Take that thing away from him!
I'll prefer charges!
I'll—"
At this point, the gnurrs came from the voodvork out.
It isn't easy to describe a gnurr.
Can you imagine a mouse-colored, mouse-sized critter shaped like a wild boar, but sort of shimmery?
With thumbs fore and aft, and a pink, naked tail, and yellow eyes several sizes too large?
And with three sets of sharp teeth in its face?
You can?
Well, that's about it—except that nobody has ever seen a gnurr.
They don't come that way.
When the gnurrs come from the voodvork out, they come all over—like lemmings, only more so —millions and millions of them.
And they come eating.
The gnurrs came from the voodvork out just as Papa Schimmelhorn reached ". . . the church in the vale." They covered half the floor, and ate up half the carpet, before he finished "No scene is so dear to my childhood." Then they advanced on Colonel Pollard.
Mounting his desk, the Colonel started slashing around with his riding crop.
Katie Hooper climbed a filing case, hoisted her skirt, and screamed.
Lieutenant Hanson, secure in his nether nakedness, held his ground and guffawed insubordinately.
Papa Schimmelhorn stopped tootling to shout,
"Don'dt vorry, soldier boy!" He started in again, playing something quite unrecognizable—something that didn't sound like a tune at all.
Instantly, the gnurrs halted.
They looked over their shoulders apprehensively.
They swallowed the remains of the Colonel's chair cushion, shimmered brightly, made a queasy sort of creaking sound, and turning tail, vanished into the wainscoting.
Papa Schimmelhorn stared at the Colonel's boots, which were surprisingly intact, and muttered,
"Hmm-m, zo!" He leered appreciatively at Katie Hooper, who promptly dropped her skirt.
He thumped himself on the chest, and announced,
"They are vunderful, my gnurrs!"
"Wh—?" The Colonel showed evidences of profound psychic trauma. "Where did they go?”
"Vere they came from," replied Papa Schimmelhorn.
"Where's that?"
"It iss yesterday!"
"That—that's absurd!"
The Colonel stumbled down and fell into his chair.
"They weren't here yesterday!"
Papa Schimmelhorn regarded him pityingly.
"Of courze nodt!
They were nodt here yesterday because yesterday vas then today.
They are here yesterday, ven yesterday iss yesterday already. It iss different."
Colonel Pollard cast an appealing glance at Lieutenant Hanson.
"Perhaps I can explain, sir," said the Lieutenant, whose nervous system seemingly had benefited by the second visit of the gnurrs.
"May I make my report?"
"Yes, yes, certainly." Colonel Pollard clutched gladly at the straw.
Lieutenant Hanson pulled up a chair, and—as Papa Schimmelhorn walked over to flirt with Katie—he began to talk in a low and very serious voice.
"It's absolutely incredible," he said. "All the routine tests show that he's not much smarter than a high grade moron.
He quit school when he was eleven, served his apprenticeship, and worked as a clockmaker till he was in his fifties.
After that, he was a janitor in the Geneva Institute of Higher Physics until just a few years ago. Then he came to America and got his present job.
But it's the Geneva business that's important.
They've been concentrating on extensions of Einstein's and Minkowski's work.
He must have overheard a lot of it."
"But if he's a moron—" the Colonel had heard of Einstein, and knew that he was very deep indeed "—what good would it do him?"
"That's just the point, sir!