"What a monster! Who are they? Where could they have come from?" Kinnison caught a confusion of startled thoughts as the real size and mass of the visitor became apparent to the natives. Then again came the clear thought of the officer.
"We would like very much to have you and as many as possible of your companions come to confer with us as soon as you have tested our atmosphere. Come in spacesuits if you must."
The air was tested and found suitable. True, it did not match exactly that of Tellus, or Rigel IV, or Velantia; but then, neither did that of the Dauntless, since that gaseous mixture was a compromise one, and mostly artificial to boot.
"Worsel, Tregonsee, and I will go to this conference," Kinnison decided. "The rest of you sit tight. I don't need to tell you to keep on your toes, that anything is apt to happen, anywhere, without warning. Keep your detectors full out and keep your noses clean—be ready like the good little endeavorers you are, 'to do with all your might what your hands find to do.' Come on, fellows," and the three Lensmen strode, wriggled, and waddled across the field, to and into a spacious room of the Administration Building.
"Strangers, or, I should say friends, I introduce you to Wise, our president," Kinnison's acquaintance said, clearly enough, although it was plain to all three Lensmen that he was shocked at the sight of the Earthman's companions.
"I am informed that you understand our language—" the president began doubtfully.
He, too, was staring at Tregonsee and Worsel. He had been told that Kinnison, and therefore, supposed, the rest of the visitors, were beings fashioned more or less after his own pattern. But these two creatures!
For they were not even remotely human in form. Tregonsee, the Rigellian, with his leathery, multiappendaged, oil-drumlike body, his immobile dome of a head and his four blocky pillars of legs must at first sight have appeared fantastic indeed. And Worsel, the Velantian, was infinitely worse. He was repulsive, a thing materialized from sheerest nightmare—a leather-winged, crocodile-headed, crooked-armed, thirty-foot long, pythonish, reptilian monstrosity!
But the President of Medon saw at once that which the three outlanders had in common. The Lenses, each glowingly aflame with its own innate pseudo-vitality—Kinnison's clamped to his brawny wrist by a band of iridium-osmium-tungsten alloy; Tregonsee's embedded in the glossy black flesh of one mighty, sinuous arm; Worsel's apparently driven deep and with cruel force into the horny, scaly hide squarely in the middle of his forehead, between two of his weirdly stalked, repulsively extensible eyes.