, and he poured gasoline into the hole and the earth around
it, taking satisfaction in the thought of the writhings in agony below.
He went about hunting _kifs_, to step on them. To stamp them out. He
must have killed millions of _kifs_.

But always there were as many left. Never did their number seem to
diminish in the slightest. Like the Martians--but unlike the Martians,
they did not fight back.

Theirs was the passive resistance of a vast productivity that bred
_kifs_ ceaselessly, overwhelmingly, billions to replace millions.
Individual _kifs_ could be killed, and he took savage satisfaction in
their killing, but he knew his methods were useless save for the
pleasure and the purpose they gave him. Sometimes the pleasure would
pall in the shadow of its futility, and he would dream of mechanized
means of killing them.

He read carefully what little material there was in his tiny library
about the _kif_. They were astonishingly like the ants of Terra. So much
that there had been speculation about their relationship--that didn't
interest him. How could they be killed, _en masse_? Once a year, for a
brief period, they took on the characteristics of the army ants of
Terra. They came from their holes in endless numbers and swept
everything before them in their devouring march. He wet his lips when he
read that. Perhaps the opportunity would come then to destroy, to
destroy, _and destroy_.

Almost, Mr. Smith forgot people and the solar system and what had been.
Here in this new world, there was only he and the _kifs_. The _baroons_
and the _marigees_ didn't count. They had no order and no system. The
_kifs_--

In the intensity of his hatred there slowly filtered through a grudging
admiration. The _kifs_ were true totalitarians. They practiced what he
had preached to a mightier race, practiced it with a thoroughness beyond
the kind of man to comprehend.

Theirs the complete submergence of the individual to the state, theirs
the complete ruthlessness of the true conqueror, the perfect selfless
bravery of the true soldier.

But they got into his bed, into his clothes, into his food.

They crawled with intolerable tickling feet.

Nights he walked the beach, and that night was one of the noisy nights.
There were high-flying, high-whining jet-craft up there in the moonlight
sky and their shadows dappled the black water of the sea. The planes,
the rockets, the jet-craft, they were what had ravaged his cities, had
turne