"Home?"
"No, to another pub." We hurried down an alley, turned up a street and down another, until I had put a maze of lanes behind us. Then we slowed abruptly and ambled into a smoky little room full of liquor fumes.
"Two beers, old toff," I said to the fright behind the bar.
We guzzled them slowly, while I watched the aliens around the tables and at the bar. Shortly there was a flurry of excitement among them, the tentacles writhing quickly and the ghastly brutes enlarging and deflating as though pumped by a bellows. All the time the human portions drank and chatted and played darts. But the usurpers were excited over something. Shortly half a dozen of them moved toward the door, the people in no evident hurry, but their marionette-masters wriggling like mad, as though eaten with impatience.
I knew they were going to discuss something important. I had what I had come for.
"Bedtime," I said to Geoff Exeter. We went out of the pub and caught a tram for the vicinity of the Gloucester Club.
CHAPTER VII
Safe in our rooms, with Johnson sitting, very unlike a waiter, behind a bottle of brandy and a tray of sandwiches, and Geoff lying on the Chesterfield smoking a pipe he could not taste, I told them what I had done.
"It's taught me a couple of things I didn't know, and affirmed some others I wasn't sure of. First, I'm certain the faculties of these brutes are the same in this dimension as their 'human parts'. That toad didn't hear me coming, I know. He didn't have time to turn and get a look at me before he went pop and left us. He was bound to the body till I released him, I think, and if he'd left it he couldn't have got back into it, or rather around it. His ears weren't keener than a man's, or he'd have turned to see me when I crept up behind him.