The chariot approached rapidly. Bender was driving, for it required the
combined strength of both big males to hold Henry between them on the
rear seat. The air clashed with the vibrations of Henry's screams.
"But it is there, I tell you! Usru lifted it up in the air with his
distance levitator. I told you they've got wonderful machines. He
turned on his G-ray and made it invisible! It's hanging over that
field, but we couldn't see it. I tell you it is there!"
"Why, sure it's there," agreed the big male called Edgar. "By tomorrow
it'll settle down again; then we'll drive over and take a look at it."
As they stopped at the curb, Edgar leaned out and explained to the
proprietor in a hoarse whisper. "He raised such hell about this here
Usru, as he calls him, Doctor Bender made us bring him back so's to
ca'm him down a little."
Protected by the full strength of the G-ray, invisible now even to
Henry's eyes, I awaited the denouement.
Henry turned a pleading face toward the waiter, who hovered discreetly
in the rear of the proprietor.
"You saw him! You saw Usru!" he urged. "He might have seemed dim--like
a shadow almost--but you did see him, didn't you?"
"I never saw nobody but you," the waiter replied, backing away a little
farther. "You was talking to yourself all the time. Sensible English at
first. Then you went clean off your nut and began to blab gibberish and
work your eyes and make crazy faces."
For such cerebration as was possible to him, the waiter's conclusion
was logical. Henry was capable only of oral communication, which we
seldom use because it is inadequate for expressing our delicate
shadings of thought. Having two eyes and an almost inflexible
countenance, his efforts to use the facial gestures and eye movements
and mouth positions with which we eke out oral speech were indeed
alarming.
"What does this here Usru look like?" The proprietor, with what is
doubtless a characteristic racial impulse to make brutal sport of
another's wretchedness, kept repeating the question until he finally
caught my distracted companion's attention.
"He's a little under three feet tall," Henry cried. "His body is only
half the size of his head and he has no legs. But he has six arms. He
uses two to grasp with and the other four to glide with instead of
walking. He has one eye on a sort of stem or tube, and it is luminous.
He has an organ he hears with and it's got other senses we haven't. It
looks like a sort of fleshy blossom on the top of his head."
"Better drive on, Doctor," Edgar chuckled to Bender. "We might see it
if we stick around here."
Bender gave Edgar a reproving glance but started the motor. As the
chariot moved away, Henry struggled violently.
"Let me out!" he shrieked. "I tell you he is here! He's flooded himself
with the G-ray and you can't see him! Usru! Us----"
Edgar's huge hand clamped down upon his mouth. The chariot roared away,
gathering speed with every revolution of its clumsy wheels.
* * * * *
I rose. The table was between me and the two males of the drink shop.
Before disposing of them, I reviewed what I had learned. Henry had
planned to impart to his kind the knowledge of the anti-gravity field
and establish communication between the earth and Urcanus--other
planets. That would infect other worlds with the earth's recurrent
mental disease--war. On Urcanus are limitless stores of metals which
earthlings esteem precious and greedily desire. Urcanians cannot risk
contact with a race thinking so far down in their emotions--with their
bodies, instead of their heads. We have bred away the body to just
enough to support the sac that holds our brains--our real selves.
What would these two creatures before me attempt, endowed with Urcanian
knowledge? Now they were shaking and gasping with ribald glee as they
repeated choice bits of Henry's conduct. Pity! Here it was reversed,
become wanton, brainless brutality.