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fast that it seems no more than a blur. Give it teeth and claws and a long, heavy tail armed with poison spines. Not that they look like bears or tigers, or even elephants.…”
    â€œYou mean they carry nothing but claws and teeth.…”
    â€œYou’re thinking of weapons, sir. They don’t need weapons. The are unbelievably fast and strong. They are filled with thoughtless bloodlust. They take a lot of killing. Tear them apart and they still keep coming on. They can tunnel under fortifications and tear strong walls apart.…”
    â€œIt is unbelievable,” said the Attorney General.
    â€œYou are right,” said Gale, “but I am telling you the truth. We have held them off for almost twenty years, but we can foresee the end. We foresaw it a few years after they first landed. We knew we only had one chance—to retreat, and the only place we could retreat to was into the past. We can hold them off no longer. Gentlemen, believe me, five hundred years from now the human earth is coming to an end.”
    â€œThey can’t follow you through time, however,” said the President.
    â€œIf you mean, can they duplicate our time capability, I am fairly sure they can’t. They’re not that kind of being.”
    â€œThere is a serious flaw in your story,” said the Secretary of State. “You describe these alien invaders as little more than ferocious beasts. Intelligent, perhaps, but still mere animals. For intelligence to be transformed into a technology such as would be necessary to build what I suppose you would call a spaceship, they would require manipulatory members—hands, tentacles, something of the sort.”
    â€œThey have them.”
    â€œBut you said.…”
    â€œI’m sorry,” said Gale. “It cannot all be told at once. They have members armed with claws. They have other members that end in the equivalent of hands. And they have manipulatory tentacles as well. Theirs is a strange evolutionary case. In their evolutionary development, apparently, and for what reason we do not know, they did not trade one thing for another, as had been the case in the evolution of the creatures of the Earth. They developed new organs and abilities, but they let loose of none of those they already had. They hung onto everything. They loaded the evolutionary deck in favor of themselves.
    â€œI would suspect that if they wished they could build most efficient weapons. We have often wondered why they didn’t. Our psychologists think they know why it is. They postulate that these aliens are a warrior race. They glory in killing. They may have developed their space-traveling capability for no other reason than that they might find other things to kill. Killing is a personal thing for them, an intensely personal experience, like religion once was for the human race. And since it is so personal, it must be done personally, with no mechanical aids. It must be done with claws and fangs and poison tail. They may feel about mechanical killing aids as an accomplished swordsman of some hundreds of years ago must have regarded the first guns, with contempt as a cowardly way to fight. Perhaps each one of them must continually reassert his manhood or his beasthood, his selfhood, perhaps, and the only means by which he can do this is slaughter, personally accomplished. Their individual standing, their regard for themselves, the regard of their fellows for them, may be based upon the quality and the quantity of their killing. Once a fight is done they eat their victims, or as many of them as they can, but whether this is for sustenance or is a ritualistic matter of course we do not know. In fact, we know little of them. There has been, as you can imagine, no communication with them. We have photographed them and we have studied them dead, but this is only superficial to any understanding of them. They do not fight campaigns. They seem to have no real plan of