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but I want a charge that carries compulsory psyching on conviction. That ought to prove how seriously I take these so-called cranks!’

6
    In the neutral light of the Ark’s reception hall – dim, source-less illumination designed to serve creatures used to many different solar spectra – I caught the arm of a man in a lab smock. ‘Did the Tau Cetians get here okay?’ I demanded.
    ‘I’m afraid I haven’t heard,’ the man said. ‘I work in the Ophiuchian sector myself. If you know who’s looking after them I can probably direct you to him.’
    ‘Dr bin Ishmael, I think.’
    ‘G block, then. Second left, first right. But watch it – it’s being put under gas some time today.’
    It must presumably already have been ‘put under gas’ – filled with air suitable to receive the Tau Cetians. I thanked him and departed at a run.
    I passed the hospital, unique in the known galaxy, whose doctors were equally prepared to set a broken leg, help a Gamma Ophiuchian moult his shell, or repair the seared gills of a Stigma Sagittarian accidentally exposed to Earthly oxygen. I passed the air circulation rooms, where thumping generators secreted the gases needed to support our alien visitors. I turned a corner and almost collided with a robot trolley on which were trays of steaming mush, grey-green and repulsive to human eyes but the very staff of life to creatures from Fomalhaut V. I blessed the foresightedness of the Ark’s designers, who had made provision for almost every conceivable life-saving reaction. Preparing quarters to house the Tau Cetians would chiefly have been a matter of adjusting some controls.
    The sealed door of Block G fetched me up short. A suggestive whiff of chlorine made me sure I’d come to the right place. Panting, I pressed the annunciator button and asked for bin Ishmael.
    After only a few seconds, the sound of pumps whirring to get rid of the poisonous gas beyond the door informed me that someone was coming. And it was indeed bin Ishmael; he lifted off his helmet to reveal his brown, lined face with its beaky Arab nose.
    ‘Hoo! That’s better!’ he exclaimed. ‘Why, you’re Roald Vincent, aren’t you? I got your message via Asprey. Come up to my room – it’s just a step from here – and I’ll give you the latest developments.’
    He shouted an open-up order at a door ten paces along the corridor, and led the way, shedding sections of his suit as he went. By the time we reached his room he wasstripped to the undersuit, and the various pieces were ready for casual tossing into a corner.
    The whole of the main wall was lined with microfiles and textbooks, ranging from dogeared classics of the twentieth century dealing with human responses to conditions in space and printed on obsolete woodpulp paper to the very latest works on that contemporary conundrum, the metabolism of the fantastically adaptable Regulans. A duplicate of the Bureau file on Tau Cetians lay open on the desk.
    I decided I would probably like bin Ishmael more than our previous casual – purely social – encounters had already made me. Old-fashioned or not, I liked people who had private libraries, and even Patricia – who took the modern attitude that all you needed was access to a good computer memory – couldn’t make me change my views.
    ‘It was smart to notify us about that wildcat of a courier,’ bin Ishmael said, running his hands through his sleek dark hair and rumpling it into untidy waves. ‘I laid on the medic you suggested, and he confirmed your opinion. Called it the worst case of nervous exhaustion he’d ever seen. She’s doped out in the hospital. Barring any allergies which may develop, she’ll be fit company tomorrow.’
    I exhaled with relief. ‘But what are you going to do about communications till she wakes up? It only just struck me. If that’s the Bureau file you have there, the Starhomers haven’t passed enough data on the Tau Cetians’ language to enable —’
    ‘No problems,’