Page:Amazing Stories Volume 17 Number 06.djvu/124

124 off my dominance. I exerted all my will. The Tree of Life juice gave me power. In the end he had to obey.

"Find a clean glass," I instructed, with calm deliberateness. "And pour it half full out of the brown bottle. Now fill it from the other—"

Gibson made every move I directed.

"Now—" I said. "Drink it!"

He drank

I drifted out of Gibson's mind-part, found my own, and directed my hands to shut off the mind-radio. Then, with a feeling of vast weariness, I sank down in my chair and stared down at Horace Gibson.

He was sprawled out, dead as a doornail.

After a moment I stood up, and bent over him curiously. I heard a muffled shriek of fright behind me.

I whirled.

It was Effie Maste, the dim-witted wench who drudged for my landlady. She had obviously been sent to tell me to come home to dinner. My landlady ruled her boarders with an iron fist.

Effie's vacant lack-lustre eyes bugged out. Her hand flew to her mouth, and she screamed again.

Then she backed out of the door, and ran.

I felt an overwhelming desire to throw my head back and laugh. That look on her face.

After a few minutes I tidied up the lab, and put my cosmic mind-radio away carefully, along with all my notes.

About an hour later, Sheriff Mike Willis came in and arrested me for murder.

UKE'S gap doesn't have much excitement, so everyone looked forward eagerly to my trial day. They hadn't had a murder trial since Old Lum Basker got lickered up and cut up his brother-in-law, Guber Wilks.

From my little cell's back window I could just see the top of the scaffold they'd built out behind Joshua Pickin's barn, for the hanging.

Trial day was August 6th.

It was phenomenally hot that day.

Flies buzzed over the jammed courtroom, augmenting the buzzing of ireful voices, as I was ushered in.

Judge Reefer pushed his glasses up on his forehead, and slapped at several flies cavorting on the paper litter in front of him, with a flyswatter that served double duty as a gavel.

"Order in the Court!" he wheezed asthmatically.

Everyone's eyes were glued on me. I was the center of attraction. And there wasn't a friendly face in the whole crowd.

I thought, with a wry smile, that my lack of friends was in a measure my own fault. I was so absorbed in my experiments I took no time to vouchsafe any small chatter with the local yokels.

Luke's Gap folks like to know what brand of tobacco you smoke, what denomination you adhere to, and have a clear picture regarding your political preferences.

They had a vulture look. I wondered vaguely if after it was all over they'd slice me up in little pieces and each take home a slice to put on the what-not for a souvenir.

Effie Maste was sworn in.

"Tell us just what you saw. Don't be afraid of that murdering sk—" Hank Peters, the prosecuting attorney, broke off slyly, as though his righteous indignation had got the better of him for a moment.

The jury twittered in approval. Effie Maste shot a scared look at me from the witness stand.

"Well,"" Effie gulped self-consciously. "When I looked in the door I saw that