"Isn't that just what we thought about ourselves-until they landed?"

George's tired eyelids came open wide.

"Are you thinking what I-"

"We've got Tillie. Mavrua probably knows enough to noodle their input indicators. It wouldn't take much. What is to Tillie as a Capellan is to us?"

"Bobo!" put in Mrs. Peabody, from some ambush.

"Bobo will do nicely," I went on. "Now we work up the exact scenery-"

"But, Jesus, Max! Talk about forlorn chances-" protested George.

"Any chance beats no chance. Besides, it's a better chance than you think. Some day I'll tell you about irrational s.e.x phobias, I've had some unique data. Right now we've got to get this perfect, that's all. No slips. You cook it and I'm going to vet every millimeter of every frame. Twice."

But I didn't. My fever went up, and they put me back in the cooler. Every now and then Tillie dropped in to tell me things like the ore piles on Luna had quit growing, and the crew was evidently busy air-sealing the hold. How was George doing? Great. Mavrua had transmitted the crucial frames. In my more lucid moments I realized George probably didn't need any riding-after all, he'd trained on those Mongolian yak parties.

If this were public history I'd give you the big drama of those nine days, the technical problems that got licked, the human foul-ups that squeaked by. Like the twenty-four hours in which the Joint Chiefs were insisting on monitoring the show through a channel that would have generated an echo-their scientists said no, but the President finally trusted ours and killed that. Or the uproar when we found out, about Day Five, that the French had independently come up with a scheme of their own, and were trying to talk privately to Mavrua-at a time when his Capellan chief was around, too. The President had to get the U.N. Secretary and the French Premier's mother-in-law to hold that.

That let the cat out of the first bag; the high-level push to get in the act began. And there was the persistent intrusion from our own Security side, who wanted to hitch Mavrua up to some kind of interstellar polygraph to check him out. And the discovery at the last minute, of a flaw in our scanningpulse which would have left a fatal trace, so that new equipment had to be a.s.sembled and lofted to the satellite relay all one sleepless night. Oh, there was drama, all right. George got quite familiar with the sight of the President pulling on his pants.

Or I could paint you the horror visions now growing in all our minds, of snow that never stopped, of glaciers forming and grinding down from the poles across the world's arable land. Of eight billion people ultimately trying to jam themselves into the shrinking, foodless equatorial belt. Of how few would survive.

A great and dramatic week in world history-during which our hero, in actual fact, was worrying mostly about an uncontrolled staph colony in his cracked pelvis and dreaming of dragging seals home to his igloo off Key West.

"How're your teeth, baby?" I asked what seemed to be a solid version of Tillie, swimming in the antibiotic fogs. I'd been dreaming that her head had been resting on my arm cast.

"Teeth. Like for chewing blubber. That's what Eskimo women do."

She drew back primly, seeing I was conscious.

"It's getting out, Max. The wise money is starting to slip south."

"Best stick with me, baby. I have a complete arctic camping outfit."

She put her hand on my head then. Nice hand.

"s.e.x will get you nowhere," I told her. "In times to come it's the girls who can chew hides who'll get the men."

She blew smoke in my face and left.

On Day Minus Four there was a diversion. The Capellan party who had landed in Africa were now partying around the Pacific on their way to pick up the VTO launch in Mexico. Since Authority was still sitting on all the vital information, the new batch of Girls from Capella were as popular as ever with the public. Behind the scenes there was a hot debate in progress about how they could be used as hostages.

To me this was futile-what could we even hope to get?

Meanwhile their launch was sitting unattended at Mexico City, showing no signs of the various cosmic can-openers we had tried. All the united military could do was to englobe it with guard devices and a mob of a.s.sorted special troops.

On Day Minus Four the three Girls went fishing off a Hawaiian atoll, in a catamaran. They were insh.o.r.e of their naval escort. One of them yawned, said something.

At that moment the VTO boat in Mexico went whirr, let out a blast that incinerated a platoon of Marines and took off. A j.a.p pilot earned his family a pension by crashing it at 90,000 feet with his atomic warheads armed. As far as we could find out, he never even caused a course correction.

The VTO came scorching down on the atoll just as the Girls drifted up to the beach. They sauntered over and were inside before the naval watchdogs got their heads out of their radar hoods. Two minutes later they were out of atmosphere. So much for the great hostage plan.

After this I kept dreaming it was getting colder. On Day Minus Three I thought I saw rhododendron leaves outside my window hanging straight down, which they do at 46 degrees Fahrenheit. Mrs.

Peabody had to come over to tell me the ship was still on Luna, and it was 82 outside.

Day Minus Two was it. They rolled me over to George's projection room for the show. We had one of the two slave-screens, the U.N. had the other. The Chief hadn't wanted that-partly from the risk of detection, but mostly because it was ninety-nine to one the thing would bomb out. But too many nations knew we were trying something.

I was late, due to a flat tire on my motorized coffin. George's masterpiece was already running when they wedged me through the doors. In the dimness I could make out the Chief up front, with a few cabinet types and the President. The rest seemed to be just two-feather Indians like me. I guess the President wanted to be in his own family when it blew.The screen show was pretty impressive. A big Capellan hunched over her console, sweat streaming down her face, yelling a low steely contralto into her mike. I couldn't get the words but I picked up the repet.i.tive cadence. The screen flickered-George had worked authentic interstellar noise into the send-and then it jumped a bit, like an early flick when the ship goes down with Pearl White lashed to a bunk. There were intermittent background crashes, getting louder, and one cut-off screech.

Then the back wall started to quake, and the door went out in a laser flare. Something huge kicked it all the way down, and Bobo came in.

Oh my aunt, he was beautiful. Bobo Upd.y.k.e, the sweetest monster I've known. I heard a chair squeak beside me and there he was, beaming at his image on the screen. They'd fixed him up with love.

Nothing crude-just a bit more browridge on what he had, and the terrible great paws very clean. The uniform-Mau-Mau on a solid base of S.S. Schrechlichheit. Somebody had done something artfully inhuman about the eyes, too. For an instant he just stood there. The crashes quit, like held breath.

There's rape and rape, you know. Most rape has some shred of humanity in it, some acknowledgment of the victim's existence. That kind most women aren't really scared of. But there's another kind. The kind a golem might do, or a torture device. Violation done by a thing to a thing. That's what they'd put into Bobo and that's what the Capellan on the screen turned up her face to look at. All sweet Auschwitz.

Did I say Bobo is seven feet two plus his helmet which brushed the ceiling, and Tillie isn't five feet?

It was something to see. He put out one huge hand. (I heard that footage was reshot twenty-two times.) His other hand was coming toward the camera. More background crash. The last you saw between Bobo's oncoming fingers was her breast ripping naked and more hulking males beyond the open door.

Blackness-a broken shriek and a, well, noise. The screen went dead.

Our lights came on. Bobo giggled shyly. People were getting up. I saw Tillie before the crowd covered her. She had some blue gook on her eyelids and her hair was combed. I decided I'd give her a break on the blubber-chewing.

People moved around, but the tension didn't break. There was nothing to do but wait. In one corner was Harry with a console. Somebody brought in coffee; somebody else brought in a napkin that gurgled into the chiefs' dixie cups. There was a little low talk that stopped whenever Harry twitched.

The world knows what happened, of course. They didn't even stop for their ore. It was 74 minutes later that Harry's read-outs began to purr softly.

Up on Luna, power was being used to close airlocks, shift busbars. Generators were running up.

The great sensitive ears yearning at them from the Bank quivered. At minute 82.5 the dials started to swing. The big ship was moving. It floated off its dock in the Alps, drifted briefly in an expanding orbit, and then Harry's board went wild as it kicked itself outward. Toward Pluto.

"Roughly one hundred and seventy-nine degrees from the direction of Capella," said George, as they rolled me out. "If they took Harry's advice, they're working their way home via the Magellanic Clouds."

Next day we got the electronic snow as they went into s.p.a.ce drive. To leave us, we may hope, for another couple of millennia.

The official confirmation of their trajectory came on the day they let me try walking. (I told you this was history as I lived it.) I walked out the front door, over a chorus of yowls. Tillie came along to help.

We never did refer to precisely what it was that made her able to grip my waist and let me lean on her shoulder. Or why we were suddenly in Magruder's buying steak and stuff to take to my place. She was distrustful of my claim to own garlic, and insisted on buying fresh. The closest we came-then or ever-to an explanation was over the avocado counter.

"It's all relative, isn't it?" she said to the avocados.

"It is indeed," I replied.And really, that was it. If the Capellans could bring us the news that we were inferior mutations, somebody could bring them the word that they were inferior mutations. If big, hairy Mamma could come back and surprise her runt relations, a bigger, harrier Papa could appear and surprise Mamma.

-Always provided that you had a half-pint female who could look and talk like a Capellan for seven minutes of tape, and a big boy who could impersonate a walking nightmare, and one disaffected alien to juggle frequencies so a transmission from a nearby planet came through as a send from home base. And a pop genius like George to screen the last stand of the brave Capellan HQ officer, sticking to her mike to warn all ships to save themselves from the horror overwhelming the home planet.

It had been Harry's touch to add that the invaders had long-range detector sweeps out and ordering all ships to scatter to the ends of the galaxy.

So, all things being potentially relative, everybody including Mrs. Peabody got a medal from bringing Papa home. And my mamma came home with me, although I still don't know how she is on chewing blubber.

HELP.

"Here we go again," said Harry's voice in my ear.

I discovered my wife had waked up first and was holding the office phone over my face. It was still dark.

"-down by the Lunar Alps. Visuals just coming in."

"Not those Capellan jocks again?" I groaned.

"Smaller. Different emission features. Get down here, Max."

Tillie was already dressing. When we'd gone to bed two hours back, the ears of Earth were following a moving source which kept disappearing behind Luna, and our moonstation near Mersenius was scrambling to set up a far-side relay. Now the alien had landed, a third of a great circle from our station.

The photo courier pa.s.sed us at the office door. Mersenius had sent a camera-eye over the alien ship.

"Looks as if they're interested in those ore-piles the Capellans left," said George. "What's that, a derrick?"

"Derrick my azimuth," I grunted, rapidly opening and closing alternate eyes to catch small differences in consecutive negatives. That's called flashing. Big photo-shops do it with a trunk-sized geewhizzus that's almost as efficient as the trained human eye.

"That's them. It He. He is moving an arm... he is shifting his stance... bipedal? Maybe, if that's a tail.

Yes! He is moving his tail. What did we have for the height of that ore-pile?"

"Forty-one meters." Little Mrs. Peabody had joined us, Living Bra alert and dedicated.

"Tentative estimate, six meters tall," I concluded. "We'll see what Langley says in the morning; they've got better comparators. And not human. Let me project this shadow-if it straightened up, it would look something like a small tyrannosaurus, wouldn't you say?"

The spy-eye gave us a close-up on its second pa.s.s, just before the alien knocked it down. We saw a lizard-like creature, helmeted and harnessed with weird hardware, wearing an unpleasant expression on its lipless face. And blue.

"Eighteen-foot blue s.p.a.ce-going dinosaurs, that's what's up there," said Harry. "At least two of them."

"Or praying mantises," said George.

"Maybe he's a she," said Tillie."Quit dreaming, kid," I told her. "The lulu is played only once in a lifetime."

By this time, the main photo-shop had confirmed my height guess and added that the two aliens had pulled the spy-eye in with some sort of beam and then apparently cut it open for a brief look before blowing the remains.

Meanwhile the hotlines of the world were steaming, and the United Nations halls were boiling with delegates trying to get a decision on what to tell Mersenius to do. So many electric razors were used in the U.N. lounge that they blew a fuse and killed our landline for fifteen minutes. At 0800 EST the question became academic. The aliens took off on a fast-precessing orbit around Terra itself.

So far they had been silent. Now they began to transmit, and George ascended to his idea of heaven with an endless supply of alien gabble to chew on.

What exactly is our shop? Basically, an unimportant bit of C.I.A. that got left out in the big move to Langley. (I warned you this would be the inside story from the pick-and-shovel level; I couldn't know less about what the President said to the Premier.) We're officially listed as a communications and special support facility. Just a small crew of oddball linguists and blown operators put out to pasture. It was a nice restful life until we accidentally got into the first great alien contact flap three years back. The Capellans, you'll recall.

George came out of that as our official Extraterrestrial Language Specialist, which hasn't done his small-man's ego any good. I am optimistically regarded as having a flare for alien psychology-shows you what can happen to a fair photo-interpreter. And Tillie is a crack polyglot. Did you know you get clobbered for calling a polyglot a linguist? Anyway, she's George's aide. And my wife. Harry is our captive physicist-of-all-work since they decided we rated an R&D. Little Mrs. Peabody got upgraded to Chief of Archives, but she still helps me with my income-tax forms.

After the Girls from Capella left hurriedly we all expected to coast into distinguished retirement with no further calls on our peculiar talents, if any. Now suddenly here was Another Alien merrily orbiting Terra, and our little shop was being pelted with data and demands for answers.

"They appear to be sending some sort of standard contact broadcast," George reported. "Three or four phrases repeated, and switch to a different language. At least twenty-eight so far. One of them resembles Capellan, but not enough to read."

"I think it's like a high Capellan," said Tillie. "You know, like Mandarin to Cantonese. The Capellans who came here must have spoken a dialect. I'm sure I heard a formal I and you and something about speak."

"Could it be Do you speak our language? Or Will you speak?"

The nations were now in hot debate as to whether and what to reply to the alien. George could scarcely be prevented from trying to pull something through his friends at N.S.A.; he was sweating for fear the Swedes or j.a.ps would beat us to it. But we couldn't get an O.K. That was the time our Joint Chiefs were so cozy with the President-remember?-and I think there was a struggle to keep them from testing their new anti-orbital-missile missile on the aliens. It may have been the same elsewhere; the big nations had all been working up some s.p.a.ce defense since the Capellan visit.

The upshot was that n.o.body did anything before the alien abruptly stopped transmitting speech and went into repeated da-dits. That lasted an hour. Then two things happened right together.

First, Harry got a signal from Defense R&D that one of their boys had identified a digital equation having to do with fissionable elements in the da-dits. Right after that came the word from a Soviet tracker that the alien had ejected an object which was now trailing their ship.

We all ducked and held our breaths.

The blip stayed in orbit.

Just as we started breathing again, the alien poked out a laser finger and the trailing blip went up in the prettiest fusion flare you ever saw-a complex burst, like three shorts and a long.This is probably where you came in. With that flare overhead, the world media roared out of control. "ALIENS BLAST EARTH!" "BLUE LIZARDS HURL BOMB FROM SKY!" The military was already loose, of course, and an a.s.sortment of mega-squibs were blasting up towards the alien ship.

They never connected. The alien deftly distributed three more blips in a pattern around earth, about 150,000 miles out, and took off in the direction of the Coal Sack. They had been in our system exactly thirteen hours, during which the united brains of Earth had demonstrated all the initiative of a shocked opossum.

"Call me anthropocentric, but they struck me as ugly customers," I brooded later.

"And very alien," said Tillie.

"You're supposed to be able to identify, remember?"

She gave me the old sulky leer, with the new magic ingredient.

"Marriage has ruined you, stud.... Hey, George! Did you hear that those bombs they left are covered with writing? About a zillion different scripts, in a nice fluorescent blue. It's your life work, old brother."

"A galactic Rosetta stone," breathed George as he sat down. "Max, you must prevent the military from destroying them. The photos are not adequate."

"Three tune-bombs going past our ears on the hour, and you want to preserve them as a reference library? What if they're loaded with disease? Or mutation inducers? Stupid-making generators, so we won't get into s.p.a.ce? Have you heard the newscasts? George, sober up."

"They can't," he groaned. "It's priceless! The key to the galaxy!"

As it turned out, they didn't, at least not then. Somebody was either too scared or too avid for alien technology. A US-Soviet astroteam managed to make a remote-control dock with one of the ten-foot missiles and spent two weeks gingerly coaxing it around to a crater on the far side of Luna.

From that minute, George lived to get to the moon. To my amazement, he screamed the medicos into an acceleration and low-G clearance, and next thing we knew he was actually booked for the Mersenius shuttle trip. In spite of looking like a dissipated gerbil, George was fundamentally pretty healthy.

At the good-bye party he told me he felt sure he had detected Capellan script on the missile's fin.

"Same as the verbal transmission-something about I you speak."

"How about: If you can read this you're too d.a.m.n close? Good luck."