It grew a little tiresome after a while and I wondered why Grannie had brought me here. And then I began to notice things.
The audience in the Satellite seemed to have lost much of its original fervor. They applauded as before but they did so only at the signal of Doctor Universe. The spell created by the man was complete.
Pompous and erect, he strode back and forth across the stage like a general surveying his army. His black eyes gleamed, and his thin lips were turned in a smile of satisfaction.
When the last question had been answered I joined the exit-moving crowd. It was outside under the street marquee that a strange incident occurred.
A yellow-faced Kagor from the upper Martian desert country shuffled by, dragging his cumbersome third leg behind him. Kagors, of course, had an unpleasant history of persecution since the early colonization days of the Red Planet. But the thing that happened there was a throw back to an earlier era.
Someone shouted, "Yah, yellow-face! Down with all Kagors!" As one man the crowd took up the cry and surged forward. The helpless Kagor was seized and flung to the pavement. A knife appeared from nowhere, snipped the Martian's single lock of hair. A booted foot bludgeoned into his mouth.
Moments later an official hydrocar roared up and a dozen I.P. men rushed out and scattered the crowd. But a few stragglers lingered to shout derisive epithets.
Grannie Annie came out from behind the box office then. She took my arm and led me around a corner and through a doorway under a sign that read THE JET. Inside was a deep room with booths along one wall. The place was all but deserted.
In a booth well toward the rear the old lady surveyed me with sober eyes.
"Billy-boy, did you see the way that crowd acted?"