smoothly.

"Yes," Stan said, not hesitating. "I hate the human race." And then he started to sweat and shake with an unreasoning anger that flooded him as suddenly as if somebody had turned on a hose. The pain.... The pain for which the apes were responsible.

"I hate the apes! I hate their goddamned guts!"

A silent wave of exultation swept the compartment. They had fashioned the mold and had made their monster....

Five minutes later, the space ship departed for its home system.

"I hate the human race." And....

CHAPTER V

He was 24 years old. A tall, unsmiling, handsome man dressed in a blue serge suit and a hat that he liked to pull down over his eyes so he could look at the world as if it were in a frame. He wasn't the type who made friends and there was a subtle air of menace about him that frightened the people with whom he came in contact. He was a stranger who looked at the world with cold and calculating eyes, like a scientist might look at a piece of lab apparatus. Women were intrigued by him, made their approaches, and hastily left—a little insulted and far more frightened.

Apes.

He was no longer 17, he was no longer a boy, and he wouldn't have shed a tear if he had been stretched on the rack. A hardness and a sense of power showed in the lines of his face and the set of his shoulders. People who talked to him felt inferior, as if they had been talking to a superman. And to a large degree they were absolutely right.

A small Thuscan flyer set him down one night on a fog-bound, Scotch moor, not far from Paisley. The next afternoon he had rented an apartment in Bristol and installed the first load of equipment. For the next three months, he did nothing but observe and travel—and buy up some small parcels of property in fifty different cities spread far and wide over the globe.

He started to set up an organization, though he had difficulty finding men to staff it. Most of those who would have qualified had been executed or were behind bars for life. But by the end of six months, his organization was almost complete. Reynolds, Langerman, and Caldwell were his lieutenants—the men who got their hands dirty and directed those in the next echelon down.

His right hand man was sent to him by Thusca. A powerful, 

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