Tension mounted in me. As we drifted in the air, I looked at our human selves, seated giants in armor, cowled, brooding, and of legendary height. Here was a chance for a meeting with entities of another shape, flesh, and history. For the Martians and Xians seemed as extinct as the dinosaurs. Their artifacts and mummies were known; but their voices, movements, and real selves, were elusively beyond imagining. In most of the old imaginative stories of the future, beings from another region spoke and thought like men. But a recent University course had pointed out how deeply different must be races sprung from wholly separate chains of evolution, not only in form but psychology; how there would be no helloes or similarity of custom on the other side, and how one must wait with perfect self-control and mind utterly open, until an equal horror of alienness lessened in the alien beings, too.... Jan said, "Look." The word was a single, flat, undramatic note. But we saw them. A mass of lint, gray to our colorblind vision, drifted toward us like twisted branches. Out of it, as from shrubbery, a dozen pair of eyes peered--lenses with a moist glint, fuzzed at the edges; here I thought not so much of lashes as of strange, misplaced antennae. The creatures were like rough-hewn dolls, with craggy, almost triangular heads. Yet these were not metal robots. Their skin was rough, as from a coarse binding of spherical cells, still small, yet almost large enough to be seen individually. These beings possessed two arms and two legs. Yet, in still another way they were familiar. They took all their major details from the mummied bodies of the Xians, though those original Xians had been of human size. What strange retreat, or advance, was implied here? I was trying to answer everything about tremendous mysteries at once. But I heard Jan tinkle out words matching my own awe: "Charlie.... Doc.... Other intelligent beings.... Real.... See their clothing, and the metal devices at their belts and in their grasp. Seeing something completely hidden previously, is getting closer to the Ultimate Secret of the universe, isn't it?" The little robot that represented Doc, holding onto the right hand of Jan's proxy as I clutched its left, had things to say, too, as we floated free, waiting for whatever would happen: "Critters as little as these micro-robots of ours--and intelligent, and of flesh. But there couldn't be an intelligent brain working on the familiar human principle in so small a size. The molecules are simply too coarse to achieve such compactness. For that and other reasons, these strangers have to have flesh of some advanced form of protoplast with its possible flow of many types of energy, submolecular or electronic. This might well apply to brain function, making its countless patterns not inconceivable in an almost infinitely smaller package."