It came riding down, light as a feather atop its light, until it hovered just a few feet above Jim's head. Jim knew that he was being examined microscopically, perhaps even fourth-dimensionally. He shivered a little. He tried to take a step back but could not. There came a sudden chuckling within his own brain, and then mentally he heard the entity speak.
"Yes, Earthman, you were right in your estimate of me. I am 'evil' to such as you. At least that is what Bhruulo tells me, and I have come to believe Bhruulo."
Jim crouched before the thing, staring up at it. He still felt its probing mental fingers in his mind, and the fingers were ... unclean. He spoke aloud at last, in a voice he hardly recognized as his own.
"What—what in heaven's name are you?"
There came that chuckling note again, as the thing spoke.
"Whatever I am, Earthman, it is not in heaven's name. I do not exactly know myself what I am. I personally have no conception or remembrance of how I came here. I only know what Bhruulo has told me. It pleases me to tell you."
The mental voice ceased abruptly. Then sudden, vivid pictures flashed stereoptically across Jim's brain and were as quickly gone. He saw a city he recognized as M'Tonak, and the city was teeming with people. Jim knew that must have been many, many years ago.
The scene changed. As through another's eyes, he caught a blurry vision of this evil entity flashing from out of the sky to land near the city. He felt some of the consternation and then horror as the populace died by the score in the streets. There was no apparent reason except the presence of the alien thing. Just to look at the blinding brilliance of it was to die. Jim caught confused pictures of all available weapons being rushed to the scene to do battle with the thing, but to no avail; as the M'Tonakians died, the entity grew tremendous in proportions and in power.
These pictures flashed away and Jim saw others; the last few scientists of M'Tonak, in a barricaded place where they worked frantically on a weapon with which to battle the alien thing. They completed the weapon but they could not destroy the entity. After a terrific struggle they subdued it temporarily by means of certain rays and beams. In this manner they at last brought it into captivity within the glassite well.