“Well, it doesn’t seem very hospitable. I sent word I was coming, and look how you receive me. And, as they say on the Earth, I think it isn’t representative. The Solar System has a right to be here and a right to be heard. Perhaps we are a little younger than some of you, but that excuse won’t hold for ever. Youth, as they say on Jupiter, is no crime.” Somewhere a star exploded and threw a momentary brilliance over the caucus, so that the gems on the brows of the Ironies sparkled as if they were actually Betelgeux and Aldebaran and Spica and Arcturus and Capella and Sirius and Altair. None of the brooding figures started at the explosion, however, much less at the accusations of the Solar Irony. “Have I got to repeat all I told you before about the ironic work I and my helpers have done in the Solar System? I must say I am tired of telling it. You ought not to close your minds the way you do to new inventions and discoveries. The first thing you know you’ll all be so out of date that this radical doctrine about the moral government of the world will spread and ruin all your schemes. If you don’t wake up pretty soon it won’t matter whether you ever wake.” From one of the Ironies a red glow and from another a blue flame and from yet another a white radiance swept around the circle as if looking to see who would speak next, but, settling upon no one, they mingled in the centre and there rested quietly, splashing the pavement with gorgeous colours. “Take what’s going on in Mars today if you want to test my right to sit in this conclave. I have bilked the Martians into thinking that their everlasting messages to Earth are understood. So those philanthropists have wasted a mountain of treasure making instruments to carry their pompous flashes, and they babble wisdom into the void—as if their wisdom actually mattered or as if Earth would or could pay any attention to it if it ever reached there! You strike me as glum enough, but if you could only see the prophets and poets crowding around that transmitter and pouring all they have and are into it, and then going back to their business with the thick smirk of a duty performed—if you could see that you would laugh a month. That’s what I’ve done in the Solar System: I’ve trained the higher beings to prattle wisdom till they are hoarse and then not to practise it any more than if they were deaf and had never heard of it.” It may have been some vibration of sympathy which ran through the Ironies or it may have been merely deeper thoughts stirring them to resume the huge discourse.