But they were effective to the _nth_ degree. The entire fleet of that one remaining brain-machine would have been lost, but it retired into space, racing away at top speed, out into space, with the remaining remnant of its great fleet. And sixteen hundred years it had raced across space, to be destroyed at last by another race of men. The battle was over, and the machine awaited its destruction. We rayed it out of existence. It was too great a menace to keep. Some people still do not believe that those Sirians were truly machines. They can not believe that a machine can have intelligence, but certainly Waterson's calculating machine has intelligence of a sort. And they ask, what would a machine want to exist for? It would have no aim, nothing to perform. Why should it want to live, or exist? We might ask what it is human beings want to live for. If there is an after-life, it is certainly not that that we live for. I am sure no man wants to die. Yet what aim have we? What function must we perform? Why should we wish to live? Our life is a constant struggle, the machines, at least, had eliminated that. There seems to me no reason why a machine should want to live, but certainly it has less reason to pass out of existence than we have! That war was destructive--terribly so. But it has brought its compensations. More than fifteen million human beings lost their lives in that great struggle, either in the battles in space, or caught in the Dis rays during that battle on Venus. But those fifteen millions have died a painless death, and twenty billions live because of their sacrifice. And it was not a vain sacrifice. We have learned much in return. No machines man ever made equaled the machines we captured there on Mars. And man will never experiment on the lines of the machine-brain. He has been warned. The brain-machine we captured was destroyed without investigation. The machines we use, the wonderful worker machines, have been modified to permit of radio control. And Stephen Waterson's discovery of the de-activating field not only helps in law enforcement, but makes war with material energy impossible. No, in all, we have lost little. Mars lost its cities, its forests, its ancient civilization. New cities are being built on the modern plan, larger, finer, more beautiful; the forests are being replaced; but the records, the relics of a civilization have been lost forever. In that we have lost much. Though all moveable things were moved when the warning came, there was much that could not be moved. The great palace of Horlak San was destroyed, but it is being rebuilt in the exact spot, in exactly the same manner. It is a worth-while project, but there is much which cannot be restored.