He was telling them now what he had done.... The little depots all over the earth, compressed with caged bacteria. Little time-bombs—all to explode within thirty minutes of this present instant. The women and children, the aged, would die first. But the polluted air, the contagion spreading everywhere—in a week, a month, the swift and deadly bacteria would leave no one alive.
"You—are going to do this to us?" young Jac murmured at last.
"Why not? It is my destiny." Never had Groff felt so quiet and comfortable a thrill as now; and this was only the beginning. "Others before me have tried their little conquests," he said with his grim smile. "Men who wanted power, and got it, just in a small way and for a little while. There was one—I recall reading about him—one who was so foolish to disclose all his plans by writing them in a book, years before he had a chance to accomplish them. I am not like him. I tell you now, when there is a scant thirty minutes before your inevitable annihilation begins."
"You hate your fellow men so much," Jac murmured impulsively, "you would kill yourself, just for the pleasure of killing the rest of us?"
To die. It sent so strangely a queer little shiver over Groff. He had always felt it; but no one could ever know it, save himself. How many times his vaunted reckless bravery had awed his fellow man! He sat very straight now, and his eyes flashed.
"I have never been one to fear death," he said.
But, as always before, he knew now that he was safe enough. His armed citadel here was wholly safe from outside attack, even if the stricken multitudes should find brief strength to try and assail him. His retainers, thinking they were safe, would remain at their posts. Poor fools. At the last, even they would be stricken and Groff would retreat up here. Impregnable, here in the tower and its neighbor little rooms, he could maintain his unpolluted air, and eat the food and drink the water which he had stored here in such abundance. Perhaps even, nature would let him live the longer for his isolation.
Master of the earth. The man who owned everything. Pride swelled him again as he thought of that poor little fool who had only wanted to make himself the titular leader of the earth, and in his own fatuous conceit had written it all down in his little book.
"You have good reason to fear me," Groff said. "You realize it now?"