one and a half Earth gravities had returned.

This, I felt, was the first undistorted view any man on Earth had had of these Aliens, except as a pet. They had not expected any human to be able to find his way here, to this room at the center of their base.

The room was not what I had expected. I had thought that I would find myself on the inside of a spaceship, and by no stretch of the imagination could this ever have traveled between the stars. It was unmistakably a prefab hut.

The two Aliens better fitted my preconceptions. They looked something like overgrown sea anemones, with three multi-jointed arms and three short legs. They were just over two meters tall. They were extremely sluggish in their movements, as might be expected from creatures that depended almost entirely on their mental abilities for control of their environment.

They looked at me for a few minutes—all of their eyes were startlingly humanlike in appearance—and I imagine that they had expressions of surprise, if I could have found any expression, or interpreted from their tendrils just where their faces were. Finally one of them moved slowly to the far wall, extended one of his arms and depressed a lever on a rather crude-looking panel attached to that wall. He then moved slowly back to his companion and both of them continued to stare at me.

I waved cheerily at them. "Hi, fellows," I said. I could detect no answer, but the room wavered a little before my eyes. I blinked and shook my head and my vision cleared.

"So you haven't been trained in the techniques of Mental Control of Earthmen," I commented. "That's interesting."

A feathery stalk slowly rose from among the coiling things that circled their tops, and at the same time I heard a gentle dragging noise approaching the door of the hut.

"It sounds as if we might be about to have company," I said. "That will be pleasant."

I examined my two hosts closely, because I had the feeling that I wouldn't be able to see them much longer as they really were.

"It's good of you to be so cautious," I said. "If you hadn't been so careful as to shield this hut, just in case we Earthmen turned out to have adequate Mind Control powers of our own, I wouldn't have had this chance to see you two in all your natural ugliness. Your friends out there would have kept me under 

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