The big-headed man eyed him with a speculative look in his great eyes, behind which the captain glimpsed the flickering raw fire of a poisonous hatred. "It is enough for you to know that you must die." [Illustration: "_It is enough for you to know that you must die._"] * * * * * Llud frowned darkly--then an incredible light burst in his brain. He stared at the pictured figure with quite new and indescribable sensations. "You," he said slowly, "are not on Earth, as I was assuming; if you were, there'd be a time lag of quite a few minutes in this conversation. You must be on one of those miniature ships out there--which aren't big enough to hold a man!" He saw the uncanny hate flare closer to the surface this time. "You are clever," said the big-headed man spitefully. "Very well, then--in your screen you see some of the differences between me, who am human, and you, who are not any more. The main difference, which you do not see, is that I am three point sixty-two millimeters high, and you are more like two meters." Knof Llud was speechless. The man who had just said he was an eighth of an inch tall grinned unpleasantly again at his amazement. "Yes," he said. "I am one of the New Humanity, which has replaced your kind on the Earth. You are the last of the old, subhuman race of giants, which will very shortly be extinct." "It's impossible," whispered Llud. But he had to remember that he had been on the verge of deducing the thing himself. The little man folded his arms and gazed at him with mocking superiority. "You have the mentality of nine hundred years ago. Your age would have called size reduction impossible, even though they already had most of the biophysical and genetic knowledge needed. They suffered from increasing overpopulation, but they were blind to the obvious answer--so Earth went through the wasteful folly of launching the interstellar ships. We are descended from dull-witted giants like you." Cautiously, out of sight of the screen, Llud extended a hand and found a pad of memo blanks and a pencil. Without taking his eyes off the magnified, bragging image, he began to write. He thought he had the answer now to this murderous welcome. "_We_ have found the solution of the problem of growth," the image was saying. "For seven hundred years now, each generation has been smaller than the one before, so that there is constantly more room on the planet, relatively speaking; and the process still goes on. There are six hundred trillion of us on Earth now. In another two generations there will be a quadrillion human beings only two millimeters tall--and no overcrowding. "But," the little man snarled venomously, "we have no room for you giants!"