City

And the Solar System, the entire Solar System, with the exception of Jupiter, would lie open for the new race of mutants to take over, to develop any kind of culture that they might wish – a culture that would scarcely follow the civilization of the parent race.

***

Webster swung away from the window, strode back to the desk. He stooped and pulled out a drawer, reached inside. His hand came out clutching something that he had never dreamed of using – a relic, a museum piece he had tossed there years before.

With a handkerchief, he polished the metal of the gun, tested its mechanism with trembling fingers.

Fowler was the key. With Fowler dead With Fowler dead and the Jupiter stations dismantled and abandoned, the mutants would be licked. Man would have the Juwain philosophy and would retain his destiny. The Centauri expedition would blast off for the stars. The life experiments would continue on Pluto. Man would march along the course that his culture plotted.

Faster than ever before. Faster than anyone could dream. Two great strides. The renunciation of violence as a human policy – the understanding that came with the Juwain philosophy. The two great things that would speed man along the road to wherever he was going.

The renunciation of the violence and the Webster stared at the gun clutched in his hand and heard the roar of winds tumbling through his head.

Two great strides – and he was about to toss away the first.

For one hundred and twenty-five years no man had killed another – for more than a thousand years killing had been obsolete as a factor in the determination of human affairs.

A thousand years of peace and one death might undo the work. One shot in the night might collapse the structure, might hurl man back to the old bestial thinking.

Webster killed – why can't I? After all, there are some men who should be killed. Webster did right, but he shouldn't have stopped with only one. I don't see why they're hanging him; he'd ought to get a medal. We ought to start on the mutants first. If it hadn't been for them That was the way they'd talk.

That, thought Webster, is the wind that's roaring in my brain.

The flashing of the crazy coloured sign made a ghostly flicker along the walls and floor.

Fowler is seeing that, thought Webster. He is looking at it and, even if he isn't, I still have the kaleidoscope.

He'll be coming in and we'll sit down and talk. We'll sit down and talk

He tossed the gun back into the drawer, walked towards the door.

NOTES ON THE SIXTH TALE

If there has been any doubt concerning the origin of the other tales in the legend, there can be no doubt in this. Here, in the sixth tale, we have unmistakably the hallmarks of Doggish story telling. It has the deeper emotional value, the close attention to ethical matters which are stressed in all other Doggish myths.

And yet, strangely enough, it is in this particular tale that Tige finds his weightiest evidence of the actuality of the human race. Here, he points out, we have evidence that the Dogs told these self-same tales before – the blazing fire when they sat and talked of Man buried in Geneva or gone to Jupiter. Here, he says, we are given an account of the Dogs' first probing into the cobbly worlds, their first step towards the development of an animal brotherhood.