standing in the middle of a village. There were houses, trees, schools, sidewalks and lawns. Somehow the general perspective was wrong. It made Garth’s eyes water a little, looking at it.

“Actually, this living level ran all the way around the ship,” said The Visitor. “When I stopped spin—artificial gravity, you know—to set down here, the various sections swung to keep ‘down’ pointed right. This is the bottommost thirty-degree arc. It makes two streets, with houses on both sides of them—a strip three hundred feet wide and three-quarters of a mile long.”

“But how could you afford so much space for passengers? I thought they’d be all cramped up in a spaceship.”

The Visitor chuckled. “Use your eyes, boy! You’ve seen this ship. It’s about a mile long and a third of a mile high. In space, she spins about her long axis. One ring, fifty feet high, takes care of passengers’ quarters. Another ring, split up into several levels, takes care of all food and air-replenishment needs. These trips take a year or more. Crowding would drive the people crazy. Remember, this is basically a cargo ship. Less than a quarter of the available space is used for passengers. But come on down the street here. I want to show you my museum.”

As they walked along the quiet street, with the leaves of trees moving in the breeze and leaving sun-dappled shadows on the sidewalk, Garth realized what a tremendous task it must have been for one crippled man to repair landing damages. The houses must have been flattened and the trees shattered during the landing. But with thousands of years in which to work, even an injured man obviously could do much. At least, thought the boy compassionately, it must have given the old man something to do.

“How sorry he must have been,” murmured Garth with sudden insight, “when the job was finally done.”

Wandering through the museum, they came at last to a room filled with small hand tools.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like them,” said Garth.

“Those are weapons,” answered The Visitor. “They are missile-throwing short-range weapons, and they are in tip-top working order. You just have to point the end with the hole in it at anything you want to kill, and pull that little lever there on the bottom. And quite a mess of things they can make, too, let me tell you.”

“They seem very inefficient to me,” said Garth wonderingly, and then stopped in confusion. “I beg your pardon, my Lord,” he said, “I didn’t mean to criticize anything; it just seems to me that they would damage a lot of the food they killed.”

“That’s true enough, my boy, true enough,” said The Visitor. “Your criticism has a lot of point to it. But, you see, they were never designed mainly to kill for food, but to make it easy for one human to shoot another.”

“Why would anyone want to do that?”

“Your civilization is a very unusual one,” answered The Visitor. “It is planetwide and has developed without a single war or major conflict. This is due entirely to the fact that I’ve been here to help and teach you. Most civilizations develop only as the result of struggle and bloodshed, with people killing people by the thousands and millions. I could have raised your people to the technological level where they are now in a few hundred years, if I hadn’t worried about killing. To do it the way it has been done—so that you can’t imagine why one human should kill another—has taken most of the time.

“It is only recently, as a matter of fact, that my work has been complete. Your civilization can now stand alone; my help is no longer necessary. It’s gotten to the point now where my continued hanging around here is likely to do harm, if I’m not mighty careful. In all your problems, you’ll always feel that you’ve got me to fall