He was seated on a rock in the enclosure they had built. He raised his deep-sunk, sleepless eyes to stare at the house where he and Walt had worked. There Walt and Diane were to have made their home; Chet found something infinitely pathetic now in the unfinished shelter: its very crudities seemed to cry aloud against the blight that had fallen upon the place.
"And what was there?" Kreiss demanded. "This hypnotic power—was it an attribute of the ape-men themselves? That seems highly improbable. Or was there something else—some other source of the thought waves or radiations of mental force?"
Chet was still answering almost in monosyllables. "Something else," he told Kreiss.
"Ah," exclaimed the scientist, "I should have liked to see them. Such mental attainment! Such control of the great thought-force which with us is so little developed! Mind—pure mentality—carried to that stage of conscious development, would be worthy of our highest admiration. I should like to meet such men."
"They're not men," said Chet; "they're—they're—"
He knew how unable he was to put into words his impression of the unseen things, and he suddenly became voluble with hate.
"God knows what they are!" he exclaimed, "but they're not men. 'Mind', you say; 'mentality!' Well, if those coldly devilish things are an example of what mind can evolve into when there's no decency of soul along with it, then I tell you hell's full of some marvelous minds!"
He sprang abruptly to his feet.
"I've got to get out of here," he said; "I can't stand it. Four more days, and that's the end of it all. I'm going back to the ship. I saw it from up on the divide. Still buried in gas—but I'm going back. If I could just get in there I might do something. There's all our supplies—our storage of detonite; I might do some good work yet!"