The creature that was drawing a saber from its scabbard, was dressed in a uniform now long dead, but easily recognizable because it had been resurrected recently in many of the romantic historical novels that enjoyed a Solarwide vogue. It wore the rugged active-service boots, the dun-colored trousers, and the stiff abbreviated jacket of a twentieth century foot soldier of officer caste. It was singing softly from a rigid mouth. "Death to the enemy." It was plain whom the enemy was to be. Revanche fell to his knees. "Mercy!" Its saber lifted. The immobile lips roared. "Justice!" EPILOGUE Da Vincelleo, hovering far above Dafess in a spaceship, watched the final scene upon the TV screen before him. Then, sighing because it hurt him to destroy his greatest work of art, he pressed a red button. And he saw the city of Dafess disappear in the old and familiar, but still terrible, mushroom. "That fool Revanche!" he said. "Did he really think I'd massacre an entire city and take a million to one chance of escaping retribution from the Solar Police?" He did not think of his being punished for such a deed as being justice. Anything he did was right; retaliation from others would have been vengeance, not justice. He sighed again. The Project: Dafess, had been enormous. But the worst problem had been Dafess's citizens themselves. Even while an exact replica of the city was being constructed in a Canadian wilderness, far from the real Dafess, his staff was tackling the necessary research, of which the hardest part had been both historical and technological. One, finding out exactly what each citizen looked and acted and talked like. Two, building Bioids that looked, acted, and talked like the original. Of course, the whole illusion had been designed to fool only one man and had had to be kept in existence less than ten hours. A minor, though fascinating problem had been that of getting blood to spout from the severed heads and concealing the springs and wires inside the wrecked bodies. At that moment Revanche, very much alive in his star yacht poised just above the stratosphere, pressed a button. The screen on his desk showed him a blur that was the missile he'd just launched and the target, Da Vincelleo's ship. Then there was incandescence, followed by the old familiar mushroom. Revanche growled, "That fool!" and he turned away from the screen. His face was smug as a porcupine's that has loaded up on tender and vitamin rich birch-bark. He felt exceedingly satisfied. Why not? Watching the destruction of the synthetic citizens of the synthetic city of Dafess had been almost as rewarding as seeing the real city delivered to judgment. The process had been a type of psycho-drama that any good psychiatrist would have recommended for emotional catharsis.