Again he smiled. “When we come back you won’t be here, any of you. Our observers give your race something like two of your decades in which to destroy yourselves.” I looked at him in tight-lipped silence. It was no new idea. Most thinking people agree that we’re on the doorstep of self-extermination. But Provvorr came out with it so facilely, like someone who knows that an apartment will be vacant for him by the first of the month. Only a quite insane mind-- “I’m completely sane,” he assured me. “You can predict the future. Is that it?” “Anyone can predict the future who makes a careful, scientific study of the present and the past. Your race will be gone, except for a few scattered survivors, by the time I bring back enough of my people to populate this world.” He looked at me as he spoke. “Is there no hope for us then?” I asked. Then I realized with horror that I was accepting his prediction at face value, and almost shouted at him. “This is our world. Do you hear? Ours, not yours.” “Why begrudge it to me and mine after you leave it empty?” he asked. Then he started violently, staring. “What’s that?” My sharp voice had summoned Skip, my bull terrier. Entering the kitchen, he stationed himself beside the stove, and he looked at Provvorr. “It’s just my dog,” I said. “He always gets excited when I raise my voice.” “This isn’t at all what I expected,” Provvorr said shakily. Skip stood stiff-legged a yard from Provvorr, and growled almost savagely. “Get him out of here,” Provvorr pleaded. “Down, Skip,” I commanded. “That’s it, old fellow. Calm now--” Skip sat down, his eyes still on Provvorr. “There, he won’t harm you,” I said. “He knows you’re frightened, and that makes him foolhardy.” “But I tried to go invisible,” Provvorr said. “I tried to vanish completely from his consciousness. It should have worked, but--he _knows_ I’m here.” Provvorr quivered. I stared at him, amazed. “I thought you had pretty thorough impressions of our world.” “Only of your chief activities and preoccupations. Nothing about the hideous, monstrous creatures you call dogs.” “Perhaps we take dogs too much for granted,” I said. “We should not. They’re our friends.” “But they’re so--so repellently alien,” he protested. “Not your kind at all.” I stared at him. “Don’t you have pets and other animals on your world?” “My people are the only inhabitants,” he explained. “Once there were others--strange and terrifyingly different. So long ago that we see only their remains in our sedimentary rocks.” His shoulders twitched nervously. I recalled how he’d acted about the moth, and began to understand the creepy strangeness which was making him quake. “Are there many dogs like this one?” he asked apprehensively. “Almost everybody has a dog,” I replied. “Or a cat.” “What is a cat?” he asked, but there was no need for me to enlighten him.