Mr. Tedder cautiously stepped up to the demonstration bench and took the knob of the telegraph key in his fingers. "This was the switch in a Ziegler's effect apparatus I'd set up for demonstration. I just tapped it, like this...." Mr. Tedder slapped the key down.
There was a glare of sudden greenness, and the air popped like a broken vacuum tube as it rushed in to occupy space suddenly vacated.
The Extra-Galactic Polymorph was gone. Mr. Coar wrinkled his brow and thought furiously of geranium-plants-in-pots, to no avail. Miss MacIntire thought wistfully of the handsome Greek gentleman who'd addressed her with an obscure quotation. Mr. Tedder, Stetzel, and Guenther bent their combined brains to steady consideration of Miss Honey LaRue, and for a moment they thought they heard the lustful bellow of a supernal saxophone. But Honey stayed away.
"If we'd only taken photographs!" Mr. Formeller wailed. "Maybe the things we saw, we saw only in our minds. The polymorph's real form would have registered on film."
"Maybe if Mr. Tedder would duplicate that apparatus of his, and...." Miss MacIntire paused uncertainly. The arcana of physics were as unknown to her as was the Greek ablative to Mr. Tedder. "Well, do the same thing that you did before. Maybe he'll come back."
"No." Mr. Tedder was glum. "It won't be back. When you think that all objects are constantly changing in space and time, you see how wonderful it is that anything ever gets anywhere. The Extra-Galactic Polymorph won't be back. Its appearance was an accident; a huge, incredible, once-in-all-history coincidence."
On the twenty-third planet of a sun of a galaxy that lay beyond the ken of even the two-hundred-inch mirror of Palomar and the giant refractors of Luna; a planet the name of which cannot be expressed in human phonetics, a Young Being in the early stages of pre-maturity chortled with its Id. Its teacher was back! Swiftly, the youngster threw aside the messy slice of pimento-loaf that was draped across the silver cube and commanded, "Zzzrf me a Klompfr!" A Klompfr appeared, and the Young Being spilled its delight out into the minds of its elders.