n, slowly, Walden nodded.

"I wondered how long it would be before you asked that. Yes, there have
been others. Sometimes three or four in a generation."

"Then, perhaps...."

"No," Walden said. "There aren't any others now. We'd know it if there
were." He turned away from Eric, to the plastic wall that looked out
across the garden and the children playing and the long, level,
flower-carpeted plain.

"Sometimes, when there's more than one of them, they go out there away
from us, out to the hills where it's wild. But they're found, of course.
Found, and brought back." He sighed. "The last of them died when I was a
boy."

Others like him. Within Walden's lifetime, others, cut off from their
own race, lonely and rootless in the midst of the new. Others like him,
but not now, in his lifetime. For him there were only the books.

The old race was gone, gone with all its conflicts, all its violence,
its stupidity--and its flaming rockets in the void and its Parthenon in
the moonlight.

* * * * *

Eric came into the study and stopped. The room was filled with
strangers. There were half a dozen men besides Walden, most of them
fairly old, white-haired and studious looking. They all turned to look
at him, watched him gravely without speaking.

"Well, there he is." Walden looked from face to face. "Are you still
worried? Do you still think that one small boy constitutes a threat to
the race? What about you, Abbot?"

"I don't know. I still think he should have been institutionalized in
the beginning."

"Why? So you could study the brain processes of the lower animals?"
Walden's thoughts were as sarcastic as he could send them.

"No, of course not. But don't you see what you've done, by teaching him
to read? You've started him thinking of the old race. Don't deny it."

"I don't."

The thin man, Drew, broke in angrily. "He's not full grown yet. Just
fourteen, isn't he? How can you be sure what he'll be like later? He'll
be a problem. They've always been problems."

They were afraid. That was what was the matter with them. Walden sighed.
"Tell them what you've been studying, Eric," he said aloud.

For a minute Eric was too tongue-tied to answer. He stood motionless,
waiting for them to laugh at him.

"Go on. Tell them."

"I've been reading about the old race," Eric said. "All about the stars.
About the people who went off in the starships and explored our whole
galaxy."

"What's