Its thought came:
"I had to let you see me or you would not have believed I existed. It was only here that I could extinguish all lights and have time to speak before you killed me. I let you think your brother was here...." There was a little pause. "I am sorry. I am sorry. I should have used some other method of luring you here."
He swung the blaster toward what seemed to be a faint sound near the astrogator unit across the room.
"We did not intend to kill your brother."
He did not believe it and did not reply.
"When we made first telepathic contact with him, he jerked up his blaster and fired. In his mind was the conviction that we had pretended to be harmless animals so that we could catch him off-guard and kill him. One of us leaped at him as he fired the second time, to knock the blaster from his hand. We needed only a few minutes in which to explain—but he would not trust us that long. There was a misjudgment of distance and he was knocked off the cliff."
Again he did not reply.
"We did not intend to kill your brother," the thought came, "but you do not believe me."
He spoke for the first time. "No, I don't believe you. You are physically like cats and cats don't misjudge distances. Now, you want something from me before you try to kill me, too. What is it?"