The operation was a success. Something that ought not to have been in Derrick’s throat was now out of it, and an incorrect arrangement of this and that had been corrected. The only trouble was a slight, ever so slight bleeding which could not be stopped. The measures taken to stop it were worse than the dream about the Indians, and, still worse, they didn’t stop it. The thin trickle of blood kept on trickling until the reservoirs from which it came were empty, and then the doctors--there were a good many of them now--told the woman who sobbed and carried on that her husband’s sufferings were all over. They told her that Derrick was dead. But Derrick wouldn’t have admitted that. Even the bleeding and the pain of which he seemed to have died were now but vague and negligible memories. The great thing was to get out of that body which had already begun to decay, and making use of a new and perfectly delightful power of locomotion, to get as far away from it as possible. He caught up with sounds and passed them. And he discovered presently that he could move a little more quickly than light. In a crumb of time some unerring intuition told him that he had come to the Place to which some other unerring intuition had directed him. Among the beautiful lights and shadows and colours of that Place, he learned fast. There were voices which answered his questions just as fast as he could think them. And something wonderful had happened to his memory, because it was never necessary to think the same question twice. Knowledge came to stay. To discover how very little he had ever really known about anything didn’t humiliate him. It was funny. It made him laugh. And now that he was able to perceive what insuperable obstacles there must always be between the man-mob and real knowledge of any kind, he developed a certain respect for the man-mob. It had taken them, for instance, so many millions of years to find out that the world on which they lived was not flat but round. The wonder was that they had made the discovery at all. And they had succeeded in prying into certain other secrets that they were not supposed to know--ever. As, for instance, the immortality of the soul, and how to commit race suicide. To let the man-mob discover its own immortality had been a dreadful mistake. Everybody admitted that now. The discovery had made man take himself seriously and caused him to evolve the erroneous doctrine that the way to a happy immortality lay only through making his brief mortality and that of others as miserable as possible. He thought a question and received this answer, only the answer was in terms of thought rather than in words: