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ever learn to distinguish between their mental impulses, Charlie
strongly felt the need to get out, to get away from this strange
space ship. He wondered just where he was on the ship.
This is the lower dome or base tier deck as your
world might call it. Or perhaps you may term it, the lower
deck.
    "Your world," Charlie thought, and as he thought it, he realized
they had unintentionally slipped, giving him the answer he was sure
of, yet had wanted to get from them. They were from another world.
Now as he watched them, the three figures began to
remove the mysterious black hoods, and the black coverall robes
they had worn out on the desert. Charlie's thoughts tumbled crazily
as he wondered just what kind of beings they would be—were they
human—what would they look like?
Remembering they had read his earlier thoughts, he
was suddenly paralyzed with fear, afraid they had read the terrible
question, the uncertainty in his mind about them. They had.
To the prime thought now frozen in your impulse
glands, came the impulse, you shall have the answer.
And as he waited, staring at them, they removed the
hoods, letting the black robes to which they were attached fall
away to the deck entirely. Charlie stood face to face with them—the
three aliens from another world.
     
     

CHAPTER FOUR
    Nightmare
As the black hooded garments fell to the deck,
Charlie saw with a wave of relief that the aliens were human
beings. Their long, angular faces reminded him of the nickname
"horseface" back in school, except that the long faces of these
alien men were fairly good-looking. But most of all, he noticed
their large and very bright eyes, as they stared at him now. The
great eyes of the men had very bright center pupils of flashing
green, circled by a thin gold band around the eye ball that looked
a little like flashing gold sparks. The outer part around the thin
gold line was white like Earthmen, Charlie noted, and very clear.
Charlie thought they looked a little like the eyes of green-eyed
tigers.
Wondering just why they had put on the black-hooded
robes and boots over their more comfortable and better
looking uniform, Charlie received an immediate
answer.
These are 'protective clothing, necessary to
protect us against the radiated surface of your world sun blasted
by the Sun. We are not accustomed to the Sun's pure light and its
continued effect upon us, therefore this protection against your
gamma-rayed surface.
"Thank you," Charlie said, "for the
information."
Aware that they were not particularly curious about
him, he continued to watch them, noticing the way their hair grew
straight up instead of down like his own. All of them had yellow,
really gold-colored hair, and it was short-cut like a crew-cut but
still it looked a lot different. It grew in a mild spiral, up
toward the crowning back part of their head, just as many Earth
people's hair spirals from the crown, but in a downward direction.
Charlie finally decided that it didn't look too bad. He pulled up
the carefully-weighed thought, just as he noticed one of the alien
men smile a little. Charlie couldn't help wondering if all the
people of their world had that same natural duck-butt style hair
that grew up, curving away to the back of their heads. In a way, it
sort of streamlined them, and it reminded Charlie of the pictures
he had seen of Mercury.
Seeming to pay no attention to him at all, the
aliens went about changing clothes, swiftly communicating among
themselves. Charlie looked them over further, especially their
unusual clothing. Under the black robes they wore short shoulder
capes. Now that the hoods were off, they furled these capes back
over their shoulders. The capes were a brilliant cobalt blue with
square or blocked gold figures along
the broad band bordering them. The inside was a
silver color. Under his cape each man wore a skin-tight type of
shirt that looked like fish net, and through this showed very pale
pink skin. As he was puzzling about the fish net shirt