The Moderator regarded her compassionately. "You haven't changed because I've told you the truth. Your life expectation is no shorter. It's a matter of relativity. To us our ten thousand years seems no longer than your three score and ten does to you." "Ten thousand years?" exploded Saxon. The sum was so staggering that it was only a figure to him. "Then--" he began, but the Moderator answered before he could speak. "No. I was not born when the experiment with the humanoids began. They were developed some twenty-five thousand years ago." Ileth began to laugh crazily, unable to stop. In a moment she would be hysterical. Saxon shook her roughly. "Stop it!" "I--I--I can't," she giggled. "Either he's mad or I am." Her words ended in a flood of tears. Saxon put his arm around the girl, turned back to the Moderator. "It was done with hard radiations?" "Yes. In the resultant mutants their metabolism had been accelerated beyond our wildest expectation. Their life cycle geared to their metabolism passed through its different phases like--like ..." again he fished in Saxon's mind for a simile. "Like a meteor. By artificially slowing down their metabolism they returned to their normal life span. "You've been very curious about the replica of New York II which you saw when you landed." Saxon nodded, trying to conceal a thought which had begun to take shape in the back of his mind. "It's just that. A replica of a city built during the Atomic Age by the humanoids. Their constant implacable wars are so savage that we've found it necessary to duplicate their work here, if we hope to preserve any of it for study." Saxon narrowed his eyes, asked, "You spoke of the menace of having such savage neighbors. Just how serious was such a threat?" * * * * * The Moderator smiled and glanced at his constituents. Saxon strained to grasp the thoughts flowing between them, but failed utterly. "Admirable!" the Moderator commented suddenly. "Your reactions, my son, are leading us to hope we may turn in the most optimistic report." Saxon stared at him as if he were crazy. Ileth's tears had subsided to a sniffle. "Now for your question," said the Moderator and coughed again. "The menace was real, not imaginary. We had created a monster that would be either a marvelous scientific instrument, or--the means of our destruction. "Remember, my son, time is relative. These creatures lived, fought, loved, begat children, carried on scientific research and died, all in seventy short years. They existed at fever intensity. Their metabolism burns them up. "Our lives are adjusted to a span of ten thousand years. We have a total population of little over a million. We are neither a war-like people, nor a highly-industrialized people. "In one of their generations the humanoids accomplish almost as much as we do in one of ours. Think, my son, they perform in seventy years what it takes us ten thousand to do.