Smith makes two attackers disappear in the home of Jubal Harshaw, an episode that reveals both the force of Smith’s unfamiliar ability and the difficult moral learning that follows its use. The incident is not first presented as a clear account of a power demonstrated at will. It returns through Jill Boardman’s frightened testimony and Smith’s troubled effort to remember it, so that the disappearance becomes at once a physical mystery, a wound in a relationship, and a test of how Smith understands right action.

The Attack and Its First Account

Jill eventually admits to Jubal that she had not told him everything. Stumbling over the telling, she describes two men who suddenly were no longer there. She had screamed, frightening Smith, and he had entered the trance Jubal had seen; after that, she endured a difficult journey to reach the house. Jill has been afraid that the story will not be believed, and her belated disclosure makes clear that Jubal’s knowledge of Smith’s earlier trance did not yet include what had caused it.

The attack began after Jill had taken Smith elsewhere, undressed him, and bathed him. When she dried him, two men arrived. In the later reconstruction, one man pulled Smith from the bathing area into the living room, whose floor Smith remembers as covered with joyful grasses. Jill tried to stop the man, who struck her. The other attacker pointed a gun at her. The violence against Jill gives the disappearances their immediate context: Smith does not describe acting during a calm demonstration, but while frightened for a person he regarded as his water brother.

Recollection and Reassurance

When Jill reaches the moment in her account when the two men vanished, Smith’s smile disappears. He relives the decision and the discovery that he believes he chose wrongly and hurt his water brother; he trembles and huddles into himself. Jill firmly tells him not to go away, then guides him through the memory in small steps: the man pulled him into the living room, Jill tried to intervene, and the man struck her. Smith asks whether she is angry with him.

Jill answers that she has never been angry with him, though at times she has been frightened. She distinguishes the fear she felt during the attack from anger at Smith, and says she is not afraid now. Her reassurance allows her to ask what he did without treating him as an enemy. She wants Jubal and herself to understand how the two men could have been there and then gone. The scene thus turns on a contrast between the attackers’ force and the care required to bring Smith back into the memory without sending him into another retreat.

Smith’s Explanation and Its Limits

Smith agrees to explain, but first says he does not know the words. He begins with a phrase in Martian, then tries to translate the experience into English for Jubal. Something is in front of him; it is wrong and must not be there, so he reaches out. He describes the act as simple, easier than tying shoelaces, while admitting that he cannot yet express it adequately. He proposes to look for the needed vocabulary in his Martian dictionaries and explain more at breakfast.

That explanation gives the episode a moral as well as supernatural dimension. Smith experiences the attackers as something wrong that must be removed, but he does not regard his ability as proof that he always knows the right course. His immediate fear for Jill and his later distress coexist with the certainty that the men vanished. The gap between effortless action and difficult explanation is central: he can perform what he cannot yet name or fully judge.

Consequences and Significance

Jubal learns that the missing men were Gil Berquist and a second man Jill identifies as Johnson, who may or may not have been a police officer. Smith, meanwhile, describes the men as food he could not make be again and is sorry that he wasted it. His language exposes the distance between his Martian understanding and Jubal’s human assumptions. Jubal responds by reassuring him that the men would have been poor food and that, since Smith believed the act necessary, he had acted rightly.

Smith is greatly comforted, but does not conclude that his judgment is infallible. He says only an Old One can be sure of right action at a cusp, and recognizes that he still has much to learn and much growing to do before he can join them. The disappearances therefore leave more than the question of what happened to the attackers: they expose Smith’s developing sense of responsibility, Jill’s effort to preserve trust while speaking honestly about fear, and the unsettled relation between instinctive power and ethical certainty. The event is reconstructed after the fact, through testimony and guided recollection, and its human consequence remains visible in Smith’s distress even as the precise mechanics resist ordinary explanation.