That night McIlvaine was more than usually diffident.
He was not like a man bearing a message of considerable importance to himself.
He slipped into Bixby's, got a glass of beer, and approached the table where his friends sat, almost with trepidation.
"It's a nice evening for May," he said quietly.
Richardson grunted.
Leopold said, "By the way, Mac, whatever became of that star of yours?
The one the papers wrote up."
"I think," said McIlvaine cautiously,
"I'm quite sure—I have got in touch with them.
Only," his brow wrinkled and furrowed,
"I can't understand their language."
"Ah," said Richardson with an edge to his voice, "the thing for you to do is to tell them that's your star, and they'll have to speak English from now on, so you can understand them.
Why, next thing we know, you'll be getting yourself a rocket or a space-ship and going over to that star to set yourself up as king or something."
"King Thaddeus the First," said Alexander loftily.
"All you star-dwellers may kiss the royal foot."
"That would be unsanitary, I think," said McIlvaine, frowning.
Poor McIlvaine!
They made him the butt of their jests for over an hour before he took himself off to his quarters, where he sat himself down before his telescope and found his star once more, almost huge enough to blot out Arcturus, but not quite, since it was moving away from that amber star now.
McIlvaine's star was certainly much closer to the Earth than it had been.
He tried once again to contact it with his home-made radio, and once again he received a succession of strange, rhythmic noises which he could not doubt were speech of some kind or other—a rasping, grating speech, to be sure, utterly unlike the speech of McIlvaine's own kind.
It rose and fell, became impatient, urgent, despairing—McIlvaine sensed all this and strove mightily to understand.
He sat there for perhaps two hours when he received the distant impression that someone was talking to him in his own language.
But there was no longer any sound on the radio.
He could not understand what had taken place, but in a few moments he received the clear conviction that the inhabitants of his star had managed to discover the basic elements of his language by the simple process of reading his mind, and were now prepared to talk with him.
What manner of creatures inhabited Earth? they wished to know.
McIlvaine told them.
He visualized one of his own kind and tried to put him into words.
It was difficult, since he could not rid himself of the conviction that his interlocutors might be utterly alien.
They had no conception of man and doubted man's existence on any other star.
There were plant-people on Venus, ant-people on Andromeda, six-legged and four-armed beings which were equal parts mineral and vegetable on Betelguese—but nothing resembling man.
"You are evidently alone of your kind in the cosmos," said his interstellar correspondent.
"And what about you?" cried McIlvaine with unaccustomed heat.
Silence was his only answer, but presently he conceived a mental image which was remarkable for its vividness.
But the image was of nothing he had ever seen before—of thousands upon thousands of miniature beings, utterly alien to man; they resembled amphibious insects, with thin, elongated heads, large eyes, and antennae set upon a scaled, four-legged body, with rudimentary beetle-like wings.
Curiously, they seemed ageless; he could detect no difference among them—all appeared to be the same age.
"We are not, but we rejuvenate regularly," said the creature with whom he corresponded in this strange manner.
Did they have names? McIlvaine wondered.
"I am Guru," said the star's inhabitant. "You are McIlvaine."
And the civilization of their star?
Instantly he saw in his mind's eye vast cities, which rose from beneath a surface which appeared to bear no vegetation recognizable to any human eye, in a terrain which seemed to be desert, of monolithic buildings, which were windowless and had openings only of sufficient size to permit the free passage of its dwarfed dwellers.
Within the buildings was evidence of a great and old civilization....
"You see, McIlvaine really believed all this. What an imagination the man had!
Of course, the boys at Bixby's gave him a bad time; I don't know how he stood it, but he did.
And he always came back.
Richardson called the story in; he took a special delight in deviling McIlvaine, and I was sent out to see the old fellow again.
"You couldn't doubt his sincerity. And yet he didn't sound touched."
"But, of course, that part about the insect-like dwellers of the star comes straight out of Wells, doesn't it?" I put in.
"Wells and scores of others," agreed Harrigan.
"Wells was probably the first writer to suggest insectivorous inhabitants on Mars; his were considerably larger, though."
"Go on."