"The Earth-child is right!" a tiny voice said. "That rocket can and must carry us to our home planet. It is our last remaining hope." For an instant Melvin felt as if he had swallowed a goldfish. Something flopped in his throat, coldly and horribly, and though the voice rang clear in his ears it seemed to come from deep inside his head. "He hears us!" the voice said. "Before he sees us we'd better train the beam on him. All Earth-children are emotional but the males are the hardest to control." It was Mary Anne who screamed in protest. She stood as if frozen, staring down with swiftly widening eyes at the three tiny men who had come striding into the room through the wall. They had come in with a blaze of light behind them, a shimmering of the wall itself that seemed to go right through to the other side. Mary Anne could have crushed them simply by raising her foot and bringing it down dead center above them. But their eyes warned her to be still. _Do not scream again, Earth-child_, the eyes warned. _We are not as ugly as we seem to you and your fright is very distasteful to us._ Horribly ugly they seemed to Mary Anne. They were no larger than the white ivory pawns on the chessboard in her father's library but they did not resemble pawns in the least. They were wrinkled and old-looking and the cheapest doll she had would have cried with shame to be dressed as they were. She could have made out of an old handkerchief a better dress, with more tucks and seams to it--and no Jack-in-the-Box could have popped up to shiver and sway with such toothless, evil-eyed malice. A child can escape from a monster of the toymaker's craft simply by drawing a line between the real and the imaginary. But Mary Anne could not escape from the little men facing her. There was no line to be drawn and she knew it. The little men were alive, and they were staring at her now as she had never been stared at before. As if she were a stick of wood about to be thrown into a blazing fire which had been kindled for Melvin as well. Totally bald they were, with skins so shriveled that their small, slitted eyes were buried in a maze of wrinkles. Most pitiful of all was the fact that their skins were mottled brown and green--colors so enchanting when associated with budding leaves or the russet-and-gold splendors of an autumn landscape. The little men were alive and they were warning her to be quiet. Just to make sure that she would not move or attempt to scream again they spoke to her again inside her head. "We're going to use the beam on you too. But you won't be hurt if you don't try to wake up your father." She could hardly keep from screaming when she saw what they were doing to her brother. The tallest of the three--they were not all of the same height--was turning Melvin slowly about in a blaze of light.