gonna buy you some ties," said Sammy. "Some beautiful ties—"
LONG before, the machine had clouded, and the Quennians stood around it watchfully, waiting for the inevitable to happen. Their faces were cold, impassive masks. And then it happened. The machine cleared for an instant and shattered with a deafening report, and long slivers from the quartz cube fell to the floor of the hall.
"We have failed," said Pyteles. "They were stupid animals, too stupid for our purpose."
"No," said Kora-san. "No living being could have withstood the things we showed them. Even the faintest glimmer of intelligence would react to our miracles. They were irresistible."
Murra picked up one of the bits that had fallen from the machine.
"Irresistible," he sneered. "I too found it irresistible. Those lovely panoramas we manufactured, the cities and the people. I could have cried out in pain a hundred times." He looked out from the vacant hall to the sullen landscape. It was an empty, barren land. "We have Tallu to thank for this," he said bitterly. "We are the last six living souls in all Quenna, and soon we too will be gone, unless—"
Lito began to tear away his features.
"Kora-san is right," he said incisively. "We have not failed. The humans will do what we asked, and then their world will be ours, a vast supply house." His face had disappeared, the flesh torn away, disclosing a tiny head covered with white, scaly skin through which a single eye peeped. As he spoke, his razor sharp teeth clicked sharply. "It will not help us to blame Tallu," he said, tearing away at his torso. "He knew everything. He left us a plan that could not fail."
Pyteles laughed wildly.
"It will fail," he said. "The plan was built on a falsehood. Even the great Tallu did not know that the people of the world he discovered so long ago were without intelligence. They could scarcely walk, their language was uncertain, their words slurred. Intelligent beings would have had their minds fired by what we showed them, but not those two."
He stood close to the instrument board that remained in the hall, and his fingers idly spun the levers. With each touch of Pyteles' hands, the scene changed from place to place. Now there was a jeweled chamber, now a plain, now mountains, now a city. He touched other levers and sounds accompanied each scene, but since he was careless, the sounds didn't match the scenes. Laughter floated mockingly over an empty plain and crowded cities were silent.
"This is our genius," said Pyteles, suddenly vicious. "This is the power of our dimensional prison—the power to imitate, the power to project images that are real to creatures of three dimensions. But even there we were wrong. Our plan was filled with flaws."
"Why do you say we were wrong?" Kora-san asked.
"Did you see what happened when one of them suddenly tried to grasp a woman who flew near him?" Pyteles asked. "He felt nothing but air, for there was no one there. An intelligent creature would have started guessing the truth then, but not those two. It meant nothing to them. Their senses were too dull, and we needed beings upon whom we could play with our pseudo-world, with our fancied treasures."
AS Pyteles spoke, the others had followed the example of Lito, tearing away the bodies in which they had
