"Edmund, where'd we have been without
Juba?"
"I ought to have foreseen that," said Edmund. "If I had been as wise as I
sometimes think myself, I'd have arranged the thing differently. Of
course it should have been obvious all the while that Juba would be our
trump card. I dimly saw that, but I ought to have instructed him in
advance. As it was, his own intelligence did the business. He understood
my claim to an origin outside this planet, when they could not. It must
have come over him all at a flash."
"But do you think that they understand it now?" I asked.
"To a certain extent, yes. But it is an utterly new idea to them, and all
the better for us that it is so. It is so much the more mysterious; so
much the more effective with the imagination. But this is not the end of
it; they will want to know more--especially Ala--and now that Juba has
broken the ice, it will be comparatively easy to fortify the new opinion
which they have conceived of us."
"But Ingra nearly wrecked it all," I remarked.
"Yes, that was a stunning surprise. How devilish cunning the fellow is;
and how inexplicable his antipathy to us."
"I believe that it is a kind of jealousy," I said.
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