Hop in,
tall man," said Watkins, grinning. "You're holding up the works."

Reluctantly Summersby backed away, stood in the door of the box. He
could jump Watkins, but if the mechanism were so complex, he would only
doom them all. "You're out of your head," he said.

"Sure."

Abruptly above the safe-cracker towered the fantastic form of their
forgotten enemy, reaching for them, one hand still to its head.
Summersby inflated his lungs.

"Should auld acquaintance be forgot," he roared tunefully, "and never
brought to mind!"

Everyone joined him. It was a startling cataclysm of sound, even to
Summersby. The alien tottered, hand outstretched; its mouth fell open,
its eyes popped, the violet blood coursed from its nostril; with a
shudder it clawed the air, honked grotesquely, and pitched forward, half
on and half off the table, where it lay gurgling. A spot on the side of
its skull, about the width of a gallon jug, on which the hair grew
sparse and gray, pulsed as though there were no bone beneath the skin,
as though a bellows within was puffing it in and out, in and out. Its
ear, thought Summersby. Probably we've wrecked it for good. Maybe the
thing will die. Then Watkins is a gone goose, if he stays. He was about
to lunge at the steady gun-hand when Adam and Villa yanked him backward
into the box. Adam was crying.

"Try and come too, Mr. Watkins, try and come too," he said.

Watkins laughed. "I'll make out okay, son. I like my hide pretty well."
He waved with the gun. "Be seeing you." Then he tossed the dark weapon
into the box and slammed the door.

XI

There was darkness, then bright sun. They stood on a street corner, and
Summersby could read the signs as plainly as Watkins must have read them
in the focusing lens of the matter transmitter on the unknown planet.

Broadway and 42nd Street. The five of them had clicked into being on the
busiest corner of New York.

"That old crook," said Adam, gulping. "He focused us here for a gag."

"I look _awful_," gasped Mrs. Full, and Summersby, glancing at her,
agreed. Like all of them, she had lost weight; her skin showed the
effects of a week's washing without soap; and her skirt and blouse were
mussed up, to say the least. All the men needed shaves. Calvin Full,
recovering gradually from the shock of the goad, and still supported by
Villa, looked like a Bowery wino.

"Is he coming?" asked Adam, addressing Summersby. "Will Watkins be along
too?"

"I don't kn