The mouldy-looking thing that was Sir Lawrence began to colloque silently with his countrymen, after their fashion. I looked beyond them to the army of thugs. Most of them, giving up their attempt to understand what the toffs were talking about, were engaged in looting the dead. I wondered what to do with them after this was over, if my bluff worked. Pay them off and send them home, I supposed. They would never talk about this pogrom--they'd be hanged! I'd have to see that they helped us bury all these corpses, alien robots and dead rogues alike, before they left. About twenty of the thugs had been killed. Who would miss them? And an event was coming--I devoutly hoped!--which would engulf any such minor event as the disappearance of some three hundred men from all walks of life.... At last Sir Lawrence Hockling turned back to me. All his companions, too, faced my way. * * * * * Never, in all my journeying among their foul kind, had I felt the concentrated effluvia of so much hate, so many noxious, diabolic waves of damnable ferocity beating against me like the wind off the Styx, turning me weak and sick. Malignant powers from the poisonous womb of Hell! I shook with uncontrollable nausea, with the dreadful revulsion caused by the towering, smashing, soul-wrenching blast of hatred flung at me by the group of beast-folk in that moment. It was beyond words. Nor was it my warped vision, affecting my other senses in the relatively mild way it had done before this. No, this was a feral force, a raging thing which knew no bonds of dimension or of the senses. It stabbed to the soul itself. Marion gave a muffled scream and huddled down on the step, clasping my knees; even the Colonel, the last man to be disturbed by an abstruse sensation, gasped audibly. As for poor Arold, he sat down with a bump and hid his face in his hands, whimpering; having as we did the added receptivity, that terrible blow nearly killed us both. The hall was blotted from my sight, a gulf opened below me, I felt myself hurtling down into unmentionable depths of agony. When I opened my eyes I did not know what to expect: perhaps the unknown wastes and plains of the silver land, whither their foul thrust, I thought, might very well have hurled me. As a matter of fact, I was still standing upright on the staircase. I have never been more surprised. Then I saw that they were in the process of leaving their human bodies, wrenching and hauling backward as though caught in a tight box. "We accept your ultimatum," said the scholarly voice of the beast who was Sir Lawrence Hockling. "We are rational beings. We have been beaten, and we will return to our own plane, which lies at an angle to your space-time continuum. Please spread the word of the capitulation abroad, so that no more may die. Agreed?"