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here, he had said, “I’ll kill you if you don’t understand.”But he wouldn’t really, would he? Would he?
    If he had towered over her, ranted and shouted, she would not have been afraid. But squatting there, waiting, silent, with his great arms bowed out like that, he was like some patient, preying beast.
    She turned off the light to blot out the sight of him, and immediately became speechless with terror at the idea of his sitting there in the dark so close, waiting. She might run; she was so swift … but no; crouched like that, he could spring and catch her before she could tense a muscle.
    Again she looked at the dead screen. “Will you … tell me something?” she quavered.
    “I might.”
    “Tell me, then: When you first saw that picture, did you understand? The very first time?”
    His expression did not change. But slowly he relaxed. He rocked sidewise, sat down, extended his legs. He was man again, not monster. She shuddered, then controlled it.
    He said, “It took me a long time and many visits. I should not have asked you to understand at once.”
    She again accepted the timid half-step toward an apology, and was grateful.
    He said, “Those were men and women just like us. Did you see that? Just like us.”
    “Their clothes—”
    “Just like us,” he insisted. “Of course they dressed differently, lived differently! In a world like that, why not? Ah, how they built, how they built!”
    “Yes,” she whispered. Those towers, the shining, swift vehicles, the thousand who moved like one … “Who were they?” she asked him.
    “Don’t you know? Think—think!”
    “Osser, I want to understand. I truly want to!”
    She hunted frantically for the right thing to say, the right way to catch at this elusive thing which was so frighteningly important to him. All her life she had had the answers to the questions she wanted to understand. All she had ever had to do was to close her eyes andthink of the problem, and the answers soon came.
    But not this problem.
    “Osser,” she pleaded, “where is it, the city, the great complicated city?”
    “Say, ‘Where was it?’ ” he growled.
    She caught his thought and gasped. “This? These ruins, Osser?”
    “Ah,” he said approvingly. “It comes slowly, doesn’t it? No, Juby. Not here. What was here was an outpost, a village, compared with the big city. North and west, I told you, didn’t I? Miles of it. So big that … so big—” He extended his arms, dropped them helplessly. Suddenly he leaned close to her, began to talk fast, feverishly. “Juby, that city—that world—was built by
people
. Why did they build and why do we not? What is the difference between those people and ours?”
    “They must have had …”
    “They had nothing we don’t have. They’re the same kind of people; they
used
something we haven’t been using. Juby, I’ve got that something. I can build. I can make others build.”
    A mental picture of the tower glimmered before her. “You built it with hate,” she said wonderingly. “Is that what they had—cruelty, brutality, hatred?”
    “Yes!”
    “I don’t believe it! I don’t believe anyone could live with that much hate!”
    “Perhaps not. Perhaps they didn’t. But they
built
with it. They built because some men could flog others into building for them, building higher and faster than all the good neighbors would ever do helping one another.”
    “They’d hate the man who made them build like that.”
    Osser’s hands crackled as he pressed them together. He laughed, and the echoes took everything that was unpleasant about that laughter and filled the far reaches of the dark room with it.
    “They’d hate him,” he agreed. “But he’s strong, you see. He was strong in the first place, to make them build, and he’s stronger afterward with what they built for him. Do you know the only way they can express their hatred, once they find he’s too strong for them?”
    Jubilith shook her