"Never mind that. Why don't people pay any attention to me?"
"Why should they?"
"That is no answer!"
"But it is, sir," said the old gentleman with dignity. "They don't find you out of the ordinary. Why pay attention to you?"
"You mean that you are accustomed to visitors from space?"
"No, sir, I mean nothing of the kind. What I do mean is that we are by now thoroughly accustomed to the idea of you. I remember—"
"Never mind what you remember!"
"When I was a child, stories about visitors from Mars or Venus were already trite and stereotyped. What could a visitor do? What might a visitor look like? All the possible answers had already been given, and we were familiar with every one of them. We imagined visitors with tentacles and without, with a thousand legs and no legs, with five heads and seven feet, and eighteen stomachs. We imagined visitors who were plants, or electrical impulses, or viruses, or energy-creatures. They had the power to read minds, to move objects telekinetically and to travel through impossible dimensions. Their space ships were of all kinds, and they could race along with many times the speed of light or crawl with the speed of molasses. I do not know, sir, in which category you fall—whether you are animal, vegetable, mineral, or electrical—but I know that there is nothing new about you."
"But you are familiar merely with the ideas. I am a real visitor!"
"Young man, I am a hundred and ten years old, and the idea of you was already ancient when I was eight. I remember reading about you in a comic book. You are not the first visitor who has pretended to be real. There were hundreds before you. I have seen press agent stunts by the dozen, and advertising pictures by the hundreds about Mars, about Venus, about the Moon, about visitors from interstellar space. Your pretended colleagues have walked the streets of innumerable cities, until now we are weary of the entire tribe of you. And you yourself, sir, if you will pardon the expression, you are an anticlimax."