Again, Janus Pitt sat there alone, enclosed.

The red dwarf star was no longer an engine of death. It was just a red dwarf star to be pushed to one side by an ever more arrogant humanity, growing yet further in power.

But Nemesis still existed, though it was no longer the star.

For billions of years, life on Earth had been isolated, performing its separate experiment, rising and sinking, flourishing and undergoing vast extinctions, Perhaps there were other worlds on which life existed, each one isolated for billions of years.

All experiments - all, or almost all, failures in the long run. One or perhaps two that were successes and worth all the rest.

But that was only if the Universe were large enough to isolate all the experiments. If Rotor - their Ark - had been isolated as Earth and the Solar System had been, it might have been the one to work.

But now-

He clenched his fists in fury - and desperation. For he knew that humanity would run from star to star as easily as it had run from continent to continent and before that from region to region. There would be no isolation, no self-contained experiments. His grand experiment had been discovered, and doomed.

The same anarchy, the same degeneration, the same thoughtless short-term thinking, all the same cultural and social disparities would continue to prevail - Galaxy-wide.

What would there be now? Galactic empires? All the sins and follies graduated from one world to millions? Every woe and every difficulty horribly magnified?

Who would be able to make sense out of a Galaxy, when no-one had ever made sense out of a single world? Who would learn to read the trends and foresee the future in a whole Galaxy teeming with humanity?

Nemesis had indeed come.