urope, and he came out of the river bed
in which he had lain for forty-eight hours.

He walked alone through the deserted streets of Belgrade until he came
to the United Nations building. There he told a very brave lieutenant
that he was willing to stand trial any place in the world they wished.

For three days nobody came to arrest him. He sat alone with the
lieutenant in the peopleless city of Belgrade and waited for his
captors. They came then, timidly reassured by his non-violence. While he
talked to them pleasantly the citizens of London and Paris suddenly
began to dance jerky and grotesque jigs on the pavements of their
cities. In the same moment the Chief Justice of the Court of the
Nations, at a cocktail party in Washington, writhed in the exquisite
pain of total muscle cramp, his august features twisted into a mask of
abject fear.

The trial itself was a legal farce. The prisoner promptly pleaded guilty
to the charge of betraying mankind to an alien race, but he didn't allow
them to question him. When one lawyer persisted in face of his pleasant
refusals, he died suddenly in a cramped ball of screaming agony.

The gray-faced Chief Justice inquired whether he wished to be sentenced
and he answered yes, but not to death. They couldn't kill him, he
explained. That was part of the reward the aliens had given him. The
other part was that _he_ could kill or immobilize anybody in the
world--or everybody--from any distance. He sat back and smiled at the
stricken courtroom. Then he lost his composure and his mouth twitched.
He laughed uproariously and slapped his knees in ecstasy.

It was plain that he was fond of a joke.

An anonymous lawyer stood up and waited patiently for his merriment to
subside.

If this was true, he asked, why had not the aliens used this power? Why
had they not simply killed off the inhabitants and taken over the vacant
planet? The traitor gazed kindly at him; and a court stenographer who
had cautiously picked up a pencil returned agonizingly to her foetal
position and, that way, died.

The traitor looked at his fingers and shrugged. The thumb that had been
snapped off in the mob's frenzy was more than half grown again.

"They needed slaves," he said simply.

"And at the end, while some of them were still sane?"

The traitor raised his eyebrows, giving him his full courteous
attention. The lawyer sat down abruptly, his question unfinished. The
creature who had betrayed his own race