Alien the First shrugged. "They make interesting toys," he said. "But, of course, they are useless crutches in building a civilization. They bring good prices when peddled for the amusement of our children and the shallower-minded adults."
"Listening to your remarks about our spaceships," I continued, "I presume all of you teleported here. We Earthmen may not be very good at Mind Control, but I think we have a good grasp of the principles, and I don't see how you could teleport without some sort of terminal device. Didn't you have to send that here by machine?"
There was a brief silence, and then Alien the Second answered. "I suppose it doesn't matter if we tell you. After all, we have you in our possession. As you suggest, we do need a terminal device. But we didn't use machinery; we used minds—the minds of you Earthmen. When the first of you landed on this uninhabited planet, we discovered that your undirected capacities were sufficient to serve as the terminal of a teleport system.
"We couldn't go directly to any of your more populous planets, because the vast numbers of your untrained minds cause so much static that the noise level is too high to permit a sharp enough focus for teleporting.
"Of course, now that we're here, where you've set up a teleport terminal that connects into your foolish mechanical network and ties into all of your thousands of planets, we'll have no trouble going anywhere among your worlds that we want to. And as soon as we have built up enough consumer demand for you creatures as house pets, we'll move in for the harvest."
"It might not be too bad at that," I said. "I've got a cat back home on Earth and she runs my household pretty much to suit her fancy. But I'm afraid it's not the same thing for Earthmen to be house pets."
"The ones we've got are doing a very good job at it," said Number Two. "And, as we indicated, you won't get the chance to be a pet."
"You seem very sure that you have me under your control."
"Very sure," said Number One. "In this confined space, with our training, the two of us could overcome all but one in a thousand of our own kind—so do you think you have a chance?"