Heym kept his gaunt face impassive, but for a moment he felt physically ill. He looked across the sparsely furnished office at the marshal’s squat simian form, he saw the barely suppressed triumph-smile in the heavy coarse visage, and a wave of sick revulsion swept over him.

He thought wearily: Fifteen hundred years…patience, work, worry, heartbreak, and triumph and a gathering dawn…generation after generation, watching from the skies, learning, pouring their whole lives into the mighty project—As if I didn’t know the danger, the fear which is the foundation and the reason for the Empire…and here we have the first glimmerings of what may be a way out of the rattrap which history has become…and it’s now all dependent on him! On the whim of a two-legged animal which will strike out in blind fear to destroy whatever it doesn’t understand…or even understanding, will destroy just for the satisfaction of venting an inferiority complex, of watching better men squirm in pain.

Calmness came, a steadiness and an icy calculation. After all, he thought, he was a psychologist and Goram was a soldier. It should be possible for him to handle the creature, talk him over, deftly convince him that he himself wanted what Heym wanted and had in fact thought of it himself and had to argue the scientist into agreement.

Yet—slow, easy, careful. He, Sars Heym, was a research man, not a practicing psychotechnician. He wasn’t necessarily able to handle the blind brutal irrationality of man, any more than a physicist was ordinarily capable of solving an engineering problem. And so much depended on the outcome that…that—

Briefly, he sagged beneath the burden of responsibility. The load seemed for a dizzying instant too much to bear—unfair, unfair, to load one man with the weight of all the future. For Station Seventeen was the key to the next phase of history—of that Heym was certain. The history of man, his evolution—the whole universe seemed to open vertiginously before him, and he stood alone with the cosmos blazing on his shoulders.

He shook himself, as if to get rid of a clinging burden, and with a convulsive effort forced coolness on himself. Detached argument—well, he had used that often enough at Sol without convincing anyone who mattered. He could still use it on Goram, but not for itself, only as a means of flattery by appealing to reason—among other means.

Intolerable, to have to play sycophant to this—atavist—but there was too much at stake for pride to count.

“I understand your position, of course,” said Heym, “even if I do not agree. I am sure that a glance at our records will convince you there is no danger.”

“I’m not interested in records,” rasped the marshal. “I could have had all that transvised to me at Sol if I wanted to see it. But that’s the psychologists’ department. I want to make a personal inspection.”

“Very well. Though we could just as well have transvised the scenes revealed on the spy devices from our headquarters to Sol.”