destroy your world completely."

Again, the meeting room exploded in a babble of languages.

"The vessel which brought me here came as a messenger of peace. But envision it, men of Earth, as a messenger of war. Unstoppable, inexorable, it may return, bearing a different Delegate from Venus—a Delegate of Death, who speaks not in words, but in the explosion of atoms. Think of thousands of such Delegates, fired from a vantage point far beyond the reach of your retaliation. This is the promise and the challenge that will hang in your night sky from this moment forward. Look at the planet Venus, men of Earth, and see a Goddess of Vengeance, poised to wreak its wrath upon those who betray the peace."

The Delegate sat down.

Four days later, a mysterious explosion rocked the quiet sands of Los Alamos, and the Venus spacecraft was no more. Two hours after that, the robot delegate, its message delivered, its mission fulfilled, requested to be locked inside a bombproof chamber. When the door was opened, the Delegate was an exploded ruin.

The news flashed with lightning speed over the world, and Jerry Bridges' eyewitness accounts of the incredible event was syndicated throughout the nation. But his sudden celebrity left him vaguely unsatisfied.

He tried to explain his feeling to Greta on his first night back in Washington. They were in his apartment, and it was the first time Greta had consented to pay him the visit.

"Well, what's bothering you?" Greta pouted. "You've had the biggest story of the year under your byline. I should think you'd be tickled pink."

"It's not that," Jerry said moodily. "But ever since I heard the Delegate speak, something's been nagging me."

"But don't you think he's done good? Don't you think they'll be impressed by what he said?"

"I'm not worried about that. I think that damn robot did more for peace than anything that's ever come along in this cockeyed world. But still ..."

Greta snuggled up to him on the sofa. "You worry too much. Don't you ever think of anything else? You should learn to relax. It can be fun."

She started to prove it to him, and Jerry responded the way a normal, healthy male usually does. But in the middle of an embrace, he cried out:

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