You wonder perhaps why the Professor did not give long ago to the
world some of these marvels that are the pride of our age. Reader,
let us put aside my tale for a moment to answer this. For all the
darkness of his sinister art there may well have been some good in
the Slave of Orion; and any good there was, and mere particle
even, would surely have spared the world many of those inventions
that our age has not spared it. Blame not the age, it is now too
late to stop; it is in the grip of inventions now, and has to go
on; we cannot stop content with mustard-gas; it is the age of
Progress, and our motto is Onwards. And if there was no good in
this magical man, then may it not have been he who in due course,
long after he himself was safe from life, caused our inventions to
be so deadly divulged? Some evil spirit has done it, then why not
he?
He stood there silent: let us return to our story.
Perhaps the efforts of poor clumsy Morano to comfort him cheered
Rodriguez and sent him back to the window, perhaps he turned from
them to find comfort of his own; but, however he came by it, he
had a hope that this was a passing curse that had come on the
world, whose welfare he cared for whether he lived or died, and
that looking a little farther into the future he would see Mother
Earth smiling and her children happy again. So he looked through
the deep-blue luminous window once more, beyond the battles we
know.
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