At this distance it was difficult to tell much about the alien, except that his body was segmented crustaceanlike, humanoid otherwise; his skin looked thick, waxy, leathery. Chief Scout Nollibar had postulated some member of the paraffin series as the chief constituent of Mellidani protoplasm; he was probably right.
Clouds of gaseous chlorine hung thickly overhead, draping the sky with a yellow-green blanket. Somewhere directly above burned the sun Mellidan: a yellow star of some intensity, its heat negated by the planet’s distance from it and by the swath of chlorine that was the atmosphere’s main component.
One other distinct feature made up the view as Bork saw it. Some eight miles directly westward, the violet-hued arc of a plastic-extrusion habitation dome rose from the bare plain. Bork had seen such domes before—more than forty years before, when he had served as a member of the last mission to Terra.
He had been only a Fifth Attaché then, though soon after he was to begin the rapid climb that would bring him to the rank of Federation Emissary. On that occasion, the emissary had been old Morvil Brek, who had added twelve worlds to the Federation during his distinguished career. Brek had been named to make the fifth attempt to enroll the Sol system.
The mission had been a failure; the Terran government had emphatically rejected any offer to federate, and Emissary Brek then declared the system non-Federated for good, in a bitter little speech which fell short of making its intended effect of altering the Terran decision. The Galactics had departed—and, on the outward trip, Bork had seen the violet domes on the snowswept plains of Sol IX, where the Terrans had established an encampment.
He scowled, now. Terrans on Mellidan VII? Why? Why?
“Contact has been made with the Mellidani leaders, sir,” Kumagon said gently.
Bork drew his eyes from the Terran dome. It seemed to him he could almost see the Terrans moving about within it, pale-skinned, ten-fingered, almost repellingly hairy men with that sly expression always on their faces—
Just imagination. He sighed.
“Transfer the line up here,” Bork said to his adjutant. “I’ll talk to them from my chair.”
Bork sprawled in a leisure-loving way into the intricate reticulations of the webfoam chair; he nudged a stud at its base and the chair began to quiver gently, massaging him, easing the stress-and-fatigue poisons from his muscles. After a moment, the communicator screen lit up, breaking into the wide-periphery view of the landscape.
Three Mellidani faced him squarely. They were chalk-white and without hair: their eyes were set deep in their round skulls, ringed with massive orbital ridges, veiled from time to time by fast-flickering nictitating membranes, while their mouths—if mouths they were—were but thin lipless slits. Three nostrils formed a squat triangle midway between eyes and mouth, while cupped processes jutting from the sides of the head seemed to equate with ears. Bork was not surprised at this superficial resemblance to the standard humanoid type; there is a certain most efficient pattern of construction for an erect humanoid biped, and virtually all such life adheres to it.
The emissary said, “I greet you in the name of the Federation of Worlds. My name is Holis Bork; my title, Emissary.”
The centermost of the aliens moved his lipless mouth; words came forth. The linguistic pattern, too, adhered to norms. “I am Leader this month. My name is unimportant. What does your Federation want with us?”
It was the expected quasi-belligerent response. Twenty years of emissary duties had reduced the operation to a series of conditioned reflexes, so far as Bork was concerned. Stimulus A produced Response B, which was dealt with by means of Technique C.
He said, “The Federation is composed of four hundred eighty-five worlds scattered throughout some thirty thousand light-years. Its capital and First Planet is Vengo in the Darkir system; its member peoples live in unmatched unity. Current Federation population is twenty-seven billion people. Membership in the Federation will guarantee you free and equal rights, full representation, and the complete benefits of a Galactic civilization that has been in existence for eleven thousand years.”
He paused triumphantly with soundless fanfare. The array of statistics was calculated to arouse a feeling of awe and lead naturally to the next group of response-leads. The Federation’s psychometrists had perfected this technique over millennia.
But the Mellidani leader’s reaction jarred Bork. The alien said, “Why is it that the Terrans do not belong to the Federation?”
Bork had been ready with the next concept-group; he had already begun to bring forth the second phase of his argument when the impact of the Mellidani’s sudden irrelevant question slammed into his nervous system and set the neat circuitry of his mind oscillating wildly.
It was a dizzy moment. But Bork had his nerves under control almost instantly, and a moment later had formulated a new pat reply he hoped would cover the new situation.
“The Terrans,” he said, “did not choose to enter the Federation—thereby demonstrating that they lack the wisdom and maturity of a truly Galactic-minded race.”
It was impossible to tell what emotions were in play behind the alien’s almost inflexible features. Bork found himself trembling; he docketed a mental note to have a neural overhaul when he returned to Vengo.
The alien said, “You imply by this that the Federation worlds are superior to the Terran worlds. In what way?”
Again Bork’s nerves were jolted. The interview was taking a very unpredictable pattern indeed. Damn those Terrans, he thought. And double-damn Security for allowing them to get a foothold here with an emissary on his way!
Sweat dribbled down the emissary’s olive-green skin. His military collar was probably drooping by now. He rooted in his mind for some sequence of arguments that would answer the stubborn alien’s question, and at length came up with:
“The Federation worlds are superior in that they have complete homogeneity of thought, feeling, and purpose. We have a common ground for intellectual endeavor and for commercial traffic. We share laws, works of art, ways of thinking. The Earthmen have deliberately placed themselves beyond the pale of this communion—cut themselves off from every other civilized world of the galaxy.”
“They have not cut themselves off from us. They came here quite willingly and have lived here during three Leaderships.”
“They mean to corrupt you,” Bork said desperately. “To lead you away from the right path. They are malicious: unable to enter Galactic society themselves through their own antisocial tendencies, they try now to drag an innocent world into the same quagmire, the same—”
Bork stopped suddenly. His hands were shaking; his body was bathed in perspiration. He realized gloomily that for the first time in his career he had no notion whatever of the next line of thought to pursue.
Promotion, glory, past achievements—all down the sink because of failure now, here? He swallowed hard.
“We’ll continue our discussions tomorrow,” he said hoarsely. “I would not think of keeping you from your daily work.”
“Very well. Tomorrow the man at my left will be Leader. Address your words then to him.”
In the state he was in, Bork had little further interest in protocol. He broke the contact hastily, and sank back in the cradle of webfoam, tense, sweat-drenched.