"And as good eggs go, I went bad." He shrugged. "I think now that I didn't need to let you capture me for them. I might have killed Alan on the spot by touching a single button. Damn you all," he said without emotion. "I either loved you too well, or I was sick of running and being a rebel." "A rebel against what?" asked Bill Thihling. "Stuffiness and authority. I've got to shut up." He hung his head. He looked very tired and rather older than he had before this hour. Then the leader of the aliens spoke to them. The message came in the curious wordless manner, and each of them put words to it in his own mind. To Alan it came like this: "We are profoundly shocked at our hasty action of this morning. We have done you incomparable injury where a little more investigation would have shown us you were not inimical, not working against us, not bad at all as men go. Our only excuse is that we were direly pressed for time. "We investigated certain sections of your planet where activities showed us some of the rebels from our world were at work; they were building ships and weapons to return to us, to attack us. We found at these places, some cities and some isolated deserts, some small towns and some government projects, that our rebels had taken control of your people, making them invulnerable with the ray which is known to us, making them long-lived and incapable of pain and with quickened reflexes and swifter bodies than before. To investigate this we should have had weeks. We gave ourselves less than a day. For we knew that our ships would have been sighted and the rebels would be speeding their plans. So we found many robot humans, many scientists working with our exiled people, and we thought that in all these places there must be millions of potential foemen." * * * * * The message was charged with emotion; it was impossible to believe that the man was lying. Indeed, thought Alan, there was no reason why he should lie. If he could wipe out New York with one small golden egg, he had no need to make allies of a few puny humans. "Again, our sole excuse is the lack of time. We did find many places where only a portion of those checked were under rebel control. Those places we did not bomb, trusting that if we struck the large cities and the projects where disk manufacture was under way, we could mop up the others with ground fighting." I wonder if Project Star is gone, thought Alan. "I wonder," echoed Win aloud. Then they turned to each other, astounded. "Darling," she said after a second, "that's the one thing I like about this hardening, pain-removing process--now we can talk to each other without words!" "Think what we can do with our mouths while we're talking," he grinned.