and, within it, the sound of the pumps, throbbing, sucking the water from the seas.

And then Michael's voice, "The thousand who left with us are dead. For some time we've known the other planets in our solar system were uninhabitable. Now we've been from one end of the galaxy to the other. And this is what we've found.... We were given Earth. There's no place else for us. The rest of the planets in the galaxy were given to others. There's no place else for them. We've all had a chance to make the best of Earth. Instead we've made the worst of it. So we're here to stay—and die." He handed the microphone back.

The silence did not change.

The President grasped Michael's arm. "What're you saying?"

A buzzing rose up from the people like that of a swarm of frightened bees. The sea of white faces swayed and their voices began to cry. The din and motion held, long and drawn out, with a wail now and a fluttering beneath it.

Michael and the woman stood above them in the center of the pale, hovering faces of the officials.

"Good God," said the President. "You've got to tell them what you said isn't true!"

"We've been searching two thousand years for a truth," said Michael. "A thousand of us have died finding it. I've told it. That's the way it's got to be."

The President swayed, took the microphone in his hands.

"There's been some mistake!" he cried. "Go back to the pumps and the distilleries! Go back to the water vats and the gardens and the flocks! Go back! Work and wait! We'll get the full truth to you. Everything's going to be all right!"

Obediently the mass of faces separated, as though they were being spun away on a whirling disk. Michael and the woman were swallowed up, like pebbles inside a closing hand, and carried away from the great, white ship.

hey ushered the man and woman into the beamed and paneled council chambers and sat them in thick chairs before the wall of polished wood desks across which stared the line of faces, silent and waiting. And on a far wall, facing them all, hung a silver screen, fifty feet square.

The President stood. "Members of the council." He paused. "As you heard, they report—complete failure." He turned to Michael. "And now, the proof."

Michael stood beside the motion picture projector, close to his chair. The lights dimmed. There was only the sound of the pumps throbbing in the darkness close and far away, above and beneath and all around. Suddenly on the screen appeared an endless depth of blackness filled with a mass of glowing white, which extended into the room around the watching people, seeming to touch them and then spreading, like an ocean, farther away and out and out into an endless distance.

Now streaks of yellow fire shot into the picture, like a swarm of lightning bugs, the thin sharp nosed shadows of space ships, hurtling, like comets, toward the clustered star smear. And then silent thoughts flashed from the screen into the minds of the spectators; of time passing in months, years and centuries, passing and passing until they themselves seemed to be rushing and rushing into the blackness toward blinding balls of white light, the size of moons.

The dark shapes of smaller spheres circling the blinding ones moved forward into the picture; red, blue, green, yellow, purple and many mixtures of all these, and then one planet filled the screen, seeming to be inflated, like a balloon, into a shining red ball. There was a razor edge of horizon then and pink sky and an expanse of crimson. Flat, yellow creatures lay all around, expanding and contracting. A roaring rose and fell like the roaring of a million winds. Then fear flowed out of the picture into the minds of the watchers so that they gasped and cringed, and a silent voice told them that the atmosphere of this planet would disintegrate a human