I had been afraid that we would never find this out, or that, if one of them told us, we would not be able to understand; perhaps the concept, the point of view, would seem as wild and bizarre and incredible as _they_ themselves. But as it began to speak now, I found that its motives, those of all its uncanny race, were as plain and nearly human as could be. "We found your land by accident," it said, nursing its head in its hands and speaking without inflection or accent. "I do not know how long ago it was by your standards. I think a long time. One of our people by a mischance of a kind I cannot describe in the words of your language was born into your dimension in conjunction with an infant of your race. When you are all dead, and we are the sole owners of both our dimensions and yours, and write history books here for our amusement even as you have done for your own, that chance birth will be hailed as joyfully and reverently as you hail the--discovery of America." "Dashed if I hail _that_ reverently," murmured the Colonel. "Bloomin' colonials ... go on." "I wonder if you can imagine with what delight our people greeted the discovery? How far can you see into our plane?" * * * * * I saw no harm in answering that. "Not far. Just a background of silver-blue lines at an angle." "That is it. A silver land." Evidently they had the same color perception as we; a surprising but not wholly unthinkable fact. "Nowhere is there color or change of form or beauty, save in our own bodies. Your earth burst on our ken with such a wealth of beauty and such opportunities for pleasure as we had never dreamt of. At once we began to infiltrate, in the guise of normal humans; at first only by the route of births stemming from that original accident, then afterwards by births regulated and controlled from our plane, by methods you could not comprehend, which once discovered freed us from the necessity of waiting endlessly to be born into a body that had descended from that original fortuitous 'sport.' I believe that in terms of your space-time continuum, this discovery of ours has been quite recent." I grew pale and cold at his words. For--if true--this meant that the beast-folk could make a wholesale invasion of our dimension at any time! The brute saw me, and laughed again. "Exactly. You are beaten. Indeed, you never had a chance, but now you have less than none. We are an advance guard, who have prepared the way for all the others of our race who will one day inhabit bodies on your plane. We have felt you out, tested your power to resist--which has been practically nil, my friend, with the exception of your own feeble and haphazard efforts--and spread out over this island until we are more numerous than you can imagine. But with the new method of coming in, there is no longer a need for infiltrating into high offices and key government positions, as we have so laboriously done before; for, my friend, D-Day is at hand."