r, fought for its life, and space itself was
ablaze with the struggles of wars for survival.

"Again science helped us. Thousands of years before, men had learned how
to change the mass of matter into energy, but now at last the process
was reversed, and those ancestors of ours could change energy into
matter, any kind of matter they wished. Rock they took, and changed it
to energy, then that energy they transmuted to air, to water, to the
necessary metals. Their planets took a new lease of life!

"But even this could not continue forever. They must stop that loss of
air. The process they had developed for reformation of matter admitted
of a new use. Creation! They were now able to make new elements,
elements that had never existed in nature! They designed atoms as, long
before, their fathers had designed molecules. At last their problem was
solved. They made a new form of matter that was clearer than any
crystal, and yet stronger and tougher than any metal known. Since it
held out none of the sun's radiations, they could roof their worlds with
it and keep their air within!

"This was a task that could not be done in a year, nor a decade, but all
time stretched out unending before them. One by one the three planets
became tremendous, roofed-in cities. Only their vast powers, their
mighty machines made the task possible, but it was done."

The droning voice of Tordos Gar ceased. Taj Lamor, who had listened with
a mixture of amusement and impatience to the recital of a history he
knew as well as the aged, garrulous narrator, waited out of the inborn
respect which every man held for the Elders. At length he exclaimed: "I
see no point--"

"But you will when I finish--or, at least, I hope you will." Tordos
Gar's words and tone were gently reproving. He continued quietly:

"Slowly the ages drifted on, each marked by greater and greater triumphs
of science. But again and again there were wars. Some there were in
which the population of a world was halved, and all space for a billion
miles about was a vast cauldron of incandescent energy in which
tremendous fleets of space ships swirled and fused like ingredients in
some cosmic brew. Forces were loosed on the three planets that sent even
their mighty masses reeling drunkenly out of their orbits, and space
itself seemed to be torn by the awful play of energies.

"Always peace followed--a futile peace. A few brief centuries or a few
millennia, and again war would flame. It