Everything was metal. Like inside a submarine or something. And there was fur. Fur on the… bed? …I was lying on. Fur on the floor. On the walls. All over the …furniture, whatever those shapes were.

I stood up. A part of the wall I was facing was not covered with fur. It quickly shifted from what seemed flat wall to what I first thought was a flat video screen. A three-dimensional video screen of some distant place in the stars, like you can't see them from Earth.

That's when I realized it was a window.

Then, behind me, a sound, a feeling I took to be a door of my chamber opening.

Two panels slid aside into the wall.

First, I saw just a silhouette of a tall person. As she moved forward, for I just had an impression she was female, I saw her eyes. They seemed to have been oddly made-up to look elongated, extra-wide almond-shape, and oddly wide apart. Her mouth I noticed next, broader than any face could have.

I hardly noticed as two others, who had all the bearing of guards, took up positions inside the room, behind and to either side of her.

She was beautiful.

Her eyebrows were, I realized, feathery. The stuff on her head was not hair but feathery. She had not so much a nose as nostrils wide apart upon her slightly-protruding — almost a muzzle or a snout — her lower face.

She flowed into the room like she was weightless, her tunic wafting around her, and I saw, protruding from her sleeves, her hands. Impossible, beautiful, tapered hands, claw-like but elegant.

I thought there were feathery ruffles at the ends of her sleeves when I realized the back of her hands and arms were actually covered with fantastically-colored irridescent feathers.

I was so enchanted, and she was so beautiful, so normal-seeming in a way, entering the room, holding in her clawed fingers a mental-communication screen, like I held that night Paul returned. She seemed like a doctor entering an examination room.

I… Paul… was delighted. Someone new to give the gift to!

She holds the sheet out toward me. I look at it dumbly. She blinks, and — was that a sigh, I wonder? She slowly, cautiously, staring me in the eye with those wide-apart weird eyes of hers, reaches for my hand and brings it to where Paul's fingers touch the bottom of the sheet.

Touching the screen was like turning on a thousand videos at once, all glaring and babbling, except you're — I was — fully immersed in all of them.

It was… almost… scary, in a fun-house spook-house kind of way. Then all that went away and it was just quiet.

She didn't say, she didn't… speak. She was just like — attitude. That I felt through this — telepathic communication screen thingy.

And she was all, like, beaming reassurance, like she was saying, "You're safe."

I — Paul — I was smiling so hard!

"I know!" exclaimed Paul, "Isn't it wonderful!"

Her return look was… patient.

"I am unaffected," she said, aloud, in English, "by your morphogenic ability. I just meant that for now, you need not feel threatened by your circumstances."

I was mostly puzzled.

"Oh, I know!" I heard myself thinking to this feathered person. "I don't feel threatened at all! This is so amazing! I'm so happy to meet you!"

Wow!

I'm a young, ordinary kid, and I'm on an alien spaceship. At least I think that's what's going on. Just… Wow!

I'm never sure, as I re-tell this story, how much of that Wow! feeling was his and what was mine as I "read" it, as I re-lived his experiences. They are real! They know about us. They come among us! They… kidnapped Paul.

She forcefully thinks to me, "You don't understand."

What?

She moved to pull back the magic plastic sheet from my touch, but I had so many questions suddenly, and she was so interesting, I clutched so hard at the screen it hurt my hand.

She seemed amazed, shocked, taken aback at my holding onto it. I could feel that she thought it a horrible, violent, threatening thing to do. She was, I think, this is what fear feels like! She's afraid of me. Not just afraid of me; she's deeply, powerfully afraid of my kind, whatever my kind is, and before she pulls, grabs, yanks desperately from my hands the magic screen, I catch her thought.

She moves across the room and places her hand on bare spots on the walls. Panels open, revealing tunics and houseslippers in my size. A refrigerated cabinet stocked with TV dinners and another cabinet full of cans of soup! And a GE microwave. A toilet….