"Telepathy? No, Mister. Not so good for us with you people. Funny? Maybe.... Learn conversing? One can always learn more.... But we have been visiting Earth, mostly unnoticed—since—before—there were—men."
Here was English, idiomatic to the point of slang. Yet, to add an eeriness, there were pauses, as if the effort to think in a human manner was more difficult for this trained but outworldly psychology than the speech itself!
So, the simplicity of communication was like in some of the old, imaginative stories. Well, why not, if these little people had been haunting human stamping grounds for ages? Besides, could extra-terrestrial thought, dealing with common physical facts, be so totally different? That University course had exaggerated.
Doc cursed happily: "Dammit, things'll be easy, now!"
"Easy," came the cheerfully buzzed answer. But soon I suspected that a cheerful tone was pure mimicry of a human way, without, necessarily, a real, corresponding emotion. For now our escort gripped us roughly, and drew us along through the great gulf of air, using hand-held jet-tubes for propulsion.
Doc's shouted, "Hey, what goes on?" and my equivalent complaints, were ignored. Our escort broke in two, six of its members, including the leader, continuing to lift Doc, Jan, and me upward through the air inside our ship, the other six, bearing what looked like massive equipment, falling behind.
In the ceiling of our lab compartment there was a circle, still edged with the rough scale of a tool cutting with intense heat, and there was a hinged, circular door of metal. They had cut through the skin of our ship, and had installed an airlock, quite like our own variety in principle, yet so tiny that our human eyes had missed it entirely.
Helplessly we were drawn through it, and onward into the murky night of Ganymede, over which Jupiter and his other scattered moons held sway. Our robot-selves of course did not feel the cold, which approached absolute zero. Nor apparently did our unarmored hosts. Nor did they seem compelled to breath oxygen.
"Charlie! Doc!" I heard Jan call. "I hope they're not taking us too far! The radio control hoods, keeping us in contact with our micro-robots, here, are of limited range. We could lose the robots!..."