ere
almost golden in color--and his face was very gentle, almost reverent.
For those two lights were signals to Sarka the First and Sarka the
Second, his grandfather and his father!

* * * * *

It was Dalis, the irascible, the fiery tempered, the erratic, who first
made answer.

"Yes! What is it now?"

Sarka smiled a trifle grimly as he spoke a single word.

"Wait!"

The voice of Dalis, which Sarka had good cause to remember, had sounded
as loudly in the laboratory as though Dalis had been present there in
person, for men had learned to communicate by voice almost without the
aid of radio and its appurtenances though the principle upon which the
first crude beginnings of radio were fashioned still applied. Each man's
dwelling place was both a "sender" and a "receiver," and men could talk
and be talked to no matter where they lived--individuals telepathically
summoned at desire of anyone wishing verbal contact.

"Gerd is here!" came the voice of that Spokesman.

To him also Sarka spoke one word.

"Wait!"

"I am here, Sarka!" came a musical voice. "And Jaska is with me,
listening!"

That would be Cleric, loyal friend, master scientist, but always shy of
contact with people, though swift to anger and self-forgetfulness when
he knew himself right and was opposed. Sarka darted a look back at the
Revolving Beryl, adjusted swiftly the Beryl-microscope, and smiled into
the faces of Jaska and Cleric, who looked enough alike that they might
have been brother and sister, though Cleric had been born ten centuries
before his daughter Jaska. They smiled back at him.

* * * * *

He shifted the Beryl-microscope and stared for a second at Dalis, there
in the Beryl, and marked the antagonism Dalis was at no pains to hide.

One by one the Spokesmen reported.

Klaser, from the Americas; Durce from the valleys of the vanished
Atlantic; Boler from that part of the Artic Circle not included in the
wedge which the Gens of Dalis thrust northward to the Pole: Vardee;
Prull; Yuta; Aal; Vance and Hime. Each from his appointed area, each
from the official headquarters of his Gens, the name given to those
people who acknowledged the tutelage of a Spokesman. Each Spokesman,
therefore, was the mouthpiece of millions of men, women and children.
And over the Spokesmen, and not themselves Spokesmen, were three
scientists: The Sarkas, First, Second and Third.

When all twe