he never saw dissolve in a great white-hot flame.

Here it was planned, and here death had some transcendental meaning.

"There's one more thing for you to see," she said.

A dimly-lighted series of chambers. She pointed them out. Refrigerated banks. As far as Danton could see, the long chambers were lined with huge banks. Each filled with spare body-parts.

"You see the pattern now, soldier? We started with a select group. From among the Oligarchs only the elite of the elite was selected to come here to Mars. There are fifty of us now, as there were fifty then. No children, of course. Why complicate things?

"Our slaves out there know nothing except that they must fight the Redbirds. Theirs is a war society. We arranged it and we've perpetuated it, and now it's the only life they know—unless your story of a revolt is true, of course, which I can hardly believe. They have only the crudest weapons. The kind of weapons we fought with on earth, soldier, left little for body-salvage, did they? We feel we've found the only way of being immortal. Why does it affect you like this, soldier? Doesn't it seem logical and fair to you?"

Danton didn't say anything. He couldn't. His throat was dry and his blood hammered past his temples. She was putting the question to him, all right; and in a way it was the same question he had asked himself more than once. To an efficiently conditioned soldier class, killing was an end in itself. Why not go on from there, carry it out to its final denominator?

"The brain never wears out," she was saying, "the only damage possible to it is due to the wearing out of supplementary body-parts, and they are seldom used to such a point. And even parts of the brain can be replaced. We have blood banks, of course. We cannot die of natural causes. If death comes from any kind of violence or accident, we can bring that body to life again.

"We are storing up reserve body-parts to keep us strong and un-aging for as long as one would care to imagine. When we are ready, of course, we shall return to Earth. We have kept that in mind, naturally. We are almost ready now to return. On Earth, of course, the same system will be established—but there our system will of necessity be slightly different. Perhaps wars will not necessarily go on unceasingly. There will be breathing spells ... it won't matter particularly to us."

She looked at Danton closely. 

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