For another, each of them struck me as having been built to accommodate not one animal, but two or more. I remembered the innumerable meteor penetrations, and the great age they implied. I remembered that in the vacuum and in the absolute zero of space, corrosion and decay are unknown and that under such conditions objects can be preserved for millennia. I remembered the dimensions of the ship. It couldn't be, and yet-- SEN. LARCH: Please confine your account to what you saw and what you did, Colonel Greaves. LT. COL. GREAVES: Very well. The chamber housing the power source, when I finally located it, proved to be quite small. The source itself was an ion motor. It had been thoroughly and deliberately smashed, and both its condition and its advanced design prevented me from being able to tell very much about it, but I _could_ tell, nevertheless, that while it had been capable of powering the ship in space, it could never have launched the ship from a planet, assuming that said planet's gravity approximated Earth's. Launching a ship the size of that one took some doing, and I take off my hat to the technicians who accomplished it. SEN. LARCH: They just might have built the ship in space, you know. LT. COL. GREAVES: I have reason to believe otherwise, but if they had, I'd still take my hat off to them. * * * * * SEN. LARCH: All of which indicates, does it not, that we are dealing with a race of people scientifically superior to our own. LT. COL. GREAVES: It does. SEN. LARCH: Then, assuming for the moment that your theory is valid, doesn't it strike you as highly improbable that the sole survivors of so scientifically advanced a race would, immediately after landing on Earth, take up primitive husbandry? LT. COL. GREAVES: No, it does not. I think that in undertaking the voyage to Earth, the passengers and the crew of Spaceship X meant to leave far more behind them than the natural catastrophe--probably a tectonic revolution--that had occasioned their exodus. I think that they meant to leave behind them a way of life which they had come to loathe because it had supplied them with false gods, and I think that once they landed on Earth and dispersed, they threw this way of life over their shoulders and deliberately reverted to the thoughtworld and the religious cosmogony of their remote ancestors. In other words, I think that they used the natural disaster that forced them to migrate to another planet as an excuse to begin all over again, and that they burned their bridges behind them so that they would _have_ to begin all over again. Probably they blew up the auxiliary craft, or lifeboat, and every technological gadget it contained the very same day they landed.... Earth, in those days, must have seemed like a promised land indeed. Green, fertile, relatively unpeopled.... They had no way of knowing, probably, that inter-marriage with the natives would soon decimate their average life-expectancy.