That night McIlvaine was more than usually diffident. He was not like a
man bearing a message of considerable importance to himself. He slipped
into Bixby's, got a glass of beer, and approached the table where his
friends sat, almost with trepidation.

"It's a nice evening for May," he said quietly.

Richardson grunted.

Leopold said, "By the way, Mac, whatever became of that star of yours?
The one the papers wrote up."

"I think," said McIlvaine cautiously, "I'm quite sure--I have got in
touch with them. Only," his brow wrinkled and furrowed, "I can't
understand their language."

"Ah," said Richardson with an edge to his voice, "the thing for you to
do is to tell them that's your star, and they'll have to speak English
from now on, so you can understand them. Why, next thing we know, you'll
be getting yourself a rocket or a space-ship and going over to that star
to set yourself up as king or something."

"King Thaddeus the First," said Alexander loftily. "All you
star-dwellers may kiss the royal foot."

"That would be unsanitary, I think," said McIlvaine, frowning.

Poor McIlvaine! They made him the butt of their jests for over an hour
before he took himself off to his quarters, where he sat himself down
before his telescope and found his star once more, almost huge enough to
blot out Arcturus, but not quite, since it was moving away from that
amber star now.

McIlvaine's star was certainly much closer to the Earth than it had
been.

He tried once again to contact it with his home-made radio, and once
again he received a succession of strange, rhythmic noises which he
could not doubt were speech of some kind or other--a rasping, grating
speech, to be sure, utterly unlike the speech of McIlvaine's own kind.
It rose and fell, became impatient, urgent, despairing--McIlvaine sensed
all this and strove mightily to understand.

He sat there for perhaps two hours when he received the distant
impression that someone was talking to him in his own language. But
there was no longer any sound on the radio. He could not understand what
had taken place, but in a few moments he received the clear conviction
that the inhabitants of his star had managed to discover the basic
elements of his language by the simple process of reading his mind, and
were now prepared to talk with him.

What manner of creatures inhabited Earth? they wished to know.

McIlvaine told them. He visualized one of his own kind and tried to put