 Why did the beings come to Earth?
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1954. New York lay quietly below him. Buildings were taller, men were healthier, most of the problems of humanity seemed licked, or nearly so. It was a time of free power, each small unit of population, each section of town operating on perpetual, ever-lasting, automatic atomic piles. The largest cotton crop ever was forecast and rumors from Mexico had it that no one had died from scorpion bite in several weeks. A month later the meat animals, the birds and the household pets began dropping as rapidly as the flies which had dropped earlier. Congress was called into special session, as were all of the national governments around the world. The U.N. met at emergency sessions to cope with the situation. Within a year it was obvious to everyone that man was the only animal left on earth. The panic which had begun with the death of the animals was quieted somewhat by the fact that humans seemed immune to the pandemic. But the lakes full of dead fish caused a great stink and residents along the coasts began to move inland. Then just one year ago, the first human became infected with the strange malady. Within six months, half of the world's population was gone. Less than a month ago no more than a few thousand people remained in New York. Housed as it was in a huge metallic globe of a building, it contained computers which kept exact account of every human on earth. Once a year the Bureau issued The Index, an exact accounting of Earth's four billion inhabitants. Only once, before the plague, had he seen the interior of this room. And again at the age of 10 each child returned to the Bureau for a recheck. All around the world sensitive receiving stations pulsed to activity, sending out searching fingers, hunting for elusive patterns of neutral energy, mapping and tabulating the results. On these screens could be graphed the population of any and every part of the globe. An illuminated counter immediately above it would give the numerical strength of the area being sampled while the screen would show population density by individual pinpoints of light that merged to form brightness patterns. And one of them, a beautiful woman, had invited him up to her apartment, not because she liked him, but because.... "Why, it was just yesterday (or was it the day before?) that ten of us, at least, met here to check the figures. The western hemisphere, including islands.
 it was the next planet for them to destroy
 it was the next planet for them to destroy  they wanted all of Earth's resources  they wanted to take over Earth  they were curious about Earth's creatures