"A little mixed up!" Comstock was incredulous. "You've had us living in a madhouse for five hundred years and all you can say is that you must have made a little mistake?" Shrugging, The Grandfather said, "So I made a little mistake." "Now," Comstock said, "now I know that my hypothesis is correct, how could you have listened to the things, the horrors that have gone on in our world for all these centuries and not been affected, not been chilled to the bone with a desire to do something concrete?" The Grandfather seemed to consider the question carefully, then he shrugged and said, "Who listens?" There was only one thing that remained for Comstock to do. Marshalling his forces, he suddenly leaped from his chair straight at The Grandfather. His clutching hands were stretched out in front of him as the forward impetus of his movement carried him into The Grandfather's chest. He pulled at The Grandfather's beard. Now he would know, once and for all. And then he knew. The beard came off in his hands. CHAPTER 16 Stunned by his own temerity, Comstock stared at what had formerly been hidden by the hair of the beard. "I knew it," Comstock said at last. "I knew no human being could live for five hundred years." "That is why I have taunted you into action," The Grandfather said gravely, "I knew that only when you saw with your own eyes the evidence of what you suspected would you be able to proceed properly." "This is why there is no record of your existence prior to five hundred years ago?" "Yes." Staring at the metallic surface that had been hidden under the beard, seeing for the first time the control panel that covered The Grandfather's whole chest, Comstock wondered what to do next. "I hope," The Grandfather said, "that I have not been derelict to my trust. But somehow the whole thing became too much for the mechanisms that the scientists built into me." If scientists could do things like this, Comstock thought with a wild surge of hope, if they could have built a thing like this that faced him, that was capable of living for half a thousand years, and had succeeded in behaving like a super-human being, then what other wonders was science capable of bringing about? What would the future hold, released from the dead hands that had held his world in sway for so long? The thought was enough to make his brain spin. The beard lay across his hands, its very feel a challenge to the imagination for it was not made of hair but some substance unlike any that Comstock had ever seen before. The Grandfather put his forefinger to a button on the board on his chest. It actuated a servo mechanism that allowed him to sit down. He said, "May I have my beard back?" Witlessly, still astounded at what had come to pass, Comstock handed the object to the man? Thing? That sat across the desk from him.