“Octopuses!” Jonathan cried. “I won’t believe it. We’ve been abducted by octopuses!”

Hollis shook her head, seemingly unaware of her nakedness, looking surprisingly attractive and womanly to Jonathan. He had never even tried to imagine what curves might be hiding under her coveralls, and in a brief moment of admiration for her he felt ashamed of his own gaunt frame. Hollis showed no sign of judging him.

“If it had to be octopi from space,” she said, “why couldn’t they have been H. G. Wells’s Martians in their tripodal war machines? Those we could have rounded up in the London zoo before lunchtime!”

On hearing these words, the creature turned around and gestured incomprehensibly. Revulsion and fascination washed over Jonathan in a wave, and his heart was skipping. The thing had no face. It belonged to a species whose flesh was impossibly white yet perfect. It was at once beautiful and obscene, godlike and profane, in that it had escaped its biological cradle to be here, light-years distant, for an evil purpose. Blind because it was eyeless, eyeless because it had never known light, it was a creature that nevertheless exuded a superpresence, as if it were somehow seeing right through him. The historian tried not to stare back, but he could not stop himself.

The enemy made another gesture with six tentacles, and Jonathan’s heart skipped another two beats.

“What would be easier for you?” the alien asked through a hidden speaker, impossibly clear and bright and in the king’s English. “That I tell you why we brought you here, or that you tell me why you came looking for us?”

“My partner and I did not come looking for anyone!” said Hollis. “We surfaced to find everything destroyed—by you, I presume—and all we did was send up a distress call to our own ships. We weren’t looking for you, never knew you were here, didn’t want to—”

“I was not referring to you and your partner,” the alien said. “Forgive me. My English may not be entirely up to crack. I have learned as best I can from old newscasts, old children’s programs, and old TV dramas. If my bad English distorted the intended meaning, you must allow me to correct myself. I was not asking why you, as individuals, came looking for me. I am asking why you, as a species, came looking for my people. Why did you begin designing, testing, and flying starship engines? Why did you not stay at home?”

“We built starships because we could,” said Jonathan. “And people went out there, my own father among them, because there were no hints of radio, television, or any other kind of broadcasts anywhere except right here. Right in our own sunspace. It was the silence that drew us out. My people wanted to find out whether or not we really were all there was, if we really were all alone.”

“Your turn,” said Hollis. “Why did you bring us here?” Despite her nakedness, she asked the question with the authority of a church inquisitor.