Detta svar var skrivet innan queranten tillade att de kommer ihåg djävulen som en orm. De har angett att följande historia är inte vad de letade efter.
Kan det här vara kortfattad "Fördrivna personalen av Eric Frank Russell ?
Berättaren träffar en konstig person medan han sitter på en bänk vid solens inställning.
He glided out of the gathering dusk and seated himself at the other end of my bench and gazed absently across the lakes towards the Sherry Netherland.
(...)My mind speculated about him the way minds do when momentarily they've nothing else to bother them. A European refugee, it decided. A great surgeon or sculptor or something like that. Perhaps a writer, or painter. More likely the latter.
Den främling bekräftar att han är en flykting.
"You're not a native of this New York?" I prompted.
"No." Resting long, slender hands upon his stick, he gazed meditatively forward. "I have no country. I am a displaced person."(...)
"In these days it is an all too familiar story," he said. "A leader became so blinded by his own glory that no longer could he perceive his own blunders. He developed delusions of grandeur, posed as the final arbiter on everything from birth to death, and thereby brought into being a movement for his overthrow. He created the seeds of his own destruction. It was inevitable in the circumstances."
(...)
"I organized that opposition. I still think it was justified. But I dare not go back."
Då står han upp för att lämna.
"My name," he murmured softly, "is Lucifer."
Enligt ISFDB publicerades den först i september 1948-utgåva av Weird Tales och har samlats in i ett antal antologier som kan hittas genom dess tillträde i ISFDb.
