Mike reveals to Jubal that he observed humanity for the Old Ones in a conversation that turns the temple’s destruction into the prelude to a far larger disclosure. He explains that the Old Ones used him as a living record of Earth, then warns that their judgment could one day determine the planet’s fate. His account recasts his time among humans as both an intimate human life and an observation gathered for an ancient civilization.

The Temple as a Completed Record

After the temple burns, Jubal wonders whether the loss matters. Mike rejects the idea that fire has erased anything essential: the temple was like a diary whose pages were already full, and a new building would be preferable to writing over them. The experience held there remains intact, while the spectacular expulsion may even help the Church in the long run by giving it publicity. Mike calls the recent days an enjoyable break in a busy routine and insists that no harm has been done.

That calm appraisal gives way to a more serious confession. Mike tells Jubal that he has lately learned he was a spy. The word initially sounds like an accusation against himself, but his explanation makes it a description of the role assigned to him before he left Mars: he was sent to observe his own people on Earth for the Old Ones. The disclosure gives the temple episode a double frame. What appeared to be a brief interruption in the Church’s life has become the occasion for Mike to reveal the much older purpose behind his presence on the planet.

How the Old Ones Recorded Him

Mike explains the Old Ones’ surveillance by comparing it with Security Forces satellites. The satellites orbit Earth, collect data, and store what they see until a Sky-Eye is keyed to release the accumulated record. In a similar way, the Old Ones remained linked to Mike while leaving him to live on his own. At a chosen moment, they triggered the accumulated material in him: what he had seen, heard, done, felt, and understood poured out into their permanent records.

The comparison clarifies both the power and the limits of the analogy. Mike does not say that the Old Ones erased his memories or took his experiences away; he describes the process as playing a tape and making a copy. But he had no forewarning that the recording would be triggered, and no chance to stop it. Once the transfer was complete, the Old Ones severed the link, leaving him unable even to protest. What Jubal hears is therefore not only a report of an extraordinary Martian technique but an account of surveillance imposed without the subject’s informed consent.

Mike also distinguishes his own ability from theirs. He describes himself as only an egg in this art and the Old Ones as masters. His account places his Earthly experience within a hierarchy of knowledge: he could be the instrument through which a record was gathered without understanding in advance how or when it would be collected. Jubal calls the treatment shabby by human standards. Mike answers that he would have volunteered if he had known before leaving Mars, but the Old Ones wanted him to observe and understand without interference. The disagreement turns on whether the value of an unaltered record can justify withholding the observer’s knowledge of the experiment.

A History Written in Ruins

When Jubal suggests that the Old Ones’ surveillance may have caused no lasting harm, Mike does not answer with another technical explanation. He tells Jubal about the destruction of the Fifth Planet of Sol, whose ruins are the asteroids. Jubal first compares the story to flood myths, but Mike insists on a different standard of certainty: the destruction of the Fifth Planet, he says, is as historically certain as the eruption of Vesuvius that buried Pompeii and Herculaneum, and is recorded in even greater detail.

The comparison is pivotal because it converts an unfamiliar Martian account into a claim about established history. Jubal stipulates the destruction as fact, while remaining reluctant to accept that the Old Ones might pose a threat to Earth. Mike’s answer is that they would not need the Old Ones’ direct intervention to make such destruction possible. With fundamental knowledge of physics and sufficient control over matter—the kind of control Jubal has already seen him exercise—he could himself act on a region near a planet’s core. He begins to describe selecting and understanding a section roughly one hundred miles across, then loses expression and turns his eyes upward as he speaks.

The conversation makes the power involved more alarming by refusing to keep it safely in the distant past. The asteroid ruins establish that planetary destruction is not merely myth; Mike’s own demonstrated capacity makes the means imaginable in the present. Yet the point is not that he announces an intention to destroy Earth. Rather, the history he recounts forces Jubal to consider what a civilization with such knowledge might do if it judged another world beyond remedy.

Possible Judgments and the Martian Pace

Mike says he is not especially afraid that the Old Ones will destroy Earth. His concern is a guess, not a grokking: they might either destroy humanity or try to conquer it culturally, remaking it in their own image. He explains why destruction could appear reasonable to them. By Martian standards, human beings may seem diseased and crippled: they fail to understand one another, and their wars, diseases, famines, and cruelties may look like complete idiocy. The possibility of a “mercy killing” follows from a profound mismatch between the two civilizations’ standards of life and social order.

Even so, Mike places any decision far beyond immediate human time. If the Old Ones chose destruction, he estimates that at least five hundred years—and more likely five thousand—would pass before they acted. Jubal calls this a long period for a jury to remain undecided. Mike answers that the Martians never hurry as humans do: they would rather spend another century, or several, making sure they had understood the fullness of the matter. Their slowness is not a guarantee of safety, but it makes deliberation, not sudden attack, the governing image of the danger.

Jubal proposes that humanity’s descendants may be able to manage their neighbors by then. Mike can partly accept the thought, but says he does not understand it in fullness. His greater anxiety is the alternative to destruction: cultural conquest. An attempt to make humanity behave like Martians would, he says, kill it just as certainly, though less painlessly, because such a transformation would be a great wrongness. The disclosure thus ends not with a prediction that Earth will be destroyed, but with an unresolved distinction between annihilation and forced likeness—and with Mike’s recognition that he cannot claim certainty about what the Old Ones will choose.