Dorn caught the eager innuendo of his voice. He knew Tesla vaguely as a radical, an author of pamphlets. Tesla continued to talk, a sycophantic purr in his words.... The war was financed by international bankers. Didn't he think so? America was being drawn in by Wall Street--to make the loans to the Allies stand up. But something was going to happen. The eyes of the workers were opening slowly all over the world. In Russia already a beginning of realities. Ah, think of the millions dying for nothing, advancing or improving nothing by their death. Soldiers, heroes, workingmen, all blind acrobats in another man's circus. But something was happening. Revolution. This grewsome horseplay in Europe's front yard would start it. And then--watch out! The voice of Emil Tesla, eager, fawning, had yet another quality in it. It promised, as if it could not do justice to the things it was saying and must be careful, soft, polite. Dorn felt the man and his power. Not a puppy on flabby legs but a brute mastiff with a wild bay that must come out in little whines, because the music was playing, because he was talking to Somebody. A man physically beaten by life, his body scraping, bowing; his words mumbling confusedly in the presence of other words. Yet a powerful man with a tremendous urge that might some day hurl him against the stars. He had something.... To Tesla's sentences Dorn dropped a yes or no. Tesla needed no replies. He purred on eagerly before his listener, seeming to whine for his appreciation and good will, yet unconscious of him. A waiter brought wine. Dorn stared at the topaz tint in his glass. His eyes had changed. They no longer smiled. A heaviness gleamed from them. The thing in his heart would not go. Heavy hands turning him over and over, as if life were tearing him, crowds and streets pulling at him. There had been no rest since Rachel had gone. He sat almost oblivious of Tesla. In the back of his brain the city tumbled--an elephantine grimace, a wilderness of angles, a swarm of gestures that beat at his thought. But before his eyes there were no longer the precise patterns of another day. He was no longer outside. He had been sucked into something, the something that he had been used to refer to condescendingly as life. People sitting in a room like this had been furniture that amused him. Now they were alive, repulsive, with a meaning to them that sickened him. Streets had once been stone and gesture. Now they, too, were meanings that sickened. A sanity in which he alone was insane, surrounded him; a completion in which he alone seemed incomplete. Men and women together--tired faces, lighted faces--all with destinations that satisfied them. And he wandering, knocked from place to place by heavy hands, pushed through crowds, dropped into chairs. Time itself a torment into which he kept thrusting himself deeper.