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 the New Frontiers flashed 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?