This was one earth of many earths. How many others followed close behind: hundreds, millions? Earth following earth, and now all the earths lay open.

He tried to figure it out and he thought he saw the pattern that the mutants planned. It was simple and it was brutal, but it was workable.

There was an Earth that was a failure. Somewhere, on the long path that led up from apedom, they had taken the wrong turning and had travelled since that day a long road of misery. There was brilliance in these people, and goodness, and ability — but they had turned their brilliance and their ability into channels of hate and arrogance and their goodness had been buried in selfishness.

They were good people and were worth the saving, as a drunkard or a criminal is worthy of rehabilitation. But to save them, you must get them out of the neighborhood they live in, out of the slums of human thought and method. There could be no other way of giving them the opportunity to break themselves of old habits, of the ingrown habits of generation after generation of hate and greed and killing.

To do this, you must break the world they live in and you must have a plan to break it and after it is broken, you must have a program that leads to a better world.

But first of all, there must be a plan of action.

First you shattered the economic system on which old Earth was built. You shattered it with Forever cars and everlasting razor blades and with synthetic carbohydrates that would feed the hungry. You destroyed industry by producing, once and for all, things that industry could not duplicate and things that made industry obsolete and when you shattered industry to a certain point, war was impossible and half the job was done. But that left people without jobs, so you fed them with carbohydrates while you tried to funnel them to the following earths that lay waiting for them. If there wasn't room enough on Earth Number Two, you sent some of them to Number Three and maybe Number Four, so that you had no crowding, so there was room enough for all. On the new earths there was a beginning again, a chance to dodge the errors and skirt the dangers that had bathed Old Earth in blood for countless centuries.

On these new earths you could build any sort of culture that you wished. You could even experiment a little, aim at one culture on the Second Earth and a slightly different one on Number Three and yet a different one on Four. And after a thousand years or so you could compare these cultures and see which one was best and consult the bales of data you had kept and pinpoint each mistake in each particular culture. In time you could arrive at a formula for the best in human cultures.

Here on this earth, the pastoral-feudal culture was the first step only. It was a resting place, a place for education and for settling down. Things would change or be changed. The sons of the man in whose house he lay would build a better house and probably would have robots to work his fields and make his living, while he himself would live a leisured life and out of a leisured people, with their energies channeled by good leadership, would come paradise on earth — or on many earths.

There had been that article in the paper he had read on that morning — was it only days ago? — which had said that the authorities were alarmed at mass disappearances. Whole families, the article had said, were dropping out of sight for no apparent reason and with no apparent thing in common except abject poverty. And, of course, it would be the ones in abject poverty who would be taken first — the homeless and the jobless and the sick — to be settled on these earths that followed in the track of the dark and bloody Earth inhabited by Man.

Soon there would be little more than a handful of people on the dark and bloody Earth. Soon, in a thousand years or less, it would go tumbling on its way alone, its hide cleansed of the ravening tribe which had eaten at it and gutted it and mangled it and ravished it — and this same tribe would be established on other earths, under better guidance, to create for themselves a life that would be a better life.

Beautiful, he thought. Beautiful — and yet, there was this matter of the androids.

Begin at the beginning, he told himself. Start with first facts, try to see the logic of it, to figure out the course of mutancy.

There always had been mutants. If there had not been, Man would still be a little skittering creature hiding in the jungle, taking to the trees, terrified and skulking.

There had been the mutation of the opposable thumb. There had been mutations within the little brain that made for creature cunning. Some mutation, unrecorded, had captured fire and tamed it. Another mutation had evolved the wheel. Still another had invented the bow and arrow. And so it went, on down the ages. Mutation on mutation, building the ladder that mankind climbed.

Except that the creature who had captured and tamed the flame did not know he was a mutant. And neither had the tribesman who had thought up the wheel, nor the first bowman.

Down through the ages there had been unsuspected and unsuspecting mutants — men who were successful beyond the success of others, great business figures or great statesmen, great writers, great artists, men who stood so far above the herd of their fellow men that they had seemed giants in comparison.

Perhaps not all of them were mutants, though most of them must have been. But their mutancy would have been a crippled thing in comparison with what it could have been, for they were forced to limit themselves, forced to conform to the social and economic pattern set by a non-mutant society. That they had been able to conform, that they had been able to fit themselves to a smaller measure than their normal stature, that they had been able to get along with men who were less than they and still stand out as men of towering ability was in itself a measure of their mutancy.

Although their success had been large in the terms of normal men, their mutancy had been a failure in that it never reached its full realization and this was because these men had never known what they were. They had been just a little smarter or a little handier or somewhat quicker than the common run of mankind.

But suppose that a man should realize that he was a mutant? Suppose that he knew from a piece of indisputable evidence — what would happen then?

Suppose, for example, a man should find that he could reach out to the stars and that he could catch the thoughts and plans of the thinking creatures who lived on planets circling those far suns — that would be full and sufficient proof that he was a mutant. And if he could obtain from his seeking in the stars some specific information of certain economic value — say, the principle of a frictionless machine — then without question he would know that he had a mutant gift. Once knowing, he would not be able to fit so snugly, nor so smugly, into his contemporary niche as those men who had been mutants but had never known they were. Knowing, he would have the itch of greatness, would know the necessity of following his own path and not the beaten path.

He might be slightly terrified by the things he learned winnowing the stars and he might be terribly lonesome and he might see the necessity of humans other than him alone working on the information that he was dredging from the depths of space.

So he would seek for other mutants and he would do it cleverly and it might take him a long time before he found one of them and he would have to approach the other cautiously and win his confidence and finally tell him what he had in mind.

Then there'd be two mutants, banded together, in the course of years they would see, and find other mutants. Not all of them, of course, would be able to send their minds out to the stars, but they would be able to do other things. Some of them would understand electronics, almost as if by instinct, more completely than any normal man, even with years of intensive training, and another one of them might sense the strange alignment of time and space that allowed for other worlds than one, following on each other's heels in a magnificent, eternal ring.