at his muscles rippled beneath his plaid shirt. "Well, we better get
that wire, Don, and go back to work."

* * * * *

After the twins had left, Elvin went up to his room to bathe. His mind
skipped pleasantly over the delightful and limitless possibilities of
his new understanding. The whole thing, of course, hinged on his
approach. But, after all, that shouldn't be hard; they were still
children emotionally. Five years of teaching had demonstrated, to his
satisfaction, that he could handle any adolescent.

He began to dress. The clothes he had worn that day were streaked and
torn. He took his second suit out of the closet. As he hung the coat
over the back of his desk chair, he heard metal strike against the wood.
It was the coat he had worn on Friday night, when he found the rocket;
in the pocket was the strip of metal that had been sealed over the
cylinder of colored spheres.

He held it in his hand again. It was the first time the full surface of
the metal had touched his skin. As he had before, he felt the sensation
of jumbled words flooding his mind, but now the feeling was more
intense. He could not put the metal down. Instead he dropped into his
desk chair and his eyes were drawn irresistibly to the pattern of tiny,
translucent globes that dotted the surface of the metal. The heat of his
body produced a chemical reaction; one by one the little globes
exploded.

Pictures filled Elvin's mind, of cities, machines, towering stacks of
books. These dissolved, and he saw planets whirling on the black
emptiness of space around the glowing disk of a red sun. There was a
cataclysmic splatter of light as the sun exploded, and slashing flame
shot out to destroy its circling planets. That picture, too, disappeared
and he was staring at a gray nothingness while an emotional voice spoke
to him deep within his brain.

"_To the intelligent life form, on the Third Planet, System K, Greetings
from the dying world of Dyran. You have located our rocket from the
hypnotichord built into the fins, and, by opening it, you have
demonstrated a condition of rationality that we are able to help. We
speak to you now through hypnotic pictures which you are translating
into the symbology of your own society. Our astronomers predict that our
planetary system will shortly be destroyed, because our sun is dying. It
is useless for us to try to escape, for no world that we can find within
the limits of our tele