"I'll be glad when this is over," she said at dinner in the ship in the lock-tunnel. "I don't think any of you realize what this fortress and the matter-transposer and the planet it took us to--I don't believe any of you realize what such things can mean to people." Burke waited. She smiled at him and said briskly, "There's a vacant planet for people to move to. People occupied it once. They can do it again. Once it had a terrific civilization. This fortress was just one of its outposts. There were plenty of other forts and other planets, and the people had sciences away ahead of ours. And all those worlds, tamed and ready, are waiting right now for us to come and use them." Holmes said, "Yes? What happened to the people who lived on them?" "If you ask me," said Sandy confidentially, "I think they went the way of Greece and Rome. I think they got so civilized that they got soft. They built forts instead of fighting fleets. They stopped thinking of conquests and begrudged even thinking of defenses, though they had to, after a fashion. But they thought of things like the Rhine forts of the Romans, and Hadrian's Wall. Like the Great Wall of China, and the Maginot Line in France. When men build forts and don't build fighting fleets, they're on the way down." Burke said nothing. Holmes waited for more. "It's my belief," said Sandy, "that many, many centuries ago the people who built this fort sent a spaceship off somewhere with a matter-transposer on board. They replaced its crew while it traveled on and on, and they gave it supplies, and refreshed its air, and finally it arrived somewhere at the other side of the Galaxy. And then the people here set up a matter-transposer and they all moved through it to the new, peaceful, lovely world they'd found. All except the garrison that was left behind. The Enemy would never find them there! And I think they smashed the matter-transposer that might have let the Enemy follow them--or the garrison of this fort, for that matter! And I think that away beyond the Milky Way there are the descendents of those people. They're soft, and pretty, and useless, and they've likely let their knowledge die, and there probably aren't very many of them left. And I think it's good riddance!" Pam said, "If we beat the Enemy there'll be no excuse for wars on Earth. There'll be worlds enough to take all the surplus population anybody can imagine. There'll be riches for everybody. Joe, what do you think the human race will do for you if, on top of finding new worlds for everybody, you cap it by defeating the Enemy with the globes?"