“Suppose, Tyler,” he said, “that you wakened from a nightmare and looked into a mirror to discover that you were an anthropoid ape? That you were incapable of speaking, of using your hands save in the clumsiest fashion? When it came home to you what had happened 49 to you, would you rush right out into the street, hoping that the people on the sidewalks would understand that you were a man in ape’s clothing?”
“Good Lord! I never thought of that!”
“You would if you’d ever been an ape. I know the feeling.”
“Then Barter’s manapes are more surely prisoners than if they were sentenced to serve their entire lives in the deepest solitary cells in Sing Sing! How horrible––but still, they yet would have a way of escape.”
“Yes, simply break out and start running, knowing that the crowd would soon take and destroy them. Right enough––but even when one knows oneself an ape it isn’t easy to destroy oneself.”
They entered the offices of Saret Balisle and looked about them. It was just an ordinary office. They looked in clothes closets and in shadowy corners. They took every possible precaution in their survey of the situation. They looked for hidden instruments of destruction. They looked for hidden dictaphones. They were extremely thorough in their preliminary preparations for the defense of Saret Balisle.
At five minutes of ten o’clock Balisle was at his desk, pale of face, but grinning confidently.
There were men in uniform in the hallways, on the roof, in the windows of rooms across the avenue. Bentley and Tyler should have felt sure that not even a mouse could have broken through the cordon to reach Saret Balisle. But Bentley was doubtful.
He went to the window nearest Balisle and looked out. Sixteen stories down was Fifth Avenue, patrolled in this block by a dozen blue-coats and as many more plain-clothes men. Saret Balisle seemed to be impregnable.