Norlamin!
Norlamin would not like the idea and would have to be pacified.
As soon as he got the Earth straightened out he would have to see what could be done about Norlamin.
X.
"Dick!" Dorothy shrieked, flashing to Seaton's side; and, abandoning his fruitless speculations, he turned to confront two indescribable, yet vaguely recognizable, entities who had floated effortlessly into the control room of the Skylark. Large they were, and black—a dull, lusterless black—and each was possessed of four huge, bright lenses which apparently were eyes. "Dick! What are they, anyway?"
"Life, probably; the intelligent, four-dimensional life that Mart fully expected to find here," Seaton answered. "I'll see if I can't send them a thought."
Staring directly into those expressionless lenses the man sent out wave after wave of friendly thought, without result or reaction. He then turned on the power of the mechanical educator and donned a headset, extending another toward one of the weird visitors and indicating as clearly as he could by signs that it was to be placed back of the outlandish eyes. Nothing happened, however, and Seaton snatched off the useless phones.
"Might have known they wouldn't work!" he snorted. "Electricity! Too slow—and those tubes probably won't be hot in less than ten years of this hypertime, besides. Probably wouldn't have been any good, anyway—their minds would of course be four-dimensional, and ours most distinctly are not. There may be some point—or rather, plane—of contact between their minds and ours, but I doubt it. They don't act warlike, though; we'll simply watch them a while and see what they do."
But if, as Seaton had said, the intruders did not seem inimical, neither were they friendly. If any emotion at all affected them, it was apparently nothing more nor less than curiosity. They floated about, gliding here and there, their great eyes now close to this article, now that; until at last they floated past the arenak wall of the spherical space ship and disappeared.