Gene rushed to the platform's edge and brought his foot down on a shaggy hand. A stone dagger swished past his ear and shattered against the machine. Heart racing, he flung himself against the master switch and slammed it shut.
Silence, then a chorus of meaningless grunts drifted up to his ears. Below, the half-men milled about like cattle, feeling stupidly of their bodies. They could not understand; they felt wonderingly of their heads where eyes should be, trying to lift the darkness.
TheNew Frontiersstill rested where it had crashed—how long ago? Gene replaced the smashed tube and jockeyed the ship clear of the debris. The tubes roared with power and the landscape fell away.
As he sped toward the cave city, his thoughts went back to the events of a few short hours ago.
In his feeling for the Wronged Ones, he had followed the only course that offered itself. That was the transference of their egos to Venus, to the bodies of the human-like inhabitants of that planet. To those whom Man had wronged long in the dim past. Gene had given a new life, atoned for Man's darkest deed.
At the same time, he had given new hope to Man himself; for now, trade between Earth and Venus would become a reality as soon as the Wronged Ones could orient themselves to the new surroundings—a year at the most. The clouds of Venus had long since lifted, and the tribe would thrive in the warm sunshine that now bathed the planet. Under Kac's able leadership they would aid in restoring Earth's depleted mineral wealth, and in turn Earth would help them in building a lasting civilization.
Now he was over the cave city, and he knew what he must do. On the Vizio-screen he could see tiny specks moving about in the valley. They were stumbling away from the caves, away from what they could not understand.
He dived on the city and depressed the firing stud of the atomic-cannon. A gigantic concussion rocked his ship as the valley wall exploded upward.
On the screen he could see the remains of the machines in the rubble below. So ended the ego-transposer, a devil machine that could lift the spider-web of self from the very brain on which it was spun.
So, too, ended the destructive ray that a desperate people, ever greedy for new wealth, had unwittingly turned upon themselves on that day of infancy in the now-forgotten past.
Now to Venus, where the end of his strange adventure awaited. There had been many more Venusians than Wronged Ones. This surplus now belonged to the beasts—mindless, with only the instincts of the beast remaining. These mindless ones must be segregated to prevent inter-breeding with the others.
As theNew Frontiersflashed sunward, Gene caught one final glimpse of the transposed Venusians on his Vizio. Now a race without hope, were they. In undoing one great wrong, he had committed another. But this was a primitive, ignorant people to whom intelligence would never have come in time to aid Earth in the crisis that threatened.
He had played God to them, but they would never know, never realize ... or would they?