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"I say kill every one of them!"

"How can you kill people who call you 'pal' and 'buddy'?" asked another Martian.

Ettil shook his head. "They're sincere. And yet I feel as if we were in a big acid vat melting away, away. I'm frightened." He put his mind out to touch among the crowd. "Yes, they're really friendly, hail-fellows-well-met (one of their terms). One huge mass of common men, loving dogs and cats and Martians equally. And yet--and yet----"

The band played "Roll Out the Barrel." Free beer was being distributed through the courtesy of Hagenback Beer, Fresno, California.

The sickness came.

The men poured out fountains of slush from their mouths. The sound of sickness filled the land.

Gagging, Ettil sat beneath a sycamore tree. "A plot, a plot--a horrible plot," he groaned, holding his stomach.

"What did you eat?" The assignor stood over him.

"Something that they called popcorn," groaned Ettil.

"And?"

"And some sort of long meat on a bun, and some yellow liquid in an iced vat, and some sort of fish and something called pastrami," sighed Ettil, eyelids flickering.

The moans of the Martian invaders sounded all about.

"Kill the plotting snakes!" somebody cried weakly.

"Hold on," said the assignor. "It's merely hospitality. They overdid it. Up on your feet now, men. Into the town. We've got to place small garrisons of men about to make sure all is well. Other ships are landing in other cities. We've our job to do here."

The men gained their feet and stood blinking stupidly about.

"Forward, march!"

One, two, three,four! One, two, three,four! . . .

The white stores of the little town lay dreaming in shimmering heat. Heat emanated from everything--poles, concrete, metal, awnings, roofs, tar paper--everything.

The sound of Martian feet sounded on the asphalt.

"Careful, men!" whispered the assignor. They walked past a beauty shop.

From inside, a furtive giggle. "Look!"

A coppery head bobbed and vanished like a doll in the window. A blue eye glinted and winked at a keyhole.

"It's a plot," whispered Ettil. "A plot, I tell you!"

The odors of perfume were fanned out on the summer air by the whirling vents of the grottoes where the women hid like undersea creatures, under electric cones, their hair curled into wild whorls and peaks, their eyes shrewd and glassy, animal and sly, their mouths painted a neon red. Fans were whirring, the perfumed wind issuing upon the stillness, moving among green trees, creeping among the amazed Martians.

"For God's sake!" screamed Ettil, his nerves suddenly breaking loose. "Let's get in our rockets--go home! They'll get us! Those horrid things in there. See them? Those evil undersea things, those women in their cool little caverns of artificial rock!"

"Shut up!"

Look at them in there, he thought, drifting their dresses like cool green gills over their pillar legs. He shouted.

"Someone shut his mouth!"

"They'll rush out on us, hurling chocolate boxes and copies ofKleig Love andHolly Pick-ture, shrieking with their red greasy mouths! Inundate us with banality, destroy our sensibilities! Look at them, being electrocuted by devices, their voices like hums and chants and murmurs! Do you dare go in there?"

"Why not?" asked the other Martians.