Michael Smith makes two men disappear

Michael Smith makes two men disappear after one attacks Jill Boardman and the other threatens her with a gun. The act protects Jill, but its meaning is unsettled: Smith remembers the violence as a crisis of choice, fears that he harmed his water brother, and struggles to describe in human words how he removed what seemed to him an intolerable wrongness.

The Assault and the Act

The episode is recalled while Jill and Jubal Harshaw try to help Smith remember what happened in the room with the joyful grasses on the floor. Jill recounts that a large man pulled Smith into that room and struck her when she tried to stop him. The attacker then disappeared. The second man pointed a gun at Jill, and he too disappeared. Her account establishes both the immediate stakes and the order of events: the first disappearance follows an assault on Jill; the second follows an armed threat.

The act is not presented as a detached demonstration of power. Smith had been recalling the earlier happiness of Jill bathing him, but that recollection collapses when he reaches the moment the two men arrived. He trembles and huddles into himself as he relives what he calls a critical cusp of decision. His distress arises not simply from remembering violence, but from the discovery that he believes he chose wrongly and hurt his water brother.

Recollection and Reassurance

Jill interrupts Smith’s withdrawal firmly, telling him to stop and not to go away. He regains control of himself and responds to what she needs. She then guides him through the scene in small steps, asking him to remember without becoming upset: the two men were there, one pulled him into the room, and she tried to intervene. Smith confirms the detail of the grass-covered floor. When he asks whether Jill is angry with him, she reassures him that she has never been angry, though she was frightened at the time.

That distinction is central to the recollection. Jill does not deny the terror of the encounter: one man vanished, the other pointed a gun at her, and then he vanished as well. But she separates fear during the attack from anger toward Smith, and tells him she is not afraid now. Her careful reassurance gives him room to approach the memory without treating Jill’s injury and fear as evidence that she condemns him.

Naming the Disappearance

When Jill asks what he did, Smith agrees to explain, but begins with a phrase in Martian and then admits that he does not know the words. Jubal asks him to use many words and explain a little at a time. Smith describes perceiving something in front of him as wrong and concludes that it must not be there and must go. He begins to explain that he reaches out, but stops, frustrated by the gap between an action he experiences as simple and his limited ability to express it in English.

His comparison makes that gap concrete: he says that anyone can perform the act and that tying shoelaces is harder. Yet he cannot find the words to describe what he did. He proposes looking for the appropriate language in his Martian-language books and says he will try again at breakfast. The scene thus offers an account of the disappearances without converting them into a fully explained technique. What Smith can communicate is the perception and decision that preceded them: a wrong thing was present, and it had to be removed.

Food, Necessity, and Moral Judgment

Smith later apologizes that he could not make the box be again and that he wasted so much food, saying he had not known how to help it and that necessity had required the action. Jill quickly clarifies to Jubal that the food Smith means is the two men: Gil Berquist and the man with him, Johnson, whom she qualifies as a policeman only if that identification is correct. His apology reveals that his account of the event includes not only disappearance but the men’s transformation into food within his understanding of what happened.

Jubal responds by translating the incident into human terms Smith can accept. He jokes that the men would have been tough and poor in flavor and invokes the Federation convention concerning “long pig,” assuring Smith that they would have been condemned as unfit for food. Beneath the joke lies a serious act of reassurance: Jubal tells Smith not to worry about waste because the act was necessary, and affirms that Smith understood the fullness and acted rightly. Smith is visibly relieved. His account of the two disappearances therefore closes not with certainty about the mechanics, but with a moral question answered through the trust of his companions.

The Cusp and Its Consequences

For Smith, the decisive feature of the episode is the cusp: a moment when he must choose how to respond to an immediate wrong. His later trembling shows that the decision continues to trouble him, even though the two men’s removal stopped the assault and the threat against Jill. His fear that he acted wrongly coexists with Jubal’s reassurance that necessity made the action right. The event consequently joins extraordinary power to moral vulnerability rather than treating power as self-justifying.

Smith places the episode within a longer process of learning. He says that only an Old One can always be sure of right action at a cusp, and that he still has much to learn and much growing to do before he may join them. The two disappearances are thus both a rescue and a source of self-doubt: Smith acts decisively, but does not regard one successful intervention as proof that he has mastered judgment. His promise to search for better words and explain the event later also leaves the memory open, connecting the act’s immediate consequences to his continuing effort to understand human language and his own choices.