Was the battle over? Who had won?... To each of us, himself is the center of the Universe.... The white-faced, trembling little Lea stood at the city gate staring at the empty luminous distance. And because she was a woman, she wanted George to have won—for herself, as well as for the fate of her people....
In the lamplit Carter living room, George sat with his father and Alice. He was in his bathing suit; ragged, dirty and blood-smeared. He had told them now of his weird experience; how he had killed Taroh; and then, still getting large, had come on and emerged again into his normal Earth-world....
"You've still got some of the drugs?" Professor Carter said finally. "Good Lord, George—a trip like that, you could have been killed a hundred times. You accomplished your purpose—I'm glad of that. Taroh is dead. No use trying to connect that world with this one any further. It's against nature. And those drugs—the most diabolic things that exist in the world today. I'll demonstrate them to our scientists—then we'll have them destroyed."
Did the blind little Alice perhaps feel differently? Her sensitive fingers caressed the stubble of beard on George's blood-smeared face. "In the morning you'll tell me all about Lea?" she murmured. "I—I really loved her, George."
"Yes—yes, of course I will," he agreed. He avoided his father's demand for the drugs. "In the morning, Dad," he said. "Don't worry—I'll be careful of them. You and Alice better get to bed now. For me, I want a bath and shave. And a lot of sleep. I'm about all in."
He kissed his father affectionately. His caress as he embraced his blind little sister lingered for just a moment.
"Good night, Alice dear."
"Good night, George."
There was no one to see young George Carter as, later that night, he furtively tiptoed downstairs. Quietly he left the house, went down to the little rock garden where the moonlight gleamed on the old sundial and its metal pointer. And he did not come back....