Why, then, has the hand of the Kur not yet reached forth to seize so charming and vulnerable a prize, such a world, so coveted a treasure? Why have the words not yet been spoken, the orders not yet signed? Why have the ports and locks of the steel worlds not opened long ago, freeing the ships, that they might emerge like dragons, as silent as moonlight, from their caves? To what enchantment have they been subject? What incantation could hold such beasts bound? What spells might have forged their chains?

The answer to these questions is clear to the Kurii, and they have little to do with magic, except in the sense that a cigarette lighter, a hand grenade, a flashlight, would serve to an aborigine as evidence of sorcery.

The mistaken assumption of the question is that the Kurii have never undertaken such a venture. A better question would be, why do they not do so now.

Consulting the annals of the steel worlds, it seems that the paw of the Kurii, four times, did stretch forth to bury its claws in the pelt of a world, but, too, four times, it was drawn back, lacerated and bloody.

Something, you see, stands between the Kurii and their coveted world, a power, a form of life as far advanced beyond the Kur, as the Kurii are beyond those of Earth, as far as those of Earth would be beyond primitives beginning to learn pottery and weaving. The nature of this power is not clear to me, but it is seemingly quite real. It has its own world, I am told, a world not wholly unlike Earth. It is, in a sense, a sister world of Earth, though I gather it is not an offspring of the sun, as we suppose Earth to be, but rather entered its system long ago, following a search for a suitable star, much as nomads might have searched for lush grazing or fertile fields. It is spoken of in ancient records as the Antichthon, or Counter-Earth.