"Fortunately, the Terran Government had the wit to sense an impending explosion that would have scattered their precious 'Peace' to Kingdom Come. Thus began the hurried exodus of both Mutants and malcontents to the Jovian system of Moons. The Mutants went first by unanimous decision of the Council. They demanded to be taken to Ganymede, where with a sigh of infinite relief (on the part of the World-State), they were deposited bag and baggage. Then the malcontents were taken to Callisto, to Io, to Europa, and some even to one or two of those smaller Moons hardly bigger than asteroids. Even in exile, however, the parental hand of Terra followed its strange and wayward children. "For we can suppose without fear of error, that the stately World-State Government felt much as an old and weary hen that has hatched a particularly bewildering brood of ducks. Deep in its heart, Terra felt a guilty sense of blame, and had anyone been able to reach that cold and battered throne, he would have discovered the angry pity and vast misgivings with which it undertook the colonization of the Moons. "But as usual, they failed to take into consideration the 'Unpredictable,' that cosmic accident that recurs always in the lives of men--thus the World-State never even dreamed of what were later on to be called 'The Societies.'" Fermin the Arch-Mutant paused meditatively in his reading, and wondered with faint amusement if _Seville-Lorca_ peering from the summit of some remote Nirvana could see the stupendous drama that was being enacted in the Moons, and write on the spectral pages of a book, a new addition to his "_Annals_." But his sardonic reverie was suddenly arrested in mid-flight, for at his feet the great, golden _Felirene_ had stirred with the preternatural awareness of the feline, its immense green eyes feral as it sensed.... I "_O Moon of my delight_ That knows no waning..." Terra--19th Century. In the semi-darkness, the vast crysto-plast observatory was deserted. For the fifteen Tiers devoted to the feast, overflowed with celebrants who observed the three hundredth anniversary of their landing. All Io seemed devoted to the chief preoccupation in their lives, and, had managed to make of an historic fact, the excuse for a planet-wide bacchanale. Julian Varon removed his black silk mask and stepped to the wide balcony overhanging the plains. The frosty air was like a benison on his narrow, high-cheek-boned face, and the silence was a greater blessing still. Vaguely, he remembered the lines of an ancient poem of the twentieth century, which, by one of those ironies of Fate, had been preserved when far greater masterpieces had faded into oblivion: "_The brandy's very good-- Blue space before me and no sign of man._"