nother world, another solar system, began to grow more
clear as the space man became more at home in the new way of
communication. He was one of a race who had come to Erb from beyond the
stars and discovered it a world without human life: So they had
established colonies and built great cities--far different from
Memphir--and had lived in peace for centuries of their own time.

Then on the faraway planet of their birth there had begun a great war, a
war which brought flaming death to all that world. The survivors of a
last battle in outer space had fled to the colonies on Erb. But among
this handful were men driven mad by the death of their world, and these
had blasted the cities of Erb, saying that their kind must be wiped out.

The man they had rescued had turned against one such maddened leader and
had been imprisoned just before an attack upon the largest of the
colony's cities. After that he remembered nothing.

Varta stopped trying to follow the conversation--Lur was only explaining
now how they had found the space man and brought him out of the wrecked
ship. No human on Erb, this one had said, and yet were there not her own
people, the ones who had built Memphir? And what of the barbarians, who,
ruthless and cruel as they seemed by the standards of Memphir, were
indeed men? Whence had they come then, the men of Memphir and the
ancestors of the barbarian hordes? Her hands touched the scaled skin of
the suit she still wore and then rubbed across her own smooth flesh.
Could one have come from the other, was she of the blood and heritage of
Lur?

"Not so!" Lur's mind, as quick as his flickering tongue, had caught that
panic-born thought. "You are of the blood of this space wanderer. Men
from the riven colonies must have escaped to safety. Look at this man,
is he not like the men of Memphir--as they were in the olden days of the
city's greatness?"

The stranger was tall, taller than the men of Memphir and there was a
certain hardness about him which those city dwellers in ease had never
displayed. But Lur must be right, this was a man of her race. She smiled
in sudden relief and he answered that smile. Lur's soft laughter rang in
both their heads.

"Asti in His Infinite Wisdom can see through Centuries. Memphir has
fallen because of its softness and the evildoing of its people and the
barbarians will now have their way with the lands of the north. But to
me it appears that Asti is not yet done with the pattern