by Various
I chose the man in the audience who was laughing the loudest and asked him to come up on the stage. With a little persuasion he did so. I selected another iron bar and wrapped it around his neck. Then I tied it in a four-in-hand knot and adjusted the ends until they were perfect. I asked him to take the necktie off. He grabbed it with both hands and tried. His face turned purple with effort, but of course he could not even budge it. Everyone laughed loudly. Finally twenty men from the audience volunteered to help. They all started pulling and hauling. They couldn't get the iron necktie off. Then the audience became silent. They looked at each other uneasily. There were frightened whispers.
* * * * *
That was the time to break the tension. I would spit on the floor. As my saliva hit the stage it burst into flames and a smell of perfume drifted through the theatre. It was my turn to look surprised and scared. Everyone howled with laughter, and the tension was broken for all but the man with the iron necktie who remained forlorn and miserable. Finally I removed his necktie and let it drop to the floor. It made a tremendous crash. Everyone was impressed all over again.
Next I grasped a horizontal bar and chinned myself fifty times with one hand. Again everyone became silent. They all knew no one has ever done that before. In many ways they are like us. For example, when they get scared their body heat rises like ours. As the heat came up to me from the audience I could feel the change in my sensors. It made my chin warm. I found that when my chin got warm it was time to break the tension. I did it by demonstrating magic tricks.
You will smile, Excellency, when you hear what they call magic here. I was tightly blind-folded. Some people came up on the stage, and I announced exactly how many there were. I pointed to exactly where each one was standing, and indicated which were males and which were females. This made a most tremendous impression. I could hear gasps in the audience. I was told that the people rubbed their eyes as if they could not believe what they were seeing. You will understand, Excellency, that I accomplished this by turning on the male principle. The women here are so exquisitely receptive to it that when it is on their excitement causes changes in their body heat. It was simple for me to sense those fluctuations in temperature and to know which of the people before me were female.
Next I put a piece of paper on a metal rack across the stage. I concentrated heat waves on it from my cupped hand. The paper burst into flames. As they say here on the street they call Broadway, that "brought down the house." They clapped and whistled and made me do it again and again. Luckily they conceived of it only as a wonderful trick.
I ended the act by choosing a very unusual looking man from the audience. He came up on stage and we went behind a screen together. When we reappeared a few seconds later the audience screamed because I had twisted my face around to look exactly like his. Believe me, the reaction was terrific. Slowly I let my face slip back to "normal." If they realized there is no normal and that I could leave my face that way permanently, that would have been too much of a shock. They would have become silent and terrified and suspicious. I might have been in danger.
I had to calculate carefully how much these people could take without realizing there was something alarmingly different about me. I learned my lesson one night. I turned on the male principle too strongly and some of the women in the audience became very agitated. Everyone was embarrassed. After the show the theatre manager came to my dressing room and asked me to have a drink with him at a little bar across the street.
When we sat down he stared at me in a queer manner. "Just exactly what happened tonight?" he demanded.
I looked surprised. "Weren't you satisfied with the act?" I asked. "The audience seemed to like me."
"They liked you too much."
I laughed. "You mean those silly females who tried to drag me off the stage?"
He narrowed his eyes and thrust his face close to mine. "If I hadn't had the best-trained ushers in New York there'd have been a panic and a riot in there. How come?"
I shrugged. "The women in your town seem remarkably excitable."
"And in your town?"
"Not so," I declared truthfully. How truthfully Your Excellency well knows.
* * * * *
"There's something peculiar about you," he said, "something very peculiar." He leaned back in his chair and his glance swept over me. "Suppose you cut out the leopard skin," he said, "and wear a jersey and trousers."
I laughed to myself. He thought my bare body, my bulging muscles had been the cause of the trouble. What a fool! Is Your Excellency laughing too? However, I dared not disagree with him. By that time he had had many drinks. He was looking mean. He reached over and grabbed the lapel of my coat in his fist.
"What the hell kind of a guy are you?" he snarled at me.
My hands twitched. I wished I could have picked him up and tied him in a four-in-hand knot around his own neck.
"Who the hell are you?" he repeated.
I yawned and stretched and got to my feet. "Not even a strong man now," I said casually, "just a tired man."
I left the bar.
After that incident I was careful with the male principle. When the audience left each night I turned it on very slightly--only enough to be sure that the women would do their best to get back to see me again.
But before I go any further in this account of my adventures, Your Excellency, let me tell you about the women here. The greatest difference between the Americans and ourselves is in the women. They are extraordinary. Some of them are beautiful beyond belief. My researches completely confirm your much-criticized hypotheses concerning our own women. If our enemies who object so strongly to Your Excellency's statements could be here for only one hour they would become your devoted supporters. American women are the proof that your theories are correct. Your famous attempt to explain some of the incongruous and apparently ridiculous passages in our ancient manuscripts by assuming the existence of a now-vanished female principle is irrefutably demonstrated by these women, Your Excellency.
Here, the female principle exists, and as you predicted, most of the women are therefore entirely different from ours. The term used in this language is "femininity." It is a devastatingly attractive thing--but almost impossible to explain. I will make an attempt.
Senseless, reasonless, even foolish motions of the body and the hands, the expressions of the eyes and the mouth, the way the head is moved and tilted are a part of it. So are unusual tones of the voice and special ways in which things are said. Laughter, a whisper, the direction of the glance, the fingers' pressure--these, too, are parts of it.
There are infinitely various types of adornment which hang on the body, fabrics in delicate or brilliant colors which cling and flow, gleaming stones at throat and wrists. The faces are enchantingly painted, the hair shining and arranged in numerous wonderful designs. There is an aura of the scent of flowers and fruits.
I tell you, Excellency, everything about this femininity assails the senses. It is so potent that once having experienced it the mere recollection causes the pulses to pound and throb. My hand trembles as I write these words to you. I am confused and disturbed and wild with a longing I never knew at home. I wish to meet Your Excellency's high standards in preparing this report, and yet I am unable to be scientific. The logic of the laboratory cannot be employed.
As soon as I could I began to hunt desperately for the secret of the female principle. I analyzed the soil, the food, the water, and the air by our own most refined methods. I found nothing to help us. I went to the risky extreme of killing two of their women. One possessed an unusual amount of this femininity. The other, who seemed to have very little of it, was essentially like one of our own women. There was not the slightest chemical difference in their bodies. Dead, they were precisely the same. But alive, Your Excellency, they were overwhelmingly dissimilar.
I was able to kill the unfeminine one scientifically without emotion or regret. But, although it was clearly my duty, I could hardly bring myself t
o kill the other one. I had known her for several days. Her femininity almost prevented my continuing with the experiment. She told me that she loved me.
I don't know if I have the skill to explain to you what this "love" is. Briefly, it means that the woman was in a mental state--a receptive mental state, Excellency, infinitely more violent than the peak our women reach after intensive application of the male principle. Your Excellency, she was that way all of the time.
* * * * *
This brings me to another extraordinary difference between them and us. The men here lack the male principle. They obviously don't need it because of the existence of the female principle in the women. If the men had it, as we have, I leave it to Your Excellency's vivid imagination as to what would be happening here.
In general the men are enough like us to be called humanoids in our sense of the word. They have about the same intelligence quotient that we have, and are physically almost identical except for our induced modifications. As Your Excellency predicted they do not have these since they have not yet discovered the methods of inducing them. As a result, while they have the same muscular potential as we do, they are far weaker, and their life span is not more than 70 or 80 years by their calendar.
They do not have heat sensors, so they stumble around in the dark and trip over things like children. They squander more energy on electric lights than on anything else in the economy. Also, their hearing and eyesight cannot be compared to ours. I am always hearing and seeing things without their suspecting it. A low conversation across the room is perfectly audible to me. Much of my best information comes this way. Naturally, since they completely lack heat generators, they cannot set things on fire.
To get back to the account of my activities, Excellency; my biggest mistake was in killing the two women for the femininity research. This got me into terrible trouble. They feel strongly about killing women here. Now that I appreciate their women, I can see why.
The local police were not hard to handle, but they have a central police system called the F.B.I. It is comparable to Your Excellency's organization in techniques and training, and in some ways even superior to it. When the F.B.I. started investigating me, things got serious immediately.
One day my heat sensor detected a man standing outside my front door. He was a huge bulky man. I sensed a mass under his left arm pit. My heat sensor analyzed it. It reflected heat like iron, but there seemed to be some small pieces of lead there too.
The man was polite and apologetic when I opened the door. He tipped his hat. He said that he had come to the wrong apartment. Then he asked, "How did you know I was standing outside the door?"
Without thinking, I uttered the first thing that came into my head. "I saw your shadow."
His eyes widened only slightly. He had good control of himself. "How could you see a shadow through a wooden door?" he asked softly.
I was exasperated at my mistake but I smiled the way people here do when they are at a disadvantage. "I do not explain my tricks," I told him. "I earn my living by performing them at the theatre."
I closed the door.
The next night I was experimenting with the male principle. I sat on a bench in a place called Central Park and practiced on the women as they went by. I discovered that the more feminine the women the greater the effect the wave has on them. Some would hesitate and look around as they walked by me. Some would stop and stare at me in a puzzled fashion. I was growing tired and ravenously hungry. I decided that when the next attractive woman passed me I would generate one last powerful wave, and then go on to a restaurant.
* * * * *
I allowed a few unfeminine ones to go by. Then I saw her, a lovely blonde girl about twenty-five years old. Her hair was a mass of short curls that covered her head with a uniform thickness like the styles in our Second Renaissance Period. She had on a black dress and was carrying a black bag in her hand. I sensed small pieces of different types of metals in her bag. She was walking slowly and weeping. Occasionally she dabbed at her nose with a piece of white cloth.
She was so beautiful, Excellency. Her warmth started flowing over my chin when she was at least sixty feet away. I decided to wait until she was quite close and then to engulf her with the full force of the male principle. I was shaken and impatient. Even at the highest point of excitement, though, Your Excellency should know that the importance of my mission was in my mind. When she was on the sidewalk directly in front of me I did as I had planned. She stopped. Her handkerchief dropped to the ground, and then her bag. She looked at me wildly. She ran over and sat on the bench beside me. She put her arms around my neck and kissed me.
"Why were you crying?" I asked.
"I don't remember," she said. "I don't care."
I closed my eyes. My senses were responding to her warmth and her scent. Suddenly there was a blast of male heat on my chin. I started and stared. There standing above us was the huge heavy man of the night before. The mass of metal was still under his left arm pit. He had an odd expression on his face. He was watching the girl as if her condition was answering a question for him.
In a sudden flash of intuition everything was clear to me. The girl was a decoy. I had fallen neatly into a trap. I had thoughtlessly demonstrated my power to the F.B.I, man--a power I could not explain by saying it was a trick.
I pushed the girl away and stood up. The man's eyes were fixed upon me with horror. I saw that he knew there was something monstrous and menacing about me. Something he did not understand. Something that meant terrible danger to him and his kind. His right hand started to creep towards the mass of metal under his arm. I cupped my hand towards him and started accumulating a heat charge. His glance dropped fearfully. It fell to my hand, and his temperature went up. He had undoubtedly seen me burn pieces of paper in the theatre.
His right hand fumbled in his pocket and he drew out a little package. "Have a cigarette?"
I shook my head. He put one in his own mouth and lighted a match. In spite of the strongest effort of my will I jumped back. I jerked my hand up over my chin. A little stick of wood with a flaring flame on the end of at least 600 degrees Centigrade, right in front of my heat sensors, took my breath away. The searing heat burned right into my brain. It was like some of the tortures in Your Excellency's Force Number Five.
The heavy man observed all of this, but he did not understand it. He looked at the girl, who had risen and was leaning against me, oblivious of everything.
"You've got quite a way with women, haven't you?" he said. He dragged on his cigarette. The tip flamed up painfully. I shrank back and again brought my hand up to protect my chin.
"What's the matter with you?" the man asked sharply.
I did not know how to answer. I stood mute and waiting.
"I want to go now, and I want to take that girl with me. Do you understand?" The man's voice was harsh with anger.
I shut the principle off. The girl lifted her head, but she appeared to be in a trance. The man took her arm and they walked off through the park. A murderous rage against the heavy man filled me. I cupped my hand. He was well within range--but then I thought of my mission, Excellency, and let him go. For hours afterwards that lovely girl who was taken from me was in my thoughts.
* * * * *
Your Excellency, two suggestions come out of this experience. They both concern our induced modifications. Any of us who come to America should be able to shut off the heat sensor at will. With everyone here smoking and lighting cigarettes and turning on 300-watt light bulbs in one's face, with automobiles approaching at night shooting out two searing heat beams in front of them, the environment is too full of shocks. It is too easy for us to be spotted because of this weakness.
Also, Your Excellency, a change must be made in the connection between all of the induced modifications. When I accumulate a heat charge, that means that the male principle is automatically on. When I was accumulating a charge to kill the heavy man, the principle was affecting the woman, and she was
reacting to it. The combination was not desirable at that time. When I light the paper at the theatre, the male principle is also on, and affects the women in the audience. We can use the male principle without using the heat ray. Why can't we use the heat ray without using the male principle? This modification should be induced.
The next afternoon there was a matinee performance at the theatre. It was crowded. The management had even provided for standing room at the back of the theatre. I started, as usual, by selecting an iron reinforcing bar and tying it into a four-in-hand around my neck.
To my surprise, although it looked exactly the same, it was much harder to bend. I never did get the ends quite even.
I had just put the second bar around the neck of the stooge from the audience when I noticed something queer. Although this was usually the place for hilarious laughter, everyone was silent. I looked out over the audience. A man was standing in the aisle, just a few feet from the stage. He was pointing a gun right at me. It was the heavy man.
As I turned around he said, "Put up your hands."
I put them up.
He spoke in a loud, deep voice, "This is no gag, ladies and gentlemen. This man on the stage is the most dangerous and cold-blooded murderer in America. He is the murderer of Lydia Davis and Genevieve Scott."
Several other men stood up. They all had masses of metal under their left arm pits. The heavy man gave them an order. "Go up on the stage and handcuff him. Use five pairs of handcuffs."
Then he spoke to the audience. "Ladies and gentlemen, today we substituted tempered steel bars for the reinforcing bars. Twenty ordinary men couldn't have bent one of those bars. What you have witnessed was no trick. The man you see on the stage is not like us. He has the strength of at least forty men. Please remain in your seats. We can handle this situation."