doctrine the process is not usually
completed until after death, but nowadays things are different. How,
since all else moves so swiftly, can a just God afford any longer to be
patient? Time has been obliterated in the last four years; space and
centuries telescoped; the sufferings of a century compressed into a few
cycles of months. No, there is something wrong, some break in the rhythm
of the universe, or those grotesque ghouls who started the whole thing,
those full-bodied, cold-blooded hangmen, who for forty years have been
sitting back planning the future of men and women as they planned the
cards of their sniggering skat games, would awake to a sun dripping
blood." He paused for a moment. "And as for that psychiatric cripple,
their mouthpiece," he concluded sombrely, "that maimed man who broods
over battle-fields, he would find a creeping horror in his brain like
death made visible."

"And you think he will not?"....

In the darkness Mr. Vandusen suddenly sat up very straight and tried to
pierce with his eyes the shadows to the right of him.

Again the chair creaked.

"And you think he will not?" asked the voice again.

The words fell one by one into the silence, like stones dropped into a
pool by a precise hand. As the ripples of sound they created died away
in the brown dusk, the room seemed for a moment to hold a hushed
expectation that made ordinary quiet a matter of movement and sound.
From the drab street outside the voice of a newsboy, strident and
insistent, put a further edge to the sharp minute. "N'extra!" he
shouted. "N'extra! 'Nother big raid on west'n front!"

It was Torrance who asked the question. "What--" he said. "But,
but--why--!" And then his wheezing inarticulateness broke like a
dislocated bellows.

Mr. Vandusen, leaning forward in his chair, did not realize at the time
the unreasonableness of the sharp blaze of irritation that at the
interruption burned within him. It was not until much later, indeed,
that he realized other odd circumstances as well: Torrance's broken
amazement, for instance; the silence of Maury, and Wheeler, and, above
all, of Tomlinson. At the moment he realized nothing, except an intense
curiosity to hear what the man who had just sat down next to him had to
say. "An extraordinary voice! Altogether extraordinary! Like a bell,
that is, if a bell could by any chance give a sense of an underlying
humor." And yet, even considering all this, when one is old and has
h