We guzzled them slowly, while I watched the aliens around the tables and at the bar. Shortly there was a flurry of excitement among them, the tentacles writhing quickly and the ghastly brutes enlarging and deflating as though pumped by a bellows. All the time the human portions drank and chatted and played darts. But the usurpers were excited over something. Shortly half a dozen of them moved toward the door, the people in no evident hurry, but their marionette-masters wriggling like mad, as though eaten with impatience. I knew they were going to discuss something important. I had what I had come for. "Bedtime," I said to Geoff Exeter. We went out of the pub and caught a tram for the vicinity of the Gloucester Club. CHAPTER VII Safe in our rooms, with Johnson sitting, very unlike a waiter, behind a bottle of brandy and a tray of sandwiches, and Geoff lying on the Chesterfield smoking a pipe he could not taste, I told them what I had done. "It's taught me a couple of things I didn't know, and affirmed some others I wasn't sure of. First, I'm certain the faculties of these brutes are the same in this dimension as their 'human parts'. That toad didn't hear me coming, I know. He didn't have time to turn and get a look at me before he went _pop_ and left us. He was bound to the body till I released him, I think, and if he'd left it he couldn't have got back into it, or rather around it. His ears weren't keener than a man's, or he'd have turned to see me when I crept up behind him. "But their communication system is terrific. That's where they have it all over us. When he was shut out of our world, the toad must have gone around their region telling his pals about it; and before long the ones who were in that pub heard of it, too. Now they weren't told by a newcomer, for I watched the door; so they were told on _their_ side of the veil, by an alien who wasn't occupying a human frame. Got it thus far?" "I admit to a little uncertainty here and there, sir." "Well, put it like this. There's a long tall screen set up across a stage. On one side of the screen--our side--are a lot of human beings. This side is our world as we know it. On the other side, the fourth dimension or whatever it may be, are a lot of these horrid-lookin' beasts of usurpers. "Now here and there in the screen are holes, and through them some of the aliens are holding fake human beings, just as in our well-worn simile of the puppet show. I can see those who are leaning through the holes, but you can't.