"Worsel, Tregonsee, and I will go to this conference," Kinnison decided. "The rest of you sit tight. I don't need to tell you to keep on your toes, that anything is apt to happen, anywhere, without warning. Keep your detectors full out and keep your noses clean--be ready like the good little endeavorers you are, 'to do with all your might what your hands find to do.' Come on, fellows," and the three Lensmen strode, wriggled, and waddled across the field, to and into a spacious room of the Administration Building. "Strangers, or, I should say friends, I introduce you to Wise, our president," Kinnison's acquaintance said, clearly enough, although it was plain to all three Lensmen that he was shocked at the sight of the Earthman's companions. "I am informed that you understand our language--" the president began doubtfully. He, too, was staring at Tregonsee and Worsel. He had been told that Kinnison, and therefore, supposed, the rest of the visitors, were beings fashioned more or less after his own pattern. But these two creatures! * * * * * For they were not even remotely human in form. Tregonsee, the Rigellian, with his leathery, multiappendaged, oil-drumlike body, his immobile dome of a head and his four blocky pillars of legs must at first sight have appeared fantastic indeed. And Worsel, the Velantian, was infinitely worse. He was repulsive, a thing materialized from sheerest nightmare--a leather-winged, crocodile-headed, crooked-armed, thirty-foot long, pythonish, reptilian monstrosity! But the President of Medon saw at once that which the three outlanders had in common. The Lenses, each glowingly aflame with its own innate pseudo-vitality--Kinnison's clamped to his brawny wrist by a band of iridium-osmium-tungsten alloy; Tregonsee's embedded in the glossy black flesh of one mighty, sinuous arm; Worsel's apparently driven deep and with cruel force into the horny, scaly hide squarely in the middle of his forehead, between two of his weirdly stalked, repulsively extensible eyes. "It is not your language we understand, but your thoughts, by virtue of these our Lenses which you have already noticed." The president gasped as Kinnison bulleted the information into his mind. "Go ahead.... Just a minute!" as an unmistakable sensation swept through his being. "We've gone _free_! The whole planet, I perceive. In that respect, at least, you are in advance of us. As far as I know, no scientist of any of our races has even thought of a Bergenholm big enough to free a world." "It was long in the designing; many years in the building of its units," Wise replied. "We are leaving this sun in an attempt to escape from our enemy and yours; Boskone. It is our only chance of survival. The means have long been ready, but the opportunity which you have just made for us is the first that we have had. This is the first time in many, many years that not a single Boskonian vessel is in position to observe our flight."