Kathryn was startled out of her introspective trance. That thought was on a terrifically high band; one so high that she knew of no race using it, so high that an ordinary human mind could not possibly have either sent or received it. Its phraseology, while peculiar, was utterly precise in definition--the mind behind it was certainly of precisionist grade. She acknowledged upon the stranger's wave, and sent out a locator. Good--he wasn't far away. She flashed toward the derelict, matched intrinsics at a safe distance, and began scanning, only to encounter a screen around the whole vessel! To her it was porous enough--but if the creature thought that his screen was tight, let him keep on thinking so. It was his move. "Well, what are you waiting for?" The thought fairly snapped. "Come closer, so that I may bring you in." "Not yet," Kathryn snapped back. "Cut your screen so that I can see what you are like. I carry equipment for many environments, but I must know what yours is and equip for it before I can come aboard. You will note that my screens are down." "Of course. Excuse me--I supposed that you were one of our own"--there came the thought of an unspellable and unpronounceable name--"since none of the lower orders can receive our thoughts direct. Can you equip yourself to come aboard with your tools?" "Yes." The stranger's light was fierce stuff; ninety-eight percent of its energy being beyond the visible. His lamps were beam-held atomics, nothing less, but there was very little gamma and few neutrons. She could handle it easily enough, she decided, as she finished donning her heat-armor and a helmet of practically opaque, diamond-hard plastic. As she was wafted gently across the intervening space upon a pencil of force, Kathryn took her first good look at the precisionist himself--or herself. She--it--looked something like a Dhilian, she thought at first. There was the squat, powerful, elephantine body with its four stocky legs; the tremendous double shoulders and enormous arms; the domed, almost immobile head. But there the resemblance ended. There was only the one head--the thinking head, and that one had no eyes and was not covered with bone. There was no feeding head--the thing could neither eat nor breathe. There was no trunk. And what a skin! It was worse than a hide, really--worse even than a Martian's. The girl had never seen anything like it. It was incredibly thick, dry, pliable; filled minutely with cells of a liquid-gaseous something which she knew to be a more perfect insulator even than the fibers of the tegument itself. "R-T-S-L-Q-P." She classified the creature readily enough to six places, then stopped and wrinkled her forehead. "Seventh place--that incredible skin--what? S? R? T? It would have to be R." "You have the requisite tools, I perceive," the creature greeted Kathryn as she entered the central compartment of the strange speedster, no larger than her own. "I can tell you what to do, if--"