Description:

The artist and the writer sat staring at each other in wordless misery, their coffee untasted and their spirits at low ebb. Up above, in the beehive that was the publishing house which gave them their livelihood, the word had gone around. B.E.M.s, B.E.M.s. . . .

Sadly, in accents forlorn, the writer said:

"Bug-eyed monsters! Ye gads! Bug-eyed monsters! Jack, old boy, do you realize we're setting science-fiction back a hundred years?"

"I know just how you feel, Harry," the artist replied. "After all, we too had presumed that we had been freed of these monsters. So back we go to the drawing board, our minds tortured and twisted . . ." He sighed disconsolately.

On the world of the bug-eyed monsters, things were even worse. ". . . What do you think of this?" asked Sally, wife of the B.E.M.ish chieftain. "Bring some humans up here and we'll run a torture party for our fiends?"

Her mate's jaw dropped, all three feet of it. This was even worse than he had imagined. Bring some humans up here, she said. Had she any idea of what that entailed? No. NOO!

He tried to reason with her:

"Darling. Wait. Don't be hasty. Let me explain. In the first place have you ever met a human?"