c
front. One could see cryptic shapes of metal inside. Two bright-metal
balls mounted on a side-wall. They had holes in them, about the right
size for the hands of children like these to enter. There was a
two-foot, carefully machined spiral of metal, intruding into and
lessening the living-space of the ship. These things had functions he
could not even guess at. He found himself resentful of things which were
obviously the developments of science, and he could not even guess what
they were for.

But alien? He looked at the boys. They were human children. They had
absolutely nothing of strangeness about them. Their hair, their eyes and
eyelashes were normal. Their noses. Their lips. Their teeth. In every
respect they were as human as he was, or Gail.

He looked to the most urgent problem of the moment. He snapped pictures,
before anything else.

One of the boys turned to the dented metal case. He began to arrange its
contents in a somehow final fashion. Soames guessed that it had been
damaged in the landing, and they'd made a repair.

The second boy touched Soames' elbow and showed him the box with the
clear plastic front. He touched it, and an image appeared in the
plastic. It was an image of the landscape outside. He shifted the box,
and the landscape image flashed sidewise. He touched another control.
The landscape flowed swiftly toward the viewer. It raced. Presently the
ground seemed to drop away and Soames found himself staring at a picture
which showed the ice-sheet and the sky and--very far away--the dark blue
line which was the sea, now a hundred miles distant.

The boy nodded and made delicate adjustments. Then Soames looked at an
image of the Gissell Bay base from which he and the others had set out
an hour before. It was a remarkably clear image. Soames could even see
the supply-plane waiting on the runway until it was time for take-off.
He knew unhappily that the box was something which was not a radar, but
performed all the functions of one and so many others that it was a
different thing entirely.

Then Gail said:

"Brad! Look at this!"

She held out two necklaces that the girls had given her. She showed him
the ornaments at their ends. One was a very tiny horse. It was
beautifully done, and obviously from life. The head was larger than an
ordinary horse's head would be. The body was lightly built. Each of its
tiny feet had three toes.

Gail watched Soames' face.

"You see? How about this?"