Terrified, I leaped from my chair and swung him around. Oh, God, that I may never witness such a sight again!
The front portion of his helmet seemed to have been cloven with an axe! The vision cylinders hung in shreds and clotted with dried, cracking blood! The lower half of his face seemed to have been beaten into a mass with a blunt instrument!
I screamed like one insane as I removed his helmet. Across his eyes and frontal arch, his skull was cloven in twain! The rays of the Red World had cut a deep gash through which had drifted the life of my dear friend and benefactor.
How I managed to escape a similar fate I do not know unless from my mad movements to remove the helmet.
What must have happened was that our devices, not insulated against things of which Dr. Korsakoff could have known little or nothing, had acted like copper wires in the distribution of electrical energy. The Sixth Dimension beam, then, must have been carried along with our own to strike at us in our own distant plane.
Why tell of what followed—my apprehension for the crime and my conviction?
Now, dear world of which I am but a miserable outcast, praying for death to relieve me of my suffering, let me close this chapter in my book of life. If any story succeeds in reaching the world, the world itself will know and believe that I, Arnoldi Kherkoff, did not murder my beloved benefactor, Dr. Ivan Korsakoff, as the courts of Russia believed.
His was a murderer far beyond powers of man to apprehend.
I suffer for the deed of a being in the Red Dimension—but not for long! I have little fear of the penalties exacted against prisoners of the camp for communicating with the outside world! When they learn of it, life will have already flown.