"Why are you telling me?"
The man cleared his throat significantly. "You might be in a position to save the world from an atomic war."
Dale stiffened. "You must know," he said coldly, "what my position is. I am in the employ of the United Nations, and any attempt to control my actions is coercion and the penalty is death."
The man did not back away. He moved closer, and his eyes became black points of force. The Bryd saw that the man had mental powers unusual for that period of Earth's history.
"Look at me, Dale Stevenson."
Dale fought against it, but the man's will was powerful. Dale's resistance weakened. The man's eyes never wavered from Dale's. He moved still closer and spoke in a low tone. "Our information is that France will drop atomic bombs on Spain's principal cities at three a.m. one week from today. Suppose—just suppose—that some other nation—some nation powerful enough to do so—should be in a position to warn France at two-thirty that France would not be permitted to attack. Suppose this warning were backed up with a show of force to prove the warning meant business."
"Isn't that the job of the U.N.?"
The man's face was only inches now from Dale's. The Bryd shivered in its figurative boots. This man was a master hypnotist. Only they wouldn't call him a hypnotist in these days. They'd call him a psyche-man. Psyche-control was much more powerful than hypnosis. Psyche-control touched the moral inhibitions, which hypnosis never had been able to do.
Dale was lost. In the end he agreed, for a cash-on-delivery fee of one hundred thousand dollars, to concentrate his sodium mirror beam on Paris at two-thirty of the morning designated, and thereby, with a smoking path of fire and ruin, help the other nation to warn France that she must keep hands off Spain.
Perhaps Dale's jealousy of Georges Raoul Dumont had a bearing on the agreement.