And the words of Kingallis returned to him. "You won't live long enough!" the alien had said. "The universe isn't big enough for both of us!" The rats had deserted the doomed ship! It was so pat--so perfect! Now they would say that there never had been any aliens. At every turn Carroll was blocked and stopped and frustrated. How long the aliens had been guarding Terra he did not know. Perhaps about the time that the Lawson Radiation was discovered, or perhaps even before. No matter how good they were at intercepting things, the aliens could not keep some things from leaking out. They might have been here for centuries awaiting the man Lawson who was the discoverer. They might have been covering information that would have led to the discovery until they could no longer stop it. At that point in the rise of any culture the discovery of such a factor would be almost automatic.... Taking any science as a parallel, civilization makes its discoveries as it is ready for them. The discovery of radio would have been impossible before the knowledge of electricity. Nuclear physics would have been impossible without a working knowledge of simple chemistry. Each science stood upon the shoulders of the other. Electronics aided astronomy, mechanics aided electronics and chemistry aided mechanics. Physics gave men more information about chemistry and chemistry was a foundation stone for electronics. * * * * * How long that had been here Carroll did not care. The pertinent thing at present was the simple fact that _now they were gone_! Gone because they dared not stay! Carroll cursed. It was his fault. Whatever was being done to eliminate Terra as a threat to the aliens' ideas of aggrandizement was being done because James Forrest Carroll had been instrumental in uncovering their schemes. Had he remained in ignorance there would have been no reason for their latest plan--conquest for aggrandizement does not include extermination. To exterminate an enemy spells economic failure. There is little glory in being the Lord of All when _All_ consists of burned planets, dead cultures and the hollow grinning skulls of a billion billion intelligences. Homage comes not from a skull. There, in the moonlight of the clearing where once stood a large alien edifice, Carroll took from the back seat of his stolen car the knocked-down teleport and set it up alongside the road. He stepped into it and emerged in his asylum laboratory. He ignored the fact that both car and teleport were stolen and abandoned. The only thing of importance now was the safety--the personal safety--of all Terrans, whether they believed or not. That he alone had good reason to believe in the threat was unimportant. There have been many cases in the world of history when one man alone stood against the world and was right. Let them scoff.