"A fact," the little man said, but not as if he cared. "They travel in swarms thousands of miles wide, and they bite like hell." We sat and watched the two voiceless crows flap through the television cartoon for a while. Nobody spoke until the film was over and the screen went blank, when the little man caught Larry's eye and held up one finger. "Bourbon," he said. We heard a confused muttering of voices in the background and waited expectantly for Colonel Sanderson to speak to us from Mars, but apparently the network people were still having trouble with their transmission beam. The screen stayed blank. "You left out the interesting part, Charlie," somebody called from down the bar. "The Martian natives. How about them?" "There aren't any--as you'd know them," the little man said. He seemed to grow thoughtful for a moment. "But they are intelligent. They do things you couldn't do." "Such as what?" somebody asked. The little man shrugged. "Teleport. They're good at it too." Saxton let out a laugh. "That would make them more intelligent than us!" he said. "What do these Martians look like?" The little man screwed up his face distastefully. "Frogs." The reporter who had asked about natives got choked on his drink and had to be pounded on the back. On my left, Abe Marker leaned against the bar to look past me at the little guy. "Frogs we got now," he said admiringly. "By the billions?" "There are more frogs on Mars," the little man said, "than there are gnats and fish together, and they never stop croaking. You'd have to hear it to believe it." The television screen lit up suddenly, chopping off conversation, and we were watching the first Marscast in history. * * * * * Colonel Sanderson himself was talking. He looked the way Stanley must have looked when he found Livingstone, gaunt and bearded and jumpy; and his crew, lined up behind him before the ship's pickup camera, were in no better shape. The lot of them stared hungrily out at us as if they had just found a peephole into Heaven and couldn't wait to see if there was a gate farther along the fence. "... established conceptions of Martian areography are completely erroneous," the colonel was saying. "There are no drifting deserts of sand or howling typhoons of ferrous dust. We can show you actual conditions better by camera, I think, than they could be detailed in words." The view jumped to another camera aimed from an outside port, and we saw Mars. Colonel Sanderson's voice kept up a running commentary behind the scene, but we only half heard him.