"What the hell’s this ...?  Oh....  What do you characters want me to do?  This feels like the short wave set from the ’copter....  Hmm....  You got it turned on....  What’ll I do with it, Broadcast?  I don’t know whether you want me to talk to you or to back home, wherever that is....  Maybe you want me to say I’m havin’ a fine time an’ wish you was here....  I’m not.  I wish I was there....  If this is goin’ on the air I’m Joe Blake, radio man on the ’copter two ’leven.  We were headin’ in to Boulder Lake when I smelled a stink.  Next second there were lights in my eyes.  They blinded me.  Then I heard a racket like all hell was loose.  Then I felt like I had hold of a power transmission line.  I couldn’t wiggle a finger.  I stayed that way till the ’copter crashed.  When I come to, I was blindfolded like I am now.  I don’t know what happened to the other guys.  I haven’t seen ’em.  I haven’t seen anything!  But they just put me in front of what I think is the ‘copter’s short wave set an’ squeaked at me—­”

The recorded voice ended abruptly.  The news announcer’s voice came back.  He said that the member of the ’copter crew had given some other information before he was arbitrarily cut off.

“I’ll bet,” said Lockley when the newscast ended, “I’ll bet the other information was that the invaders have managed to tell him that earth must surrender to them!”

“Why?”

“What else would they want to say?  To come and play patty-cake, when they can push the Army around at will and have managed to keep planes from flying anywhere near them?  They may not know we’ve got atom bombs, but I’ll bet they do!  Part of that extra information could have been a warning not to try to use them.  It would be logical to bluff even on that, though they couldn’t make good.”

Jill said very carefully, “You hinted once that they might be men, pretending to be monsters.  But that would mean that somebody I care about would probably be killed because he’d seen them and knew they weren’t creatures from beyond the stars.”

“I think you can forget that idea,” said Lockley.  “They don’t act like men.  Chasing away the plane that was going to land for us, and not using the beam on the fugitives it was plainly going to land for—­that’s not like men preparing to take over a continent!  And nudging the Army back to make the cordoned space larger—­that’s not like our most likely human enemy, either.  They’d wipe out the cordon by stepping up the terror beam to death ray intensity.”

“Suppose they couldn’t?”

“They wouldn’t have landed with a weapon that couldn’t kill anybody,” said Lockley.  “It’s much more likely that they’re monsters.  But they don’t act like monsters, either.”

Jill was silent for a moment.

“Not even monsters who wanted to make friends?”