“Yes,” replied Dirk. “I remember that he was insolent to Inga and that I lost my temper and struck him. But what happened to me? I don’t recall that anybody hit me. I did hear sort of a peculiar sound just before I started to pass out, but––”
“Teuxical took a shot at you,” said Steinholt, “and you have been unconscious for over thirty-six hours.”
“Took a shot at me!” exclaimed Dirk. “What did he shoot me with?”
“That is what we all would like to know,” said Steinholt. “He leveled one of those damn tubes at you and pressed a button on it. There was a hissing sound, a flash of light, and you got groggy, and went out. He potted Zitlan, too,” continued Steinholt, “and he apologized for the trouble that his son was responsible for. Do you know,” he added, “I sort of like the old man.”
Lazarre, with a sympathetic smile on his face, entered the room at that moment and overheard the conversation.
“Old man is right,” he remarked, with a little note of awe in his voice. “Teuxical admits that he is three thousand years old and that he has at least two thousand more ahead of him. That Lodore must be a queer world,” he commented, shaking his grizzly head.
“It is not so queer when you take everything into consideration,” said Steinholt. “It seems quite natural when Teuxical explains it. Lodore it seems, is something like a hundred thousand times as big as this miniature world we live on. It took Lodore infinitely longer to solidify from a gaseous state than it took this world, and its entire evolution has been relatively slower than ours. Therefore, according to Teuxical, the people up there live longer and, incidentally, know infinitely more than we do.”
“What time is it now?” asked Dirk, after a moment of thought.