f a moonless, clouded night
there was a whispering of many wings, and from dark shapes that loomed
against the dark sky, great beams swept over the tented fields where
the prolats lay huddled and sleeping. And when the red sun circled the
ice-chained earth he found in his path heaps of dust where on his last
journey he had warmed the swarming millions._

_The slaves thus ruthlessly destroyed could well be spared, for the
machines did the work of the world, even to the personal care of the
aristos' pampered bodies. Only for direction, and starting and
stopping, was the brain and the hand of man required. Now that the
inhabited portion of the terrestrial globe was so straitly
circumscribed, radio power waves, television and radio-phone, rendered
feasible the control of all the machines from one central station,
built at the edge of the Northern Glacier. Here were brought the scant
few of the prolats that had been spared, a pitiful four hundred men
and women, and they were set to endless, thankless tasks._

_I was one of those few; and Keston, my friend, who was set at the
head of the force. I was second in command. For a decade we labored,
whipped our fellows to their tasks, that the aristos might loll
careless in the perfume and silks of their pleasure palaces, or riot
in wild revel, to sink at last in sodden stupor. Sprawled thus they
would lie, until the dressing machines we guided would lift them
gently from their damasked couches, bathe them with warm and fragrant
waters, clothe their soft carcasses in diaphanous, iridescent webs,
and start them on a new day of debauchery._

_But the slow vengeance of an inscrutable Omnipotence they mockingly
denied overtook them at last, and I saw the rendering and payment of
the long past due account._

* * * * *

As I entered the vast domed hall wherein all my waking hours were
spent, the shrill whistle of an alarm signal told me that something
had been wrong. Instinctively I looked toward the post of Abud. Three
times in the past week had Keston or I been called upon for swift
action to right some error of that dull witted prolat. On the oval
visor-screen above the banked buttons of his station I saw the
impending catastrophe. Two great freight planes, one bearing the
glowing red star that told of its cargo of highly explosive terminite,
were approaching head-on with lightning rapidity. The fool had them on
the same level.

Abud was gaping n