Var was staring in fascination at the Ryzga's face. It was a face formed by the custom of unquestioned command; yet it was lined by a deeply ingrained weariness, the signs of premature age--denied, overridden by the driving will they had sensed a moment earlier. It was a sick man's face. The Ryzga's final thought clicked into place: _Decision!_ He turned toward the switchboard behind him, reaching with practised certainty for one spot upon it. Neena screamed. Between the Ryzga and the control panel a nightmare shape reared up seven feet tall, flapping black amorphous limbs and flashing red eyes and white fangs. The Ryzga recoiled, and the weapon in his hand came up. There was an instantaneous glare like heat lightning, and the monster crumpled in on itself, twitched briefly and vanished. But in that moment a light of inspiration had flashed upon Var, and it remained. As the Ryzga stretched out his hand again, Var acted. The Ryzga froze, teetering off balance and almost falling, as a numbing grip closed down on all his motor nerves. Holding that grip, Var strode across the floor and looked straight into the Ryzga's frantic eyes. They glared back at him with such hatred and such evil that for an instant he almost faltered. But the Ryzga's efforts, as he strove to free himself from the neural hold, were as misdirected and unavailing as those of a child who has not learned to wrestle with the mind. Var had guessed right. When Neena in her terror had flung a dream monster into the Ryzga's way--a mere child's bogey out of a fairy tale--the Ryzga had not recognized it as such, but had taken it for a real being. Var laughed aloud, and with great care, as one communicates with an infant, he projected his thoughts into the other's mind. "There will be no new beginning for you in _our_ world, Ryzga! In two thousand years, we've learned some new things. Now at last I understand why you built so many machines, such complicated arrangements of matter and energy to do simple tasks--it was because you knew no other way." Behind the hate-filled eyes the cold brain tried to reason still. "Barbarians...? Our party was wrong after all. After us the machine civilization could never rise again, because it was a fire that consumed its fuel. After us _man_ could not survive on the Earth, because the conditions that made him great were gone. The survivors must be something else--capacities undeveloped by our science--after us the end of man, the beginning.... But those of us who chose to die were right." The tide of hate and sick desire rose up to drown all coherence. The Ryzga made a savage, wholly futile effort to lift the weapon in his paralyzed hand. Then his eyes rolled upward, and abruptly he went limp and fell in a heap, like a mechanical doll whose motive power has failed.