"What are you trying to do, kid me?" DuQuesne sneered. "I don't need any sugar coating on my pills. You are going to take me on a one-way ride—all right, go to it, but don't lie about it!"
"No; I mean it. Remember the one we met in the first Skylark? Well, we captured him and six others, and it's a very simple matter to dematerialize you so that you can join them. I'll bring them in, so that you can talk to them yourself."
The Intellectuals were brought into the control room, the stasis of time was released, and DuQuesne—via projection—had a long conversation with One.
"That's the life!" he exulted finally. "Better a million times over than any possible life in the flesh—the ideal existence! Think you can do it without killing me, Seaton?"
"Sure I can—I know both the words and the music."
DuQuesne and the caged Intellectuals poised in the air, Seaton threw a zone around cage and man, the inner zone of course disappearing as the outer one went on. DuQuesne's body disappeared—but not so his intellect.
"That was the first really bad mistake you ever made, Seaton," the same sneering, domineering, icily cold DuQuesne informed Seaton's projection in level thought. "It was bad because you can't ever remedy it—you can't kill me now! And now I will get you—what's to hinder me from doing anything I please?"
"I am, bucko," Seaton informed him cheerfully. "I told you quite a while ago that you'd be surprised at what I could do, and that still goes as it lays. But I'm surprised at your rancor and at the survival of your naughty little passions. What d'you make of it, Drasnik? Is it simply a hangover, or may it be permanent in his case?"
"Not permanent, no," Drasnik decided. "It is only that he has not yet become accustomed to his changed state of being. Such emotions are definitely incompatible with pure mentality and will disappear in a short time."
"Well, I'm not going to let him think even for a minute that I slipped up on his case," Seaton declared. "Listen, you. If I hadn't been dead sure of being able to handle you I would have killed you instead of dematerializing you. And don't get too cocky about my not being able to kill you yet, either, if it comes to that. It shouldn't be impossible to calculate a zone in which there would be no free energy whatever, so that you would starve to death. But don't worry, I'm not going to do it unless I have to."