It was a master stroke. The knowledge and skills are lost, but what they did can be roughly understood. By microsurgery they divided their germinal cells into viable complementary halves, such that similars, when mated, produced simplified organisms. And complementary spe- cies were separated by the dead belt.

A simple splitting wasn't enough; some parts were vital

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and must be duplicated In both halves. So that each, essentially, had to be more than half.

Deliberately, the results were made varied; the Great Race may have used misdirection to confuse whatever terrible search they -worked so desperately to evade. So besides Earthani there were Tilari and the like; besides the Others there were their analogues here, and no doubt more variations elsewhere.

But with the aid of a catalyst, such as Dahirs cup, any humanoid became interferfile with any Otheroid. And always the resultant Children would be the same, the sum of the parts rejoined.

Long ago, there was the Great Race. And now it was come again.

Barton had thought he'd accepted the idea long since, but now the full impact bit him. Makes a man feel lost, he thought, to realize in his gut that his species has no destiny of its own, and never had. That humans had never been anything at all in their own right, but only the carriers and conservators of half the heredity of a race he couldn't even begin to understand. He found it hard, at gut level,'- to believe something that made him feel so utterly god- damn insignificant.

He had to believe it, though. When the gathering broke up, a group of them talked it out-Barton and Limila, Ferenc and Racelle, Ren and Lisa, Mark and Elys. What it boiled down to was that once you looked at it, there was simply too much evidence.

On Earth the advent of Cro-Magnon man had never been satisfactorily explained. And too many myths pointed to a time when a few of the Great Race shared Earth with man and with some Other-type beings; after they were gone, they survived in legend.

The Greek fauns and satyrs, for instance, have Other- like aspects. The Great Race became the centaur, such whimsies as many-armed Kali, and the two-backed beast riven into man and woman eternally striving to reunite.

Oh, there was no doubt, if you looked at it right. They were there. Stories got mixed up a little, over the millen"

rflia, but not too badly to recognize, once you saw the real thing.

How long ago? Not even the Others had a guess, on that. The dead belt was a safety factor, to make sure the danger would be past before a comparatively half-smart

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species could develop star travel enough to meet one of its complements.

Another fail-safe device, it bad to be, was concentrat- ing the intuitive and mental-force powers, and the touch of race memory, into the Others and those like them. So that they, at least, would have the instinctive drive for re- combination, would have ready the cup and what it must contain, and would know how to use it. No, the Great Race hadn't missed a trick, that Barton could see.

"So now we know," said Ferenc Szabo, "We and the Others and the rest-all through our long separate his- tories we've been nothing more than self-perpetuating strains of sperm and ova, waiting no one knows how long, to combine and re-create the Great Race." Barton saw the man's arm tighten around Racelle; her long, tawny eyes, slanted a bit, widened and then relaxed.

"What bothers me," said Lisa Teragni, "is what were they hiding from? And how do we know the danger's really gone?" When nobody answered right away, she said, "Oh, I'm just as shaken up as everybody else, at finding out we're nothing but sperm banks. 1 refuse to think about that, just now. But this other-"

Mark GyrU cleared his throat. "It's not my field," he said, "so I may not explain it too well. But I have a guess at what it was, that the Great Race couldn't withstand."

When the man paused, Barton said, "Give it a try; all right?"

"Radiation," said Gyril. "There's some evidence of a wave of stellar explosions, time not too well pinned down, that occurred in the galaxy-proper and would have flooded this Arm with more quanta than would have been healthy to most organisms."

**But we're still here," said Elys Rounds.

"The more complex the organism," Gyril said, "the more vulnerable it is to radiation damage. Genetically, I mean, as well as with individuals. The Great Race, you know, carries roughly double our chromosome count. At least, the Children do-and of course that's what the colchicine- surrogate is for, in Dahil's cup. To allow full addition of our chromosomes with those of the Others."

Barton frowned, not angry, only thinking. "You mean, the Great Race split itself into simpler organisms that could weather the radiation?** He nodded. "Yen, I guess I got it the first time. Seems like the hard way, is all."

Limila touched his arm. "Perhaps. But we cannot

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understand their motivations." And Barton had to agree with that conclusion.

Everybody was tired; the discussion had ground down to repetition, "Let's let it rest until" morning," Barton said.

"I have some ideas, but they can wait that long."

In the morning, though, they were up against the matter of the suicides. Nearly twenty percent of the human adults, during that night.

"Damn it!" Barton said. "We should have thought Some people just weren't going to be able to take it."

"What could we have done?'* said Renton Bearpaw.

"Hold a pep talk? We were too busy, getting our own selves sorted out."

"Yeh," Barton shook his head. "Couldn't do every- thing all at once. Well, let's round up some muscle and get

to work."

The work was burying the dead, and the mindlessness of digging gave Barton time to think. Part of his thought had no bearing on the immediate problem. If the Great Race was so almighty, how come it couldn't handle the radiation problem? Assuming Gyril had the right of it, there. Then Barton shrugged. Maybe they overreached themselves; maybe one of their own projects got out of hand. No way, for sure, that he'd ever find out, one way

or the other. ^

Right now, though, he had to start putting some feelers out, and the first place to start was with Chiyonou.

He found the Child off to one side of the settlement, engaged in some sort of game with other Children. They were-Barton blinked, and then knew what he'd .seen, briefly, before the Children noticed his presence. They were teleporting, vanishing and appearing, but now they stopped doing that. With no word or gesture on Barton's part, Chiyonou came to greet him.

Barton steadied his thinking, and held it, and said, "You see what has to be done? Can you do it?"

The Child nodded. "We knew it yesterday; we have begun. The ones coming and going, as you saw-they help begin our work, at some distance from here. What , we need to know, we read from many minds." The kid couldn't frown, exactly; the equipment wasn't there for it.

But Barton thought Chiyonou looked puzzled, as the next words came. "I see only so far. Barton, along the line of

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action. Do you see farther? The difficulty, I think, is that we are so very young."

"Don't knock it," said Barton. "It's all too curable." He set an image in the front of his thoughts, and said, "Read me now; it's quicker than talk." And after a silent pause:

"What you think?"

"For your people," Chiyonou said, "perhaps it is the best solution."

Barton had been squatting beside the Child. Now, feel- ing a little like a cat petting its master, he ruffled the fur on Chiyonou's head, and then stood. "All right," he said.

"But let's keep this just between us for a while. I still have to sell it to Ferenc Szabo."

Ferenc, after the evening meal, was in philosophic mode. Maybe, thought Barton, the wine helped. As Ferenc said, "Even from the human standpoint, I think it's worth it. The way the Children are, I mean, even as relative infants. They deserve the universe a lot more than we ever did. They'll enrich it."

He shook his head. "I have to feel sorry for the human race, though. Not for any tangible harm the Children will do it; they don't hurt people. But the shock-the shock I'm only now getting over. A lot won't be able to take it.

Like today's dead."