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gather you know about the damage to our alien wagon. That was sorted out in time, but when I met the Starhomer courier – why didn’t you tell me to expect a woman, by the way? – she snapped my head off!’
    I gave a summary of the facts so far and explained what precautions I’d asked to be taken at the Ark; then I ended, ‘I’m going to the Ark right away, to smooth over any harm that may have resulted, but I honestly don’t know if I can manage it. Get an experienced alien contact man along as soon as you can!’
    I cradled the phone and glanced up, realizing the car had halted without orders. Ahead, I saw a police towcar hauling a battered private car out of the gate – the one, presumably, used to crash our alien wagon. Surely that could have waited till I was on the road ahead!
    The phone sounded. Tinescu back in his office, maybe. I reached for it, but the caller was Rattray.
    ‘Vincent? I meant to come and join you at the ship, but I was held up explaining to the police about these three slobs we arrested. Sorry. Did it go off all right?’
    ‘Nobody’s actually died of it,’ I said grimly. ‘But it’s a fair mess that’s brewing up.’
    ‘I’m not surprised. The Starhomers must want to put us on the wrong foot with the new aliens, hm? Feeding their insecure little egos! Look, why I called you—’
    The police stop beacon clearing traffic for the towcar cut its beam, and my car shot forward again. ‘Yes?’
    ‘The charge against these three bastards – what’s wrong with your boss, that he won’t file a complaint of damage to property?’
    ‘Give me that again slowly,’ I requested when I’d drawn breath.
    ‘I wanted the police to take them in for deliberately wrecking your truck. But Tinescu has to file complaint. He refused – wouldn’t stop to argue, said he had to leave the office right away.’
    ‘You haven’t just let them go?’ I demanded in dismay.
    ‘Of course not! But they’ve only been booked on suspicion of reckless driving – this bit with the manual controls being cut in. And that doesn’t rate lie-detector testing, so they may simply lie their way out from under.’
    ‘I think I see,’ I muttered. ‘I’ll bet money you mentioned this Stars Are For Man League to Tinescu.’
    ‘Of course I did.’
    ‘He refuses to take them seriously.’ I explained about the episode this morning, when I’d found some of their literature in my conveyor box, and Tinescu wrote the League off as a crank group to be ignored.
    ‘Cranks or not,’ Rattray said, ‘you can’t afford to ignore people like that! This is how I look at it. Disregarding the fact that the logistics of interstellar travel make the idea of conquering – let alone
holding
– a galactic empire completely absurd, we have a responsibility to the future. We’re the only race we know of, thus far, with interstellar flight. In a sense this gives us power over alien races. But accordingto what I hear about the Tau Cetians, they’re enough like us to have discovered us in another couple of centuries, if we hadn’t come to them first! Somewhere, absolutely for sure, there must be a race which has had starflight longer than we have. What happens when our chauvinistic vacuum-brains hit that fact head on?’
    ‘I take your point,’ I said soberly. ‘And I hadn’t heard that about the Tau Cetians. I assumed from the file they must be fairly close to us psychologically – if they weren’t, the Starhomers couldn’t have coped even as well as they have. But —’
    ‘Just a second. What is it?’ – to someone else, presumably an intruder in his own office. I didn’t hear the reply, but it must have been an urgent call, for he came back with blurting haste.
    ‘Vincent, I just wanted to get you to talk to your boss – persuade him to file that charge. Because if he won’t play, I shall. I’ll have to make it a charge of interfering with the proper conduct of spatial traffic, or something equally specious,