The Fiat operated for me! I needed no further proof. Now, as for animals there were enough in the sea. They might come out in time to populate the earth. Just now I had no need of animals.

"There shall be men, but not the tall white blue eyed man of Atlantis," I decided. "I shall make several men, of different colors, of different attributes, of different heights, different appetites, different mentalities. First, I shall bring a brown man—and why not his mate at the same time—into being!"

I saw the man and his mate in perfect detail, whole.

I spoke the word, and nothing happened, nothing whatever! More sharply I spoke it again, but it did not operate. I gazed at the tree I had made, to make sure—and as I thought of how I had completed the tree, the thought created its other self beside it, so that there were two new palms on the first of my two peaks. But man I did not bring into being.

I tried red men, and failed. I tried black men, failed again. I tried yellow man—failure, all failures!

Would my dream not come true then? Was I destined to live out my time entirely alone on this Eden I had selected? I would not have it so.

I could manufacture stuff from electronic force. I had with me in my vessel every ingredient, every element, every instrument. I had stocked my vessel against every contingency, like a good seaman, by which I might build the skin, flesh, bones, cartilage, nails, all the intricate diverse parts of man.

So all in a day I built the forms of a red man, black man, yellow man, brown man—and for each I built a mate at the same time.

Then I commanded them to obey me, to rise, and breathe, and walk, and go, and live as men and women. In their brains which I had created I wrote for each color a language which should be all his own.

Now they obeyed me!

They rose, and stood, and turned their eyes upon me, eyes that should have been alive, but were instead the eyes of the dead—the eyes of things which had never lived, nor ever would—moving things that did not live!

I've no way of knowing what their metallic minds thought of me, but as if they were, all eight of them, possessed at once by the same evil genii, they launched themselves at me, shrieking at me in their several tongues.

I had not expected this. 

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