"That is it. A silver land." Evidently they had the same color perception as we; a surprising but not wholly unthinkable fact. "Nowhere is there color or change of form or beauty, save in our own bodies. Your earth burst on our ken with such a wealth of beauty and such opportunities for pleasure as we had never dreamt of. At once we began to infiltrate, in the guise of normal humans; at first only by the route of births stemming from that original accident, then afterwards by births regulated and controlled from our plane, by methods you could not comprehend, which once discovered freed us from the necessity of waiting endlessly to be born into a body that had descended from that original fortuitous 'sport.' I believe that in terms of your space-time continuum, this discovery of ours has been quite recent."
I grew pale and cold at his words.
For—if true—this meant that the beast-folk could make a wholesale invasion of our dimension at any time! The brute saw me, and laughed again.
"Exactly. You are beaten. Indeed, you never had a chance, but now you have less than none. We are an advance guard, who have prepared the way for all the others of our race who will one day inhabit bodies on your plane. We have felt you out, tested your power to resist—which has been practically nil, my friend, with the exception of your own feeble and haphazard efforts—and spread out over this island until we are more numerous than you can imagine. But with the new method of coming in, there is no longer a need for infiltrating into high offices and key government positions, as we have so laboriously done before; for, my friend, D-Day is at hand."
He folded his arms and chuckled once more, icily, hideously. "Quite soon now, we will come into this dimension in one great wave that will obliterate your race as though the stars had never shone upon it at all! Every birth in the world shall be one of our robots—and then, no matter how you struggle and fume and plot, your people are doomed! Then, no matter how hard you fight, you will lose, for your species will ultimately die of old age!"
In the silence that followed this burst of ghoulish amusement, I heard someone who was going by in Baker Street whistling the Bronze Horse Overture, one of my favorites ... oddly, irrelevantly, I considered it a good omen, and was cheered. Then Geoff spoke.
"Just put my hands on his throat, somebody, will you?"
"Not yet, son. Go on, ogre. Why will you murder a whole race? Just for amusement? Just so you can see colors and pretty forms?"
"Yes. That simple a reason. And because we hate you, for that you have inherited a world of such perfections and do not appreciate it. To see colors, to revel in sounds and scents and tastes we had never imagined; to feel the vicarious ecstasy of these robots in acts you take for granted—acts of feeding, of drinking, of viewing and touching, of sex, which we do not have in our proper forms in any fashion whatever. We envy you, and hate you. We want your world, even if we must take its tactile delights vicariously—which is not so second-best as it sounds, for these robots are in a sense ourselves as much as our own bodies are. You who are born to this wondrousness—can you claim you properly appreciate it? Or will you admit that you have held it lightly and unthinkingly for as many generations as you can count?"