barbarism. Is it even well begun?"

His words, half appropriate and half in supremely bad taste now, as Mitchell Prell well knew—though he had to say them because of the need to say something—still fell into a void of silence and echoed through the house like a cheap speech.

Sighing raggedly, he tried again: "Yes, I'm alive, Eileen. The ship from the Moon was in space before the blowup happened. We rode ahead of the main shock wave at high speed. So we won through. From the final warning message from the Moon, I gather that trouble started in the warp chambers. The heat and pressure were restrained by the tight space warp for a while, until inter-dimensional barriers ripped wide open. The whole mass of the Moon was in the way. By old standards it couldn't happen; but a lot of lunar atoms went all to pieces in a flare of high energy. The tough part is that we achieved a workable motor principle for stellar ships weeks ago. The blowup came from side line testing."

Once more no words answered Mitchell Prell when he stopped talking. He waited, but his sister's eyes remained cold.

"All right, Eileen," he went on at last. "You're thinking that I am one of the specialists who is responsible for this. Surely I'm the only survivor among those research men who were on the Moon. But remember this: we weren't working on our own. We were hired, under a democratic system, and told what to hunt for. It was the best that could be done, except that the lab should have been put farther away, on some lonely asteroid. Logically, then, we are not solely to blame for what has happened. But it doesn't work that way, Eileen. Under grief and hysteria logic still collapses, even in our time. In a real crisis there continue to be many people who need scapegoats. A collective mishap, the result of a mass desire for more knowledge, then becomes a personal guilt. So I'm a fugitive, Eileen."

It was a strange, bitter thing for Eddie Dukas to watch—his mother and uncle facing each other, not friends, his mother's face a hard mask of coldness.

Then, all at once, her icy poise crumbled. "Jack isn't alive any more," she said. "My husband. That's the fact that I know best. You with your glib talk, my brother, are one person directly in the chain of events that caused Jack's death. I don't accuse you, Mitch. I just say that I can't look on you now with any pleasure. That's all."

Then, sitting there on the sensipsych couch, she began to cry. It was painful for Eddie to watch. He had never 

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