Where did they come from? Or, judging from their "talk," when did they come from? And would it do me any good if I knew?
I was sitting there in my bachelor apartment, drinking a can of beer and trying to work a crossword puzzle to get sleepy. I wasn't especially jittery like the groom is always supposed to be on the eve of his wedding. Just wide awake at midnight, wanting to get sleepy so I could get some real rest when I went to bed.
Just sitting there trying to think of a two-letter word for "sun-god." And that made me think of the gold in Betty's hair when the sun was on it at the beach. And pretty soon I was just staring into space, aching for Betty, wishing the next twelve hours of my life would vanish and we could be together, heading for our little cottage at the lake.
Staring into space.... Then it wasn't just space. There were these two big ball bearings in front of me, about three feet in diameter, if you could say they had a diameter. They looked like ball bearings because their surfaces were shiny, mirrorlike steel. But they had unevenly spaced, smooth bumps. Something like the random knobs on a potato, so they weren't really round at all.
The light from my lamp reflected crazily, and my own image gaped back at me from their distorted, reflecting curves. Like the fun-mirrors at the crazy-house, only crazier ... and not funny at all. Fear is never funny. And I was afraid. I'll swear I could taste the terror. It was salty on my tongue. When I tried to cry out, the roof of my mouth felt like old concrete.
Then one of them spoke. "It's alive! Intelligent! It senses our presence!"
I was receiving pure thought, not words. But man thinks only in words. And their thoughts fished suitable words from my subconscious to frame them for my assimilation.
Telepathy? Impossible! What common points of reference could I have with these two unthinkably alien life-forms?
The answer whipped back at me on an intuitive, sub-vocal level: Thought is a universal energy manifestation. Language is only the clumsy vehicle for thought.