“It’s too late now,” he admitted, shaking his head. “Yet I’ve done no more to him than he did to me.”
Hale went to the eye-piece in the machine and started to look inside. Unani Assu stepped forward, tapped him on the shoulder, and, fingering significantly the dissecting knife which he had picked up, said:
“I am operating the machine. Will you sit over there by Aña and wait? It won’t be long. And, white stranger, remember this: I am your friend. I am turned against none but our common enemy.” He pointed significantly to the machine.
Two hours passed, long, silent hours for the watchers in the laboratory. Aña fell asleep, in a sweet, childish bundle upon the piled cushions, her golden hair, still decorated with the red flowers which she always wore, crushed and withered now. Several times Hale caught Unani Assu gazing at her sadly, and his own look saddened when it rested on the Indian’s strong, outraged body.
The humming of the machine changed to a whistle. Placing his fingers on his lips in a signal of quiet, Unani Assu whispered:
“Let Aña sleep. She mustn’t see this.”
Opening a door in the machine, his handsome face lighted with a grim smile, he whispered exultingly:
“Watch!”
A scuttling sound issued forth and then, half drunkenly, an enormous rat tumbled out—one of those horrible rats with the hairless, humanlike faces that had so frequently come from the life-machine.