Or perhaps something very real had emerged from our own unconscious mind, taking actual, physical form and coming forth to haunt us. Maybe belief creates its own reality. It could be that the gods of the past were strong because the belief of their followers actually did give them life, and maybe that was happening again. We were creating drab, postindustrial gods to place of the glorious beings of the past. Instead of Apollo riding his fiery chariot across the sky or the goddess of night spreading her cloak of stars, we had created little steel-gray gods with the souls of pirates and craft no more beautiful inside than the bilges of battleships.

Or maybe we were receiving a visit from another dimension, or even from another time.

Maybe what we were seeing were human time travelers who assumed the disguise of extraterrestrial visitors in order to avoid creating some sort of catastrophic temporal paradox by revealing their presence to their own ancestors.

I wondered about my description of them as insectlike. Their appearance was actually more humanoid. There were no feelers, no wings, no tangle of legs. It was the way they moved — so stiffly — drat suggested the insect world to me. That, and their enormous, black eyes. What if intelligence was not the culmination of evolution but something that could emerge from the evolutionary matrix at many different points, just as wings and claws and eyes do. Primitive creatures have primitive organs.

If, say, some species of hive insect had become intelligent on some other planet — or even here — it might be very much older than us, and its mind very much more primitive in structure.

What would a more primitive intelligence be? I wondered if such a thing might nut involve less differentiation from creature to creature than we have . . with less individual awareness and independence.

If they were a hive, they might communicate as a hive, using a complex mixture of sounds, motions. scents, and even methods as vet unknown. Our knowledge of earth's hive species is very limited. An intelligent hive might as a whole be very powerful, but as individuals, quite limited both in strength and in understanding.

They might have, in essence, a single, enormous mind. Such a mind might chink very well indeed — but very slowly. That would certainly explain why they were being so careful in dealing with us. A single human being might be far less wise than they but also a lot faster thinking.