al mutations, and I never knew him very well until
the revolution came and we went away together. He was a doctor, my
boy, and a good one. We spent almost five years together and I learned
a lot from him. About medicine, but that wasn't important then. I'm
thinking of what I learned about love. I'd always hated Yardsticks,
but my son was one, and I came to love him. He had plans for
rebuilding the world, he and I and the rest of us. We were going to
wait until the revolution ended and then help restore sanity in
civilization.

"But the Naturalists flew over and dropped their bomb, and my boy
died. Over four hundred of our group died there in the canyon--four
hundred who might have changed the fate of the world. Do you think I
can forget that? Do you think I and the few others who survived have
ever forgotten? Can you blame us if we did go crazy? If we hid away
out there in the western wilderness, hid away from a world that had
offered us nothing but death and destruction, and plotted to bring
death and destruction to that world in return?

"Think about it for a moment, Littlejohn. We were old men, all of us,
and the world had given us only its misery to bear during our
lifetimes. The world we wanted to save was destroying itself; why
should we be concerned with its fate or future?

"So we changed our plans, Littlejohn. Perhaps the shock had been too
much. Instead of plotting to rebuild the world, we turned our thoughts
to completing its destruction. Our tools and texts were gone, buried
in the rubble with the bodies of fine young men. But we had our minds.
Crazed minds, you'd call them--but aware of reality. The grim reality
of the post-revolutionary years.

"We burrowed away in the desert. We schemed and we dreamed. From time
to time we sent out spies. We knew what was going on. We knew the
Naturalists were gone, that six-footers had vanished from a Yardstick
world. We knew about the rehabilitation projects. We watched your
people gradually evolve new patterns of living and learning. Some of
the former knowledge was rescued, but not all. Our little group had
far more learning than you've ever dreamed of. Fifty of us, between
ourselves, could have surpassed all your scientists in every field.

"But we watched, and we waited. And some of us died of privation and
some of us died of old age. Until, at last, there were only a dozen of
us to share the dream. The dream of destruction. And we knew that we
must act swiftl