s instead of iron, and our only
fire is that of the Sun, and even now, two thousand years later, the
Earth is still slowly recovering from the pangs and poison of that age.
If you turn up the sod in the plain where the wild herds graze, you will
find numberless fragments of rusted or corroded metal, bits of glass and
strange plastic substances, debris of artifacts still showing the marks
of their shaping--the scattered wreckage of the things they made. And
we--we too are a remnant, the descendants of the few out of all humanity
that survived when the Ryzgas' world went down in flame and thunder.

"In the last generation of their power the Ryzgas knew by their science
that the race of man would endure them no longer. They made ready their
weapons, they mined the cities and the factories for destruction, making
sure that their works and their knowledge would perish with them.
Meanwhile they redoubled the yoke and the punishments, hastening the
completion of the last of the starships.

"From the memories that the old Watchers have left here, and from the
memories of dead men that still echo in the air, I have gathered a
picture of that world's end. I will show it to you...."

* * * * *

Var and Neena stared, unstirring, with wide vacant eyes, while the old
man wove a dream around them, and the bright ice-cave faded from their
vision, and they saw--

Black starless night, a sky of rolling smoke above the greatest city
that was ever built. Only the angry light of fires relieved the city's
darkness--that, and the blue-white lightning flashes that silhouetted
the naked skeletons of buildings and were followed by thunder and a
shaking of the earth.

Along lightless streets, half choked with rubble and with the dead,
poured a mad, hating horde. The recurrent flashes lit scarred faces,
naked bodies blackened and maimed from the hell of the workshops where
the Ryzgas' might had been forged, eyes that stared white and half
sightless from the glare of the furnaces, gnarled hands that now at long
last clutched the weapons of the last rebellion--a rebellion without
hope of new life on a world gutted and smoldering from the fulfilment of
the Ryzgas' dream, without slogans other than a cry for blood.

Before them death waited around the citadel where the masters still
fought. All round, from the lowest and most poisonous levels of the
shattered city, the slaves swarmed up in their millions. And the