ossible for me. I am not
ignorant as the others of earth people you have met. And my nation is
numerous, the greatest of this earth."

"Our ways are too strange to you. But I will try. You need not try to
tell me of your people; we examined your earth carefully before we chose
this valley for our retreat. Here we built and raised the force wall to
keep out inquiring interlopers like yourself who might bring the powers
of your nation in ignorant war against us. But from our home world the
Schrees were sent on our trail, and they found us. They were too many.
Our only hope was in safe hiding, and they found us out. We did not know
they could find us, or we would never have built. We thought pursuit had
long been abandoned, but they are driven by single-minded hate, not by
logic. It has been a lifetime of wandering they have followed us. It has
been all my lifetime, making this home here, thinking ourselves
safe--and then they came and destroyed all our work."

As she talked, she had quieted. We had resumed walking along the ledge
of the mountainside. Suddenly from ahead a man leaped out, his strange
weapon trained on my breast. I stood, not daring to move, while Nokomee
shouted a string of shrill alien syllables at him. He thrust the weapon
back in his belt, and fell in behind us as we passed. I could not help
staring at him, and at the thing he had pointed at me.

It was a tapering tube about a foot long, triggered on the thumb side
with a projecting stud, with a hand-grip shaped with finger grooves. I
knew it was a weapon with a long history of development behind it by the
simplicity of the lines, the entire efficiency of its appearance. The
small end was a half-inch, perhaps, in bore, the big end perhaps three
inches or less. He handled it as though it weighed but a trifle. I did
not ask what it was.

The man himself was no taller than Nokomee, though much more solidly
built, with thick, slightly bowed legs and heavy black brows on bulging
bone structure, his eyes deep-set beneath. His ears, like Nokomee's,
were high and too small to be natural. His teeth were larger than normal
on earth, and the incisors smaller and more pointed, the canines heavier
and longer. There was a point to his chin, heavy-angled and thick-boned
as it was, it was not an earthman's chin. His neck was long, more supple
and active, he kept moving his head in an unnatural watchfulness like a
wild animal's. I wondered what other differences, s