tle pause; then came these singular sentences:

"Weaklings praying for miracles to make easy the path their own wills
should clear. Beggars who whine for alms from dreams. Shirkers each
struggling to place upon his god the burden whose carrying and whose
carrying alone can give him strength to walk free and unafraid, himself
godlike among the stars."

And now distinctly, unfalteringly, the voice went on:

"Dominion over all the earth? Yes--as long as man is fit to rule; no
longer. Science has warned us. Where was the mammal when the giant
reptiles reigned? Slinking hidden and afraid in the dark and secret
places. Yet man sprang from these skulking beasts.

"For how long a time in the history of earth has man been master of it?
For a breath--for a cloud's passing. And will remain master only until
something grown stronger wrests mastery from him--even as he wrested it
from his ravening kind--as they took it from the reptiles--as did the
reptiles from the giant saurians--which snatched it from the nightmare
rulers of the Triassic--and so down to whatever held sway in the murk of
earth dawn.

"Life! Life! Life! Life everywhere struggling for completion!

"Life crowding other life aside, battling for its moment of supremacy,
gaining it, holding it for one rise and fall of the wings of time
beating through eternity--and then--hurled down, trampled under the feet
of another straining life whose hour has struck.

"Life crowding outside every barred threshold in a million circling
worlds, yes, in a million rushing universes; pressing against the doors,
bursting them down, overwhelming, forcing out those dwellers who had
thought themselves so secure.

"And these--these--" the voice suddenly dropped, became thickly,
vibrantly resonant, "over the Threshold, within the House of Man--nor
does he even dream that his doors are down. These--Things of metal whose
brains are thinking crystals--Things that suck their strength from the
sun and whose blood is the lightning.

"The sun! The sun!" he cried. "There lies their weakness!"

The voice rose in pitch, grew strident.

"Go back to the city! Go back to the city! Walter--Drake. They are not
invulnerable. No! The sun--strike them through the sun! Go into the
city--not invulnerable--the Keeper of the Cones--strike at the Cones
when--the Keeper of the Cones--ah-h-h-ah--"

We shrank back appalled, for from the parted, scarcely moving lips in
the unchanging face a gust of laught