ps had vanished high in the air.
Not even debris had fallen on the planet.

It was the first use of the Nuclear Beams. Dirrul had been a schoolboy
when the Agronian scientists announced their discovery. He remembered
the exciting thrill of pride, recalled how he and his schoolmates had
dreamed of destroying the Vininese with the new weapon.

He remembered too the galling bitterness he had felt when the
scientists announced that they had made peace instead.

They had had sound reasons, of course. They said the Beams had a
limited value. They could be used only defensively to girdle a single
planet in the stratospheric level of its atmosphere. Elsewhere they
were harmless. To compound the spectacular timidity, the scientists
had given away the secret to all comers, including the Vininese. They
had an argument for that particular idiocy too--if each planet could
protect itself so easily from all external attack its people could
freely decide for themselves their galactic allegiance or maintain
isolated independence.

The Planetary Union had been formed and members of the Vininese
Confederacy invited to join it. Not a people anywhere in the
Confederacy made even tentative exploration of the offer while five
sun systems of the Union later joined the Vininese. That was the fact
that had ultimately prodded Dirrul into joining the Movement.

Later, when he read the pamphlets brought from Vinin, he had clarified
his purposes. On the one hand lay the waste, the confusion, the
uncertainty of Agron. Scientists who talked forever of hypotheses and
were afraid to stand firm for any absolute truths--moralists who
qualified even the simplest standards of right and wrong--philosophers
who glorified a condition of eternal chaos which they called an open
mind.

On the other hand lay the clean efficiency of Vinin. Scientific
certainty, and the progress that stemmed from it--the Space-dragon
instead of the Safe-sweet candy, a clear social organization in which
the individual was directed by established and inflexible principles.

The whole of it was history as Dirrul had learned it, the chronology
of the past. As he looked on the star map of the galaxy, at midpoint
between the two great unions of planets, the meaning of the past began
to change. The chronology fell into a new perspective.

Against the vast expanse of space time twisted into a new
relationship. Time and space began to equate with an exciting
synonymity. History was