"To scare him if he wakes," breathed Bill Calico. "Isn't it frightful enough?" asked Jerry. "I have an idea: if the Rabelaisian types outside are at their normal size, which seems logical, then this one may be uncomfortable, having to go around all compressed to eight feet." "Could be ... let's advance," said Daley. "We'll wait just outside Pink's door. Then if it tries anything—" "Yeah?" "We'll make a protest," finished Daley. "Somehow, we'll make a strong protest." They left the screen, a few seconds before Captain Pinkham groaned and opened his eyes. The alien regarded him with its habitual expression of overpowering slyness. "Why did you nearly die?" it asked. "Was it something I did?" When Pink could trust himself to speak without gibbering—it was horrifying to see half his room filled by this bronze-yellow balloon of evidently solid flesh—he said, "Naturally it was something you did, you big ape. You turned off our air." "Air?" It compressed its lips. "Ah, I remember air. A substance needed on Earth for life. We never understood it." "Don't you breathe?" asked Pink. "Don't you take any element into your system and mix it with your blood and then—oh, you haven't any blood." He paused. "But don't you need any outside element to sustain life?" "No. Nor do we eat." "But you are organic life?" "Of course. A life which you cannot understand, I see. A life impervious to anything beyond it, indestructible and eternal." I think you're lying, said Pink to himself. Nothing in the universe is indestructible ... or at any rate, unalterable. Everything has its Achilles heel, even the atom. The monster spoke, half to itself. "That, the locked switch was the air, then. I thought it was the air-lock." It laughed. Pink thought it had a pretty primitive sense of humor. "Not the air-lock, but the air." "You wanted to let your friends into the ship," accused Pink. The beast nodded. "Didn't you know that opening the air-locks without sealing off their compression rooms would kill all the humans aboard?"
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