We guessed then that they meant to enter our ship, and in a moment our guess was confirmed as the long, flat ship hovering above sank downward until its lower surface was lying along the upper surface of our own oval craft, the two touching. Then we heard a section of the underside of the ship above sliding back, and a moment later, at my order, one of our crew slid open our own upper space-door. The openings in the two ships, in the upper side of ours and the lower side of theirs, were thus together, pressed so closely by the weight of the upper ship as it pressed down upon us that it formed a hermetically sealed opening connecting the two. Then, down through that opening from the ship above, down into the corridor of our ship and toward our pilot room, there came a half-dozen of the Andromedans from the ship above us, a half-dozen of the people of the Andromeda universe. I do not know what weird and alien shapes we had expected to see in these beings of a different universe, but I do know that never had our imaginations envisaged creatures of so utterly strange a nature as these that came toward us now. For they were _gaseous_! Tall columns of misty green gas, that held always to the same pillar-like outline, as unchanging of form as though of solid flesh, and that were gliding along the corridor toward us! Upright, unchanging columns of green, opaque vapor, from near the top of whose six feet of height there branched out on each side a smaller arm of the same thick green gas, arms that they moved at will, and in which some of them held instruments and weapons! Tall, erect columns of thick, green vapor, without features of any kind that we could see, that yet were living, intelligent and powerful beings like ourselves! Their bodies, their two arms, their very organs and features and senses formed of gas, just as our bodies are solid, and that of a jellyfish liquid! Down the corridor they came toward us, gliding smoothly forward, halting just before us and surveying us, I knew, by whatever strange sense of sight was within their gaseous bodies. Dumbly we stared toward them, for the first time now wholly appreciating the immense difference between us and them; then, at a loss for another gesture, I held out my hand toward the foremost of them. Instantly his own arm came out toward me, gripped my hand with a grip as solid as though that arm had been of flesh instead of gas, a grasp that though cold was real and tangible. When the one before me had withdrawn his grasp, then I spoke aloud to him, but there came no reply. Instead the Andromedan extended toward me, in the grasp of his other arm, a small globe of what seemed misty glass, a few inches in diameter and mounted upon a little metal base. As he held it, though, pressing a tiny button in the base, the misty globe suddenly glowed with light, and then in it I could see figures moving, as though in some tiny cinema-screen.