As the trees thinned out until I could see the well-remembered cottage with its thatched roof, its single room, its wide veranda, I slowed. The house stood alone, with no trees around it, just the way she and I had wanted it.
I stopped at the last tree and looked at the house for several minutes. Nothing moved that I could see. Circling slowly from tree to tree, I continued watching the house until I was staring at it from a point nearly opposite the place where I had first seen it. Then I began to walk toward it. Even the sound of the birds had faded away, although I could still smell the heady fragrance of tropical flowers. She had always kept a large bouquet of them on the table beside the bed.
When I had reached a point about twenty paces from the house, I wheeled suddenly and leaped forward, aiming at a spot where nothing showed to the eye. There was a moment—the merest instant—of dizziness, and then a room suddenly materialized around me. The room looked alien, and there were two Aliens at the far end of it. The usual drag of one and a half Earth gravities had returned.
This, I felt, was the first undistorted view any man on Earth had had of these Aliens, except as a pet. They had not expected any human to be able to find his way here, to this room at the center of their base.
The room was not what I had expected. I had thought that I would find myself on the inside of a spaceship, and by no stretch of the imagination could this ever have traveled between the stars. It was unmistakably a prefab hut.
The two Aliens better fitted my preconceptions. They looked something like overgrown sea anemones, with three multi-jointed arms and three short legs. They were just over two meters tall. They were extremely sluggish in their movements, as might be expected from creatures that depended almost entirely on their mental abilities for control of their environment.
They looked at me for a few minutes—all of their eyes were startlingly humanlike in appearance—and I imagine that they had expressions of surprise, if I could have found any expression, or interpreted from their tendrils just where their faces were. Finally one of them moved slowly to the far wall, extended one of his arms and depressed a lever on a rather crude-looking panel attached to that wall. He then moved slowly back to his companion and both of them continued to stare at me.
I waved cheerily at them. "Hi, fellows," I said. I could detect no answer, but the room wavered a little before my eyes. I blinked and shook my head and my vision cleared.
"So you haven't been trained in the techniques of Mental Control of Earthmen," I commented. "That's interesting."