Smith demonstrates disappearance and levitation at Jubal Harshaw’s home, where improvised tests transform a puzzling ability into a sequence of witnessed and filmed effects. The episode’s decisive turn is not simply that objects vanish or float: Harshaw and his associates learn to distinguish what they actually see from what they expected to see, while Smith’s own account remains tentative and tied to his sense that something is wrong.

A test of disappearance

After Smith explains that he reaches toward a thing he judges should not be present, then struggles to put the process into words, Harshaw asks whether he can make a large, empty brandy carton disappear. Smith repeats the formulation as a question, and Harshaw tells him to assume the box is wrong. The test is not an abstract exercise: Harshaw’s proposal turns Smith’s account into a practical demonstration, with an ordinary carton as its target.

When Harshaw asks Jill to throw the box at his head, she suddenly does so. Harshaw ducks by instinct, and the carton disappears before it can strike him. He has looked away at the crucial moment and cannot say what happened; Jill comforts the visibly trembling Smith, telling him that it vanished without touching Harshaw. The contrast matters: the result is immediate for the people in the room, but the precise process is not yet understood, and Smith appears distressed rather than triumphant.

An observer gives the disappearance a more exact description. It is not instantaneous: the carton seems to shrink very rapidly, as if receding into the distance, while remaining visible within the room up to the moment it is gone. The witness can report the appearance but cannot say where the box went. The episode thus separates observation from explanation: the effect can be described in detail even when its destination and mechanism remain unknown.

The ash tray and the limits of wrongness

Harshaw next sets up a test with a heavy ash tray, drawing Smith’s attention to its weight and sharp corners. He tosses it toward the ceiling and expects it to fall onto his head, injuring him unless Smith intervenes. The ash tray stops at the top of its trajectory and hangs five inches below the ceiling, with no visible support. Harshaw is stunned; Anne, asked to report what she sees, confirms both its position and the absence of anything holding it up.

Smith’s explanation is conditional rather than a display of unlimited control. When Harshaw moves out from under the tray, Smith no longer perceives anything wrong in its being where it is. Asked to move it, the tray descends steadily, travels sideways, pauses over the desk, then settles almost noiselessly into an empty place. The object’s movement follows a change in Smith’s perception of what should not be there, not simply Harshaw’s desire to see it move. The demonstration also makes the test’s danger plain: Harshaw had deliberately placed himself beneath a heavy object to create a reason for Smith to intervene.

Harshaw then asks Smith to lift the tray a foot above the desk without touching it. Smith complies and anxiously invites Harshaw to measure, offering to correct the height if he has judged it wrongly. The detail gives the scene a collaborative, almost experimental character: Smith’s ability is not only an extraordinary event but something he attempts to perform accurately in response to a request.

The pistol test and recorded evidence

Harshaw tests a more urgent possibility by showing Smith a very old police pistol. He instructs the women to move aside, tells Smith not to act until ordered, then picks up the gun and aims it at him. At Harshaw’s command, the weapon disappears from his hand without a jolt, shock, or twisting motion. Harshaw declares the response perfect because Smith has removed the gun before it can be aimed at him; Smith answers that he is happy. The test establishes the defensive consequence of the ability in a deliberately staged threat, though the earlier demonstration has already shown how unsettling it can be for Smith.

The household’s cameras make it possible to examine the events after the fact. Harshaw and Duke review the footage of Jill throwing the carton and see it disappear in midair. In slow motion the carton does not merely wink out: it becomes smaller and smaller until it is no longer visible. The slowed film cannot preserve useful sound, but the altered pace clarifies the visual sequence that the witnesses had initially struggled to describe.

The other recordings confirm different parts of the demonstrations. The ash tray’s suspension near the ceiling falls outside the camera’s view, but its leisurely descent and landing are captured. The pistol appears small in the stereoscopic image, yet the recording supports the same apparent recession into the distance as the carton. Because Harshaw had been gripping the weapon when it disappeared, he accepts that the effect occurred even though the images do not explain it. He requests duplicate prints, making the recordings evidence that can be retained rather than a fleeting household spectacle.

Significance

The demonstrations move from a single disappearance, observed imperfectly, to a set of tests involving a threatened person, a suspended household object, and a weapon held in Harshaw’s hand. Each supplies a different kind of evidence: a witness’s description of the carton’s apparent shrinkage, direct observation of the ash tray’s unsupported motion, and recorded footage that confirms the visible effects. The progression also shifts the mood from curiosity to danger and then to verification.

The objects remain conspicuously ordinary: a discarded carton, a dirty and over-decorated ash tray, an old pistol. Their familiarity makes the anomalies harder to dismiss, while their different uses expose the practical stakes. The carton demonstrates disappearance; the ash tray reveals suspension and controlled movement; the pistol shows that the same capacity can interrupt an act of violence before it is completed.

Yet the episode does not resolve how Smith’s power works. The observers can document an object shrinking from view, but they cannot follow it to a destination or infer a mechanism from the images. Smith, meanwhile, describes his action through the language of wrongness and admits that he cannot yet explain it well. The scene’s lasting significance lies in that gap between reproducible effect and incomplete understanding: Harshaw becomes convinced of what happened, without becoming able to say what, exactly, he has witnessed.