The earthlings stiffened into rigid, wildly staring images. They did
not reason that Henry might have told the truth. Emotion discarded the
obvious and invoked the occult. I proceeded to supply them with ample
premises. Here is what they saw.
The glass of stale yellow liquid, raised of course by my grasping
hands, to them seemed to rise of itself. They saw it hang suspended in
air. Then, while they clung together, uttering little moaning sounds,
it seemed slowly to fade into nothingness as I brought it within the
aura of my personal G-ray.
I turned my atomic disintegrator upon the table, set at slow speed.
They saw the flimsy structure crumble bit by bit to dust, and grain by
grain, the dust dissolve into nothingness.
I turned off the G-ray and fronted them, thrusting out my eye-tube
and making it its most luminous. That released the waiter's
vasomotor processes. He tore at the proprietor's clutching hands,
striving to loosen them.
"My God!" he babbled. "What that guy had--it's catching! I see what he
said he saw!"
With a piercing howl, he wrenched loose the proprietor's fingers and
went away in long, high, bounding leaps. The proprietor sagged slowly
down upon the gravel, a loose, blubbering heap.
I effaced myself from human sight with the G-ray and tuned the arrester
ray of the distance control upon the chariot. That stopped it. A
heavier charge rendered its occupants helpless. Even against the drag
of earth's heavy atmosphere my sturdy little individual inertia and
friction compensator enabled me to reach the machine in a twinkling.
Henry was happy to go back with me to the ship. He was pulsating with
horror at the thought of incarceration among the insane. He seethed
with disgust at the stupidity of his kind. From these emotional
premises he deduced a compelling desire to return with me to Urcanus
where he is understood and honored.
[Illustration: "He was dead when I found him beneath my laboratory
window."]
He will be happy. He was dead when I found him in the wreckage of
his ship beneath my laboratory window. He is alive because of our
skill. Earth has no science able to maintain life in him a month. On
Urcanus we can observe him for centuries, studying the psychology of
development as we step him up stage by stage toward our own perfection
of mental and physical organization. When he is useful to us no longer,
there remains euthanasia.