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bin Ishmael chuckled. ‘Those beasts are bright.
Very
bright. You presumably know how close their mentality is to the human?’
    ‘Director Rattray, out at the port, said something about them being apt to invent spaceflight for themselves if they’d been left to their own devices.’
    ‘Correct. And bang go some beautiful theories about the connexion between oxygen-metabolism and the expansiveurge … Still, that’s irrelevant.’ He briskened. ‘I was about to say that of course the Starhomers discovered them by accident, and they didn’t have any linguists or semanticists with the expedition. Damned few such people on the whole planet, I imagine, as they don’t hold with the soft disciplines. So they took the much shorter course of teaching the Tau Cetians Anglic.’
    ‘I thought they used subsonics for communication,’ I objected.
    ‘So they do. The Starhomers threw together some sound transformers and worked the trick that way. Your lady friend had one with her, so I’ve sent it to our works to be copied. A beautiful engineering job, it looks like. Anyhow, the Tau Cetians are still apparently at the multilingual stage, but they’re close enough to an information theory to realize that Anglic – being artificially constrained to relate very closely to reality – would suit them better than one of their own haphazardly evolved natural languages. Oh yes! These are certainly the brightest bunch we’ve yet turned up.’
    ‘Always excepting the Regulans,’ I pointed out.
    ‘Hmmm… Well, yes. Though I’ve never decided whether Regulans are incredibly intelligent or just unbelievably adaptable.’
    The sense of strain was leaving me. I hadn’t managed to do what Tinescu wanted – take over from Kay Lee Wong at the port – but at least we’d averted a crisis on the way here and the visitors were safely in the hands of experts. I might as well go back to the Bureau, in that case. But I lingered to ask one or two more questions.
    ‘What are you going to do with them now?’
    ‘The Tau Cetians? Oh, the usual routine. First off, we’ll study their biochemistry – got to make sure we can feed them while they’re here, cure any diseases they may pick up, and so on. At the same time we’ll work out a basic vocabulary in some of their own languages to make certain theirsemantic orientation in Anglic is sound. It damned well ought to be – they have the same general attributes we do, including bisexuality. And then we’ll take them on a guided tour of Earth, though I’ve no idea how long it’ll be before Public Relations is ready to lay that on.’
    ‘I don’t get that,’ I said. ‘Why the difficulty? Simply because this is a first visit?’
    ‘Oh no. This ultimatum from the Stars Are For Man League.’
    My mind refused to produce an answer to that for several seconds. At last I drew a deep breath.
    ‘Look, what
is
it about this League? That’s the third time today I’ve heard mention of it, but I’ve never run across it before. And what ultimatum?’
    ‘Oh, it’s absurd, of course, but as a matter of security we keep tabs on all anthropocentric organizations, and this one has come ahead lately. Got some money behind it from somewhere, apparently. Printed a lot of glossy new literature, for instance.’
    ‘Like this?’ I fished out the pamphlet I’d brought away from the spaceport.
    ‘Yes, that’s one I’ve seen several times recently,’ bin Ishmael nodded.
    ‘So – what ultimatum?’
    ‘They sent an anonymous message to say we’d better keep our aliens under careful guard, because they’re tired of monsters wandering around unattended.’
    ‘But this must surely be a hollow threat!’
    ‘Think we can afford to chance it? The Starhomers are longing to see us mishandle the first Tau Cetian delegation – that’s why they’re making things deliberately awkward for us. Think of the effects if someone does attempt the lives of a party of aliens! And think how much worse it’ll be if