at one time in their history, but they failed.

Secure in the knowledge that theirs was the only civilizing force on the
face of the planet, the race of the Great Nobles spread over the length
of a great continent, conquering the lesser races as they went.

Physically, the Great Nobles and their lesser subjects were quite
similar. They were, like the commander and his men, human in every sense
of the word. That this argues some ancient, prehistoric migration across
the empty gulfs that separate the worlds cannot be denied, but when and
how that migration took place are data lost in the mists of time.
However it may have happened, the fact remains that these people _were_
human. As someone observed in one of the reports written up by one of
the officers: "They could pass for Indians, except their skins are of a
decidedly redder hue."

The race of the Great Nobles held their conquered subjects in check by
the exercise of two powerful forces: religion and physical power of
arms. Like the feudal organizations of Medieval Europe, the Nobles had
the power of life and death over their subjects, and to a much greater
extent than the European nobles had. Each family lived on an allotted
parcel of land and did a given job. Travel was restricted to a radius of
a few miles. There was no money; there was no necessity for it, since
the government of the Great Nobles took all produce and portioned it out
again according to need. It was communism on a vast and--incomprehensible
as it may seem to the modern mind--_workable_ scale. Their minds were as
different from ours as their bodies were similar; the concept "freedom"
would have been totally incomprehensible to them.

[Illustration]

They were sun-worshipers, and the Greatest Noble was the Child of the
Sun, a godling subordinate only to the Sun Himself. Directly under him
were the lesser Great Nobles, also Children of the Sun, but to a lesser
extent. They exercised absolute power over the conquered peoples, but
even they had no concept of freedom, since they were as tied to the
people as the people were tied to them. It was a benevolent
dictatorship of a kind never seen before or since.

At the periphery of the Empire of the Sun-Child lived still unconquered
savage tribes, which the Imperial forces were in the process of slowly
taking over. During the centuries, tribe after tribe had fallen before
the brilliant leadership of the Great Nobles and the territory of the
Empire had