eeded."

All five of us marched silently, and bravely, on after that. A hundred
yards brought us to the first native. It lay there, spread eagled in
eight directions, on the salt. In the center of the tentacles there
arose a column of black rubbery flesh, topped by a rounded dome in the
center of which was one huge liquid black eye. There was not a twitch
of a tentacle as we came to a halt beside it.

"Is this the one you talked to, Johnny?" I asked.

"How should I know?" he asked bitterly. "I never knew if I talked to
the same one twice."

"They're much bigger than I thought," Miss Point said with a little
dismay in her voice.

"Some of them are ten feet in diameter," Johnny said, I thought with a
bit of vindictiveness in his tone.

"Never mind," Aunt Mattie said. "We'll simply sew three lengths of
cloth together to get our square. I'm sure they won't mind a neatly
done seam."

She had a length of cloth in one arm of her space suit, and a pair of
scissors in the mechanical claw of the other hand. With her eye she
seemed to measure the diameter of the dome and, manipulating the
scissors with the claw like an expert space mechanic, she cut a
sizable hole in the center of the cloth.

Entirely without fear or hesitation, she stepped into the triangle
between two long black tentacles that lay on the salt and walked up to
the erect column at the center. Expertly, she flipped the cloth so
that the hole settled over the creature's head, or whatever it was.
Fore and aft, the cloth rippled out to cover the tentacles. The
creature did not move.

With an amazing speed, she took some bundles of cloth from the arms of
Mrs. Waddle, and with even more amazing dexterity of the space claw,
which showed she was no amateur, she basted a length of cloth on
either side of the first strip. Then with her scissors, careful not to
gouge his hide, she cut off the corners so that the eight tentacles
barely peeped out from underneath the cloth.

Somehow, it reminded me of a huge red flower with a black pistil
laying there on the white salt.

"There, sir," my aunt said with satisfaction to the monster. "This
will hide your nakedness, instill in you a sense of true modesty." She
turned to Johnny. "They must not only know what," she instructed.
"They must also know why." She turned back and faced the monster
again. "It is not your fault," she said to it, "That you have been
living in a state of sin. On Earth, where I come from, we have