Then they died. And other men came after them. Wars flamed up and burned out; the howling peoples dwelt in smashed cities and kindled their fires wit… - Poul Anderson

His will grew tight again. This was no age for weaklings. You had to do whatever seemed best, without letting gods or men or the lower devils deter you.

What, after all, what is the most logical way for superman to evolve? Not in one fantastic mutation of unknown thousands of genes all working to produce the same results: the very formulation was an insult to the laws of probability. No, homo superior should have evolved from homo sapiens in the same way that other species had evolved from a parent stock—by isolation of a few not very different mutations, selection and intensification of the new traits, new mutations gradually appearing and being lost if they were unfavorable, being incorporated if they gave some advantage.

Did ignorance save his freedom, or merely his illusion of freedom?