“We are pleased to meet you,” the alien said gravely. The converter automatically turned his thoughts into English, but maintained the trace of his oddly inflected accent. “You have been saying that you are from the skies.”

“His grammar’s pretty shaky,” Willendorf interposed. “He keeps referring to any of us as *you’—even you, who just got here.”

“Odd,” I said. “The converter’s supposed to conform to the rules of grammar.” I turned to the alien, who seemed perfectly at ease among us. “My name is Bryson,” I said. “This is Willendorf, over here.”

The alien wrinkled his soft-skinned forehead in momentary confusion. “We are Alaree,” he said again.

“We? You and who else?”

“We and we else,” Alaree said blandly. I stared at him for a moment, then gave up. The complexities of an alien mind are often too much for a mere Terran to fathom.

“You are welcome to our world,” Alaree said after a few moments of silence.

“Thanks,” I said. “Thanks.”

I turned away, leaving the alien with my men. They had twenty-six minutes left of the break I’d given them, after which we would have to get back to the serious business of repairing the ship. Making friends with floppy-eared aliens was one thing; getting back to Earth was another.

The planet was a warm, friendly sort of place, with rolling fields and acres of pleasant-looking purple vegetation. We had landed in a clearing at the edge of a fair-sized copse. Great broad-beamed trees shot up all around us.

Alaree returned to visit us every day, until he became almost a mascot of the crew. I liked the little alien myself and spent some time with him, although I found his conversation generally incomprehensible. No doubt he had the same trouble with us. The converter had only limited efficiency, after all.

He was the only representative of his species who came. For all we knew, he was the only one of his kind on the whole planet. There was no sign of life elsewhere, and, although Willendorf led an unauthorized scouting party during some free time on the third day, he failed to find a village of any sort. Where Alaree went every night, and how he had found us in the first place, remained mysteries.