Martians.”

“Oh, I hope not!” Lyman regarded him anxiously. “Drunk as I am, I don’t think so. I’ve been trailing you all day, making sure. It’s a risk I have to take, of course. They’ll go to any length—any length at all—to make a man give himself away. I realize that. I can’t really trust anybody. But I had to find someone to talk to, and I—” He paused. There was a brief silence. “I could be wrong,” Lyman said presently. “When the third eye’s closed, I can’t tell if it’s there. Would you mind opening your third eye for me?” He fixed a dim gaze on the brown man’s forehead.

“Sorry,” the reporter said. “Some other time. Besides, I don’t know you. So you want me to splash this across the front page, I gather? Why didn’t you go to see the managing editor? My stories have to get past the desk and rewrite.”

“I want to give my secret to the world,” Lyman said stubbornly. “The question is, how far will I get? You’d expect they’d have killed me the minute I opened my mouth to you—except that I didn’t say anything while they were here. I don’t believe they take us very seriously, you know. This must have been going on since the dawn of history, and by now they’ve had time to get careless. They let Fort go pretty far before they cracked down on him. But you notice they were careful never to let Fort get hold of genuine proof that would convince people.”

The brown man said something under his breath about a human interest story in a box. He asked, “What do the Martians do, besides hang around bars all dressed up?”

“I’m still working on that,” Lyman said. “It isn’t easy to understand. They run the world, of course, but why?” He wrinkled his brow and stared appealingly at the brown man. “Why?”

“If they do run it, they’ve got a lot to explain.”

“That’s what I mean. From our viewpoint, there’s no sense to it. We do things illogically, but only because they tell us to. Everything we do, almost, is pure illogic. Poe’s Imp of the Perverse—you could give it another name beginning with M. Martian, I mean. It’s all very well for psychologists to explain why a murderer wants to confess, but it’s still an illogical reaction. Unless a Martian commands him to.”

“You can’t be hypnotized into doing anything that violates your moral sense,” the brown man said triumphantly.

Lyman frowned. “Not by another human, but you can by a Martian. I expect they 

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