An extraordinary thing happened. The monsters suddenly began to quiver and squeak again but this time—it was clear to the ear somehow—not with rage, but with fear. Pure and terrible fear. They trained their eye-stalks on Jimsy LaRoche, they paled to a lighter shade of brown and green, then slowly they began to back away.
“Hold your fire, men!” called a police captain, probably just to get into the act.
Dr. Mildume appeared again from somewhere. So did Etienne Flaubert. So did Eddie Tamoto and some of the other technicians. They gaped and stared.
Slowly, inexorably, using Jimsy LaRoche as his threat, Mr. Untz backed the two monsters into the studio, and gradually to the cage. Dr. Mildume leaped forward to shut them in once more.
And through it all Jimsy LaRoche continued to bawl at the top of his lungs.
Later, in Mr. Untz’s office-cottage, Harold read the newspaper accounts. He read every word while Mr. Untz was in the other room taking a shower. He had to admit that Max had even thrown a little credit his way. “My assistant, Mr. Potter,” Untz was quoted as saying, “indirectly gave me the idea when he said that one man’s meat was another man’s poison.
“Dr. Mildume had already explained that the monsters came from a high-gravity planet—that the smaller of the species evidently seemed the more capable, and therefore the dominant one.” Harold was sure now that the statement had been polished up a bit by the publicity department.
“The only logical assumption, then,” the statement continued, “was that small stature would dominate these life forms, rather than large stature, as in the environment we know. They were, in other words, terrified by tiny Jimsy LaRoche—whose latest picture, ‘The Atomic Fissionist and the Waif,’ is now at your local theatre, by the way—as an Earth-being might have been terrified by a giant!”