motionless, grotesquely
humanoid figures with smallish, sunken eyes fixed rigidly on the people
some yards away. Then, as Calvin watched, two of them thrust out their
hands holding the ball-tipped rods. The gestures were almost too swift
to follow.

He stared at the central figure, and it gazed back with its withdrawn,
pupilless, rust-red eyes. Its head was, as Villa had told them, the
shape of a watermelon, with the eyes wide-set on either side of a gently
agitating orifice that was probably a nostril. The mouth, very human in
shape, with full lips the color of the eyeballs, was quite low in the
face. There was a rough growth of gray-black hair on the crown of the
big head and a fuzz of it, less dark, on the face itself. There seemed
to be no ears.

Its body, long and thick, was dwarfed by the tremendous arms. Its feet
were large, toeless, and flat; its legs joined smoothly to the trunk
about halfway up. It wore clothing of a sort, which surprised Calvin
Full, perhaps more than anything else about the being. There was a kind
of short sleeveless jacket of amber color caught at the front by a long
silver bar, and a white skirt worn under the legs, reaching from just
below the hip joints to the bottom of the torso.

Its companions were almost identical with it, except for clothing of
different hues and varying cut.

The thing in the middle now opened its mouth and made a noise that
reminded Full of an off-key clarinet.

"Gpwk?" it said, with a rising inflection. "Hummr gpwk?"

Abruptly it came forward, its motions flowing and yet a bit jerky, its
long legs carrying it rhythmically, but with a hint of gawkiness; Calvin
thought of a galloping giraffe he and his wife had seen in a travelogue
some nights before. It towered over them, bending at the hip joints.

"Steady, dear," he said.

"I'm all right," his wife said shakily, seeming just on the verge of
screaming.

"Wish I could say the same," said Adam Pierce, the Negro boy. "What a
specimen!"

"Look like anything to you?" asked Watkins.

"Hell, no. Unless it's something from Mars."

"Maybe we're on Mars," said Watkins conversationally, but no one
responded.

* * * * *

It's as sensible a suggestion as the East Indian one, thought Calvin. He
had not the slightest idea where they were, and he saw no sense in
worrying over it until they had more information to build theories on.

The beast making no further move, his wife at