The glass of the Ray rod grew fiery red. The button seared my hand, and a smell of charred wood filled my nostrils. I dropped the weapon, and it fell clattering to the ground. Sanson was standing in the gap, unharmed. My Ray rod was the one that I had unwittingly discharged on the occasion when I scrambled for the cellar roof. It had given me life then; it seemed now to have brought me death. Of course it was useless till it had been recharged; now it emitted only the red-mull rays: heat, not cold combustion. Sanson had halted as I aimed. Now, at the sound of the falling Ray rod he sprang forward and turned his solar light on me. His poise was a crouching leopard’s. In his left hand he held the light, and in his right was his own Ray rod, covering me. I looked at him, I stared at him, I rose upon my feet and staggered to him. Something in his poise, the whitening hair, brushed back, something in the man’s soul that the years could not conceal reminded me.... I stood looking into the face of Herman Lazaroff! CHAPTER XIX THE STORY OF THE CYLINDERS “So it was you, Arnold,” said Sanson quietly. “Well ... what do you think of Sir Spofforth’s theories now?” All my hatred and fear of him had died in that blinding revelation. Bewilderment so intense that it made all which had occurred since my awakening dim, a sense of pathos and futility at once deprived me of my fears and robbed him of his power; and we might have been the fellow-workers of the old days again, discussing the problem of consciousness. He seated himself on the mud mound, and his voice was as casual as if we had just returned to the laboratory after escorting Esther home. And indeed I could with great difficulty only convince myself that I had not fallen asleep and dreamed this nightmare. “You see, it has all come to pass, Arnold,” said Sanson, twirling the Ray rod idly between his fingers. “A world such as I foretold—a world set free. Enlightenment where there was ignorance; the soul delusion banished from the minds of all but the most foolish; the menace of the defective still with us, but greatly shrunken; the logical State so wonderfully conceived by Wells, with Science supreme, and almost a world citizenship. It is a glorious free world, Arnold, to which humanity has fallen heir, and the fight for it has been a stupendous one. And it is a world of my creation! I have done what Caesar, Charlemagne, and Napoleon failed to do; I have brought humanity under one sway, out of the darkness into light, out of ignorance to knowledge. I have set man, poor plantigrade, on his feet firmly. He looks up to the skies, not in the blind and foolish hope of bodiless immortality, but knowing himself the free heir of the ages. Wasn’t it worth the battle, Arnold?”