Don Mariner said calmly, "I'll tell you why he doesn't feel it. Just look at his face." They all did so, uncomprehending. "He isn't sweating," said Don triumphantly, "and he hasn't even turned pale!" Grady turned his head toward the engineer. "Oh, you fat little blob of stupidity," he said icily. "You stand there with your idiot companions and your bright little idea that's about as wrong as wrong can get. Of course I'm not sweating. _I haven't any sweat glands. I haven't any pores._ And naturally I can't turn pale. This is my natural color. I'm no damned human chameleon. But I can feel pain, in spite of your driveling theories. What do you want to know?" He spat again. "I won't sit here and take this agony for anyone. What the blazes can you do to us if you do know? You can't touch us. Go on, ask away." "Are you mutants?" asked Brave. "No." "Are you human?" "Not as you understand it." "Where did you come from?" The pilot sneered. "From the ninth planet of a sun unknown to you," he said. Brave glanced back at Alan. "Think he's lying?" "I swear I don't know." "I'm not lying," said Grady. "Want to know how I got out of that disk alive? I heard the damn machinery shifting in front of me--oh yes, my ears are sharper and my sight's better, and I can move a lot faster than you can--so I spread myself out thin against the back of the seat. Lucky for me the monster stopped an inch short of my guts. Want to see how I did it? Will that convince you?" Then he did an incredible, a terrible thing to see: he seemed to turn almost fluid, and though none of his features changed, they withdrew to the sides; his whole body thinned out and flattened along the chair back, and he became a caricature of a man run over by a steam roller. Then he laughed at them. Above Rob's gasp and Alan's cry came the shriek of Don Mariner. Then he had swept Brave aside and fired a grenade pistol almost in the face of the pilot; and Grady died without a sound. * * * * * "No recriminations," said Alan. "You can't see a thing like that and hold your hand. If I'd been armed I'd have done it myself." Brave was running his hands over the exposed flesh of the dead pilot. "This is weird stuff," he said. "It isn't human--well, that's obvious. It feels vaguely like gutta-percha. It's swelling up slowly. No, by glory, it's going back into shape again. It's becoming humanoid again." He looked up. "Notice how that word springs to the mind? Humanoid. He wasn't human, he told the truth about that. He wasn't even superhuman. He was alien." Don Mariner, still shaking, said, "I'm sorry I shot him. I just went out of my head at that stunt he pulled. Never been so scared in my life. I sure fouled up our chances of learning how and whom to fight." "'What can you do to us if you do know? You can't touch us.'" That was Rob Pope musing aloud. "What did he mean by that? That they're so powerful it doesn't matter now if we know about them?"