«See what you have done to me!» Von Seyfertitz pointed.

The office walls were covered with expensive teak paneling. The desk was from Napoleon's age an exquisite Empire piece worth at least fifty thousand dollars. The couch was the best soft leather I had ever seen, and the two pictures on the wall were originals-a Renoir and a Monet. My God, millions! I thought.

«Okay,» I said. «The beasts, you said. You'll kill them, not me?»

The old man wiped his eyes with the back of one hand, then made a fist.

«Yes!» he cried, stepping up to the fine periscope, which reflected his face, madly distorted, in its elongated shape. «Like this. Thus and so!»

And before I could prevent, he gave the brass machine a terrific slap with his hand and then a blow and another blow and another, with both fists, cursing. Then he grabbed the periscope as if it were the neck of a spoiled child and throttled and shook it.

I cannot say what I heard in that instant. Perhaps real sounds, perhaps imagined temblors, like a glacier

cracking in the spring, or icicles in mid-night. Perhaps it was a sound like a great kite breaking its skeleton in the wind and collapsing in folds of tissue. Maybe I thought I heard a vast breath in sucked, a cloud dissolving up inside itself. Or did I sense clock machineries spun so wildly they smoked off their foundations and fell like brass snowflakes?

I put my eye to the periscope.

I looked in upon-

Nothing.

It was just a brass tube with some crystal lenses and a view of an empty couch.

No more.

I seized the view piece and tried to screw it into some new focus on a far place and some dream bacteria that might fibrillate across an unimaginable horizon.