Then they walked down the gentle slope until they had reached the shadow of the alien disk. They stopped a few feet from the watching outlanders. The captive Unquote writhed forward as far as she could on Alan's shoulder and spat at them.
They were a strange, a fantastic group, and yet they seemed to be human beings. Their bodies, much of which was unclothed, were built on the human scale; they averaged about six feet in height and their chest and limbs were developed to the same degree as a normally husky man's. Their foreheads were uniformly high. Their eyes varied in color, only one having irises of an unearthly hue, a kind of vivid violet. Only in the arrangement of their features did they differ perceptibly from the men of Terra: the cheeks were broader, the noses flatter, the eyes more widely spaced, and the bone structure much less apparent. Somewhere Alan had seen a man, lately, whose vague memory reminded him of these fellows. Where...?
Erin Grady!
When the pilot had spread himself out, so to speak, against the back of the chair, his face had widened, the features had drawn sideways and perceptibly flattened, so that he had resembled these saucermen. Was this what he had meant when he said, "You can't touch us. What could you do anyway?" This holocaust, this ghastly obliterating of New York and Los Angeles and fifty more great cities?
Grady had been a spy for them, then; a watcher, landed perhaps from one of the disks on a dark night....
He shook himself. That's romantic hogwash, he said. Everyone on Project Star had a thorough checking-over, and his history from birth to the present was recorded in the files. That meant that Grady had been born here, in the United States.
Unless the keepers of the files were alien too, in which case a falsified record would be a simple matter to arrange.
But if he had been left here in comparatively recent times, say even four or five years ago, Alan went on, how did he learn our language, our backgrounds, our habits and customs and all the rest of it, so well? Are these creatures then so much farther advanced than we, that they can take on the perfect counterfeit of humanity in so short a time? He could not quite believe it. Grady had been too human.
Damn it all, these men looked too human!