k saucer.
Dirrul had never been so far from Agron. He felt a stifling sense of
insignificance.

The meaning of time as he understood it was somehow overwhelmed by the
immensity of space. Now and yesterday, today and tomorrow, became a
single unity. Dirrul had a new sense of the past in terms of the
present. His mind groped for word symbols that he understood which
could crystalize the shadowy new concept filling his mind.

New understanding seemed to arise from the space-map. Somewhere among
the glowing points of light was the Place of the Beginning, a single
planet called Earth. In the far-distant past Earthmen had made
themselves rational beings. But for centuries thereafter they had made
no further progress, apparently appalled by the audacity of such
presumptive evolution. They had fought through a long primitive period
of violence, erecting system on system and philosophy upon philosophy
to conceal, destroy and wipe out their own biological machinery.

Then out of a final orgy of death and terror the Earthmen had grasped
the meaning and the responsibility of the Rational Potential. They had
understood the reality of being.

Within a century after that they had conquered space. They had found
peoples like themselves occasionally--but more often races that had
followed different biological adaptations to different environments.
Wherever there seemed to be a spark of primitive rationality the
Earthmen had stayed and patiently taught the Rational Potential of
being, which they had learned for themselves only after such
bloodshed.

The galaxy was theirs, in a sense, for it thought in the patterns of
Earthmen, although long ago their direct influence had waned. They
were a legend and an ideal, lost in the vastness of space, yet bound
fast into the cultures of all peoples.

Yet somewhere the Earthmen must have failed, somewhere there must have
been a flaw in their teaching. Fifty years earlier, as the Agronians
measured time, the galaxy had been torn apart by war. The Agronians
had led one group of planets, the Vininese another. Planet after
planet was seared by deadly new weapons--world after world died in the
orange flame of gaudy atomic disintegration. Slowly the power of Vinin
crept across the sky until the Vininese ruled half the galaxy.

Their first defeat had come unexpectedly. Their great space-armada
swung in on Agron, while the people crowded in terror in their flimsy
raid shelters. But the Vininese shi