"We'll win through!" Andres cried, his great hands strong and encouraging on Frederix's shoulders. "We'll get the Kaa ships to Calidao; we'll wireless Earth; we'll curb it now while it's not too late! Their armada is years away; much can be done ere it comes! "Why, we've already downed the Certagarni squadron and reestablished control there and in Botrodus!" That supreme confidence banished the hopeless resignation in Frederix's heart, buoyed him up and gave him newborn hope. Andres was smiling, reaching into the young engineer's open helmet to grasp his golden beard in iron fingers, to tug at it playfully. "Getting gray, fella! Must've happened when I shot you down!" That broke the strain. They grinned boyishly at each other; then Del spun on his heel, walked to the radio cabinet, and simultaneously a carbon copy of his own voice cried in mockery: "Don't move a muscle or I shall be forced to shoot." He started to turn; the robot's unsheathed pellet gun coughed and Del toppled over against the transmitter, smashing the bared, delicate condensers into nothingness as he dropped into paralysis. Frederix stood stunned. "No ... no ..." he murmured; and then he was leaping forward, tears of rage and futility in his eyes, to lift Del to a nearby couch, to call to him incoherently. He looked then to the robot standing silently nearby. The curses on his lips were never uttered, for flooding into his mind came a strong feeling of sorrow, regret, and the automaton was extending the weapons to him grip foremost, as though their surrender might repair the damage done! He tried to fight off the thoughts which thronged the threshold of his mind then. He tried to think of Del and of Onupari and his death cargo, of hellish death rushing across the light years towards Sol; but instead he could think only of the things Del had told him of creating this robot, powering it with a full gram of radium, releasing intelligence. That there was intelligence here, he did no longer question. A reasoning intellect which had forbade slaying him and now had done this inexplicable thing. Or did it have complete control of the robot's form? Had it acted of its own accord or had the robot's relays automatically caused this dilemma? That final thought brought a counter-thought, a clear and sorrowing affirmation! But how could he credit anything existing independent of a flesh and blood body as having intelligence? Must not every life form remain an insoluble psychophysical being? And yet--is not the basis of all things electrical? Life and all that pertains to it and the universe? Why not, then, a pure, radioactive intelligence? Could it not have arisen by evolving degrees from the complexity of atomic fluctuations finding genesis in the pitted core of Pallas--where Andres, prospecting to pass empty days away, had found it--a sentient consciousness born in cosmic loneliness out of the very fabric of the universe? Had not One Other thus found genesis?