The surgeon turned with quiet dignity and addressed his three associates, his determination to ignore the Monitor's rage clearly evident in the firm tones of his voice.
"Remove all of the bandages, and make the injection before he begins to stir. Remove the bandages first. He has been conscious for several hours now, but perhaps not fully conscious. You will know how to awaken him, but be sure to make the injection before he opens his eyes. It will take effect in twenty or thirty seconds."
For the next five minutes no one in the laboratory spoke. Neither the surgeons, who were too busy carrying out instructions to even exchange glances or the two women who stood facing each other with dagger-points dancing in their eyes.
The girl seemed to sense what the Monitor was thinking and to resent it as a matter of pride. But she remained silent and self-contained and only the tightness of her lips and the dark hostility with which she parried the gaunt women's accusing stare betrayed a vulnerability which her pride could not quite overcome.
What broke the stillness at last was the strangest and most unnerving of all sounds: a groan from the man who had not moved even under the administration of the figures in white hovering over him, a man who had lain as if dead for so long that it seemed impossible that he could stir, and open his eyes and let out his breath explosively after so short an interval of time.
The man on the table sat up. He sat up so quickly that the surgeons withdrew from him in consternation, as if they had not anticipated so instant a response to the gentle massage which they had applied to his chest, and the swiftly following injection.
The Monitor turned pale and took a quick step backward and the girl seemed equally shaken, although she did not remove her eyes from the tall, gaunt figure who sat looking at her with his chest rising and falling and his hairy legs dangling. Only the surgeons retained their composure, recovering quickly from their first shocked recoil and regarding the figure without horror.
The man on the table was both a giant and a monster. His chest was barrel-shaped and ridged with three bands of muscle which completely encircled his body and rose and fell with his breathing. His massive shoulders were ugly and misshapen, the shoulders of a giant whose too rapid growth had brought about the cruelest kind of deformity. His arms, which were matted with coarse black hair, seemed abnormally foreshortened and were less than half the length of his lower limbs, which were very long and only slightly less hairy.
Even more repellent than the giant's ill-shaped body was the almost Neanderthal-like primitiveness of his face. The jaw was massive, the features coarse and the brow sloped as sharply backward as the brow of an ape. But there was nothing apelike in the burning intensity of his deep-sunken eyes, or the intelligence which animated the rest of his features as he fastened his gaze on the girl who still stood silently regarding him, her fingers pressed to her throat.
"Start dancing," the tall surgeon whispered, tapping her gently on the arm. "We'll soon know whether or not he can be stirred in an amorous way. I would have spared you this ordeal if I could, but there is no subterfuge which would enable us to postpone it in the presence of a Monitor. She is envious of your beauty and will not like what you must do. But she will have to watch. The success or failure of this test touches her at too vital a point. She is a Monitor and must become a judge—a cold, impersonal maker of decisions. I am not like that, but—"