Beyond that, the resemblance to man ceased.
The creatures he saw were clothed in satiny uniforms, yet something about the material told him it would hold up under heavy stress. Wherever their actual bodies showed—head and hands, mostly, though a man of apparently lesser rank was bared to the waist, working on a machine set against one wall—they were covered with short (or cropped) white down. Jerry could detect on the heads no sign of ears or nose, but in the midst of the furry expanse of face, tiny green-glinting beads of jet were eyes, and a thin, wide blue-gray slit further down was the mouth.
The hands, he noted with interest, were furred even within the palms. Or so he thought until one of the creatures, idly flexing a hand, showed Jerry that the fingers bent on double joints in either direction. There were no nails as such, but each digit on those deceptively soft-looking hands terminated in a tapering cone of some hard black material, as shiny as the eyes in those coconut-frosted faces.
Jerry once more had cause to regret the impossibility of Contact within a mind of an intelligent creature. Intelligence equated with impenetrability, so far as Contact went. You could learn of an intelligent race only so much as their words and gestures and behavior cared to let you know.
Jerry knew he was in a sea-region, but whether over it, on it, or under it—No. The room, so far as he could see, was windowless. It could mean that the vehicle was carrying its own atmosphere, in order to keep the riders alive, whether the outside surface of the ship were within inimical gases or liquids, or the deadly nothingness between planets.
Then again, he might simply be within a fortress, or below sea-level in a ship. Jerry gave it up, and concentrated on himself, and his barred container.