Vann, in the station, said “_Dear God_,” and braced himself for the end. In Washington, the operator fainted and had to be dragged from his console. Aboard the Federation ship, Xaxtol radiated a shaken “Enough!” and tentacled a stud that sent his craft flashing on its way through subspace. At Charlie Trask’s shack, Max bounded across the clearing and into the brush. There followed a riot of squalling and screaming that brought Charlie out of his shack on the run. Ellis sat numbly, beyond shock, waiting for the worst. Unaccountably, the worst was delayed. Charlie came back, clutching a protesting Max by the scruff of the neck, and threw down something at Ellis’ feet. Something small and limp and magenta-furred, smeared with greenish blood and very, very dead. “There’s your varmint,” said Charlie. With one minute remaining before the promised bombers roared over, Ellis, with a frozen clarity he had not dreamed he possessed, radiated a final message before he fainted again. “Call off the jets,” he said, in effect. “It’s over. The beast is dead. The hermit’s cat killed it.” * * * * * An hour later at the station, his ankle bandaged and his third cup of coffee in hand, Ellis could review it all with some coherence. “We didn’t consider the business of relative size,” he said. “Neither did our Galactic friends. Apparently they’re small, and so are all the species they’ve met with before. Maybe we’re something unique in the universe, after all. And maybe it’s a good thing they didn’t land and learn how unique.” “It figures,” Weyman said. “Washington let it out on the air that DF stations made a fix on the spaceship before it jumped off. It measured only twenty-two feet.” Vann said wonderingly, “And there were hundreds of them aboard. Gentlemen, we are Brobdingnagians in a universe of Lilliputians.” “I’ve been trying,” Ellis said irrelevantly, “to recall a poem I read once in school. I’ve forgotten the author and all the verse but one line. It goes—” “_What rough beast is this_,” Vann quoted. “You were thinking about it hard enough when the debacle in the brush took place. The image you radiated was rough enough—it shocked the pants off us.” “And off the Galactics,” Weyman said. “The shoe is on the other foot now, I think.” He went to the quonset door and looked out and up, listening. “Jets. The Washington brass on its way to cross-examine us.” “The other foot?” Vann said. “Don’t be cryptic, man. Whose foot?” “Theirs,” Ellis said. “Don’t you see? One of these days we’ll be going out there to make our own place in the galaxy. With our size and disposition, how do you think we’ll seem to those gentle little people?” Vann whistled in belated understanding. “Rough,” he said. THE END ------------------------------------------------------------------------ TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE Punctuation and hyphenation have been normalized.