatures, more or less anthropoid, except for the fact that their complexions had a pale, greenish cast and their eyes were double-lidded like those of snakes. They had an intelligence of .63 on the Solar Constant scale. Within a century or so the control board meant to award them autonomy; toward this end educators had been working ever since Io had been removed from the British Imperial Protectorate in 2221. Trouble had sprung, both literally and figuratively, like a bolt from the blue. A cosmic _blitzkrieg_. One moment there had been peace and sweet content on Io; the next came a frantic, garbled message about "a rebel army ... natives ... led by...." The rest had been drowned in an ear-drum blasting burst of electronic static that had rendered all further communication impossible. "Kreuther!" said Mallory thoughtfully. The affair sounded like one of Kreuther's moves. That power-mad genius, exiled from Earth after the thwarted Lunar Campaign of 2234, was accustomed to strike in just this fashion. He alone, of all avowed SSP enemies, had the persuasive ability to win to his cause a horde of normally contented Ionians, the wealth with which to set into motion war's red machinery, the genius with which to disrupt interplanetary communications. "But if it is Kreuther," thought Mallory consolingly, "this time he's bitten off more than he can chew. That new weapon--" He wondered, briefly, which officer, sailor, passenger, had been entrusted with the secret of the new ray gun's construction. Then he cast the thought from his mind. It was none of his business. It were better he didn't know.