esigned as to catch and
concentrate the yearly more feeble rays of the sun, so that its
life-giving warmth might continue to be the boon of living people.

* * * * *

It had been found as Earth cooled that life was possible to a depth of
eight miles below the one-time surface, so that the one huge building
extended below the surface to this great depth, and was divided and
re-divided to make homes for men, their wives, and their progeny. But
even so, space was limited. Neighboring families outgrew their
surroundings, overflowed into the habitations of their neighbors--and
every family was at constant war against its neighbors.

Men did not die, but they could be slain, and there was scarcely a home,
above or below, in all the vast building, which had not planned and
executed murder, times and times--or which had not left its own blood in
the dwelling places of neighbors.

No law could cope with this intolerable situation, for men, down the
ages, had changed in their essential characteristics but little--and
recognized one law only in their extremity, that of self-preservation.

So there was murder rampant, and mothers who wept for children,
husbands, fathers or mothers, who would never return to their homes.

"My grandfather," whispered Sarka, his eyes peering deeply into a
certain area beyond that assigned by law to the House of Cleric, where
men of two neighboring families were locked in mortal, silent conflict,
"should not have frustrated the mad scheme of Dalis! It was slaughter,
wholesale and terrible, but it would have cleansed the souls of the
survivors!"

* * * * *

Mentally Sarka was looking back now to that red day when Dalis, the
closest scientific rival of Sarka the First, had come to Sarka the
First with his proposal which at the time had seemed so hideous. Sarka
remembered that interval in all its details, for he had heard it many
times.

"Sarka," Dalis had said in his high-pitched voice, staring at Sarka the
First out of red-rimmed, fiery eyes, "unless something is done the world
will rush on to self-destruction! Men will slay one another! Fathers
will kill their sons, and sons their fathers, if something is not done!
For always there is marrying and giving in marriage, and each family is
reaching out in all directions, seeking merely space in which to live.
Formerly there were wars which automatically took thought of the
overplus of