He took a dash, and was fifteen feet down the drive before he remembered to take the car.

The green man showed up at the stroke of midnight. Nothing spectacular, no down-the-chimney about it. He just walked through the door, and closed it behind him.

Milt was beaming like an arsonist at the Great Chicago Fire. “All set. Everything’s all taken care of. Mated and everything, even legal.” He held up the marriage license.

The green man took the paper from Milt’s fingers and looked it over carefully. His blobby nose twitched with some unnamed emotion. He nodded his head, and handed the paper back.

“Well, when do we go?” Milt demanded. The green man thumbed the side of his huge nose. “Well, you see—”

Milt’s joy turned to moth’s wings in his mouth. His face crumpled slowly, and his voice grew syrupy with dread.

“Hey, wait a minute! You promised. You said I could be survivor number one. All I had to do was get mated. So I got mated; look!” He waved the license beneath the green man’s prominent proboscis.

The visitor placated him. “Now take it easy, Mr. Klowitz. Something’s come up. When I went to make my report to the Council of Elders, I discovered that there had been a change in plans. You might call it a postponement.”

“You can’t do this to me!” Milt said. “You can’t just leave me here to die. You can’t you can’t you—”

“Mr. Klowitz, please! You’re not listening to me. You don’t have to die. No Earthling has to die. The Council has decided to extend the clean-up date another ten thousand Earth-years. It’s possible that future developments will cause us to decide not to eliminate your race at all. You will be—”

By this time Milt’s habit of interruption was ingrown. “You mean you aren’t going to destroy the Earth?”