McGraw©Hill/Focus/4 O'Clock p. 226////R7N14/ ***** The hands of the alarm clock on the table in front of Mr.

Crangle stood at 3:47, on a summer afternoon. "You're wrong about that, you know," he said, not taking his

from the face of the clock. "You're quite wrong, Pet, as I have

explained to you often enough before. The moral angle presents

no difficulties at all." The parrot, in the cage hanging above him, cocked her head

and looked down with a hard, cold, reptilian eye, an ancient eye,

an eye older age upon age than the human race. She said, "Nut." Mr. Crangle, his eye still on the clock, took a peanut from

a cracked bowl at his elbow and held it above his head, to the

bars of the cage. Pet clutched it in a leathery claw. The

spring©steel muscles opened the horny beak. She clinched the

peanut and crushed it, the sound mingling in the furnished room

with the big city sounds coming through the open window © cars

honking, feet on the sidewalk, children calling to each other, a

plane overhead like a contented industrious bee. "It is quite true," Mr. Crangle said at 3:49, "that only

someone above all personal emotions, only someone who can look at

the whole thing as if from the outside, can be trusted morally to

make such a decision." As the big hand reached 3:50, he felt a

sense of power surge deeply through him. "Think, Pet. In ten

minutes. In ten little minutes, when I say the word, all evil

people all over the world will become half their present size, so

they can be known.