all were content to drowse. One man was aroused. He was
Rastignac.

They were Rastignac's hope, those Six Stars, the gods to which he
prayed. When they passed quickly out of his sight he would continue
his pacing, meditating for the twenty-thousandth time on a means for
reaching one of those ships and using it to visit the stars. The end
of his fantasies was always a curse because of the futility of such
hopes. He was doomed! Mankind was doomed!

* * * * *

And it was all the more maddening because Man would not admit that he
was through. Ended, that is, as a human being.

Man was changing into something not quite _homo sapiens_. It might be
a desirable change, but it would mean the finish of his climb upwards.
So it seemed to Rastignac. And he, being the man he was, had decided
to do something about it even if it meant violence.

That was why he was now in the well-dungeon. He was an advocator of
violence against the status quo.

II

There was another cell next to his. It was also at the bottom of a
well and was separated from his by a thin wall of cement. A window had
been set into it so that the prisoners could talk to each other.
Rastignac did not care for the woman who had been let down into the
adjoining cell, but she was somebody to talk to.

"Amphib-changelings" was the name given to those human beings who had
been stolen from their cradles and raised among the non-humanoid
Amphibians as their own. The girl in the adjoining cell, Lusine, was
such a person. It was not her fault that she was a blood-drinking
Amphib. Yet he could not help disliking her for what she had done and
for the things she stood for.

She was in prison because she had been caught in the act of stealing a
Man child from its cradle. This was no crime, but she had left in the
cradle, under the covers, a savage and blood-thirsty little monster
that had leaped up and slashed the throat of the unsuspecting baby's
mother.

Her cell was lit by a cageful of glowworms. Rastignac, peering through
the grille, could see her shadowy shape in the inner cell inside the
wall. She rose langorously and stepped into the circle of dim orange
light cast by the insects.

"_B'zhu, m'fweh_," she greeted him.

It annoyed him that she called him her brother, and it annoyed him
even more to know that she knew it. It was true that she had some
excuse for thus addressing him. She did resemble him. Like him, she
had strai