All Were Monsters by Manly Wade Wellman _Like the Darwins and the Huxleys the Wellmans have a quite remarkable record of family accomplishment. Manly Wade’s dad is an internationally famous medical pioneer, painter and writer and his brother, Paul, has achieved outstanding recognition as a best-selling historical novelist. But it is Manly himself we are concerned with here, and his by no means inconsiderable literary talents. There’s a bitter-bright eerie wonderment in this unusual little yarn._ =The man from the stars bore the human race no ill will. Why was he greeted by a host of monsters?= “I’ve watched you in the sky,” I whispered, staring in shocked disbelief at the humanoid male from the little space ship. “For three nights, with my telescope.” I gestured toward the roof where the instrument stood. “I made it myself, and I can see the rings of Saturn and Jupiter’s moons. I live alone on this farm, and--” I stopped abruptly, telling myself I was quite mad to think that he could understand me. “Oh, but I can,” he said instantly. In the gloom he looked just the way you’d expect an inhabitant of another world _would_ look, from his long, thin, snug-garmented arms and legs to his high domed forehead. “I know how to communicate telepathically with your kind,” he said. That made sense, but the rest of it didn’t. “I can’t believe it,” I said. “The first ship from another world! Why didn’t the big observatories report on your coming?” “They didn’t see me,” was his measured reply. “But if my crude, homemade telescope picked you out--” “I didn’t _want_ them to see me,” he explained patiently. “Too much attention would have been exhausting. I wanted to start, quietly, with you. Long before I set down on your world I decided on you, with your telescope and your lonely home out here away from any densely populated area. Let’s go in.” As I led him toward my back door I still couldn’t grasp it. He looked too patly like the popular conception of a creature from another planet. “You can’t grasp it,” he said. “I look too patly like the popular conception of a creature from another planet.” “You can read my mind?” I gasped, forgetting that he’d just informed me that he had telepathic powers. “And I can speak your language. As to my appearance--I have adopted a synthetic disguise to avoid startling you too much. If you saw and heard me as I really am, you’d refuse to believe in my existence.” I opened the kitchen door for him. Inside, his snug garments shone metal-bright. He had large, glowing eyes, and his thin face seemed inscrutably observant and somehow very wise. Just as I closed the door behind us, he goggled upward, and shrank back as though terrified. “What’s that?” he gasped. “A moth,” I replied. “It was drawn to the electric light.” Snatching the little creature out of the air, I crushed it in my fingers and dropped it on the table. “You did that almost instinctively,” he said. “And ruthlessly.”