“Think Andy and Dandy are afraid we’re too young to play with matches? Or maybe apelike creatures are too unpleasant-looking to be allowed to circulate in their refined and esthetic civilization?”

“I don’t know, Dick.” The prof ambled back to his desk and leafed irritably through his sociological notes. “If anything like that is true, why would they give us free run of their ship? Why would they reply so gravely and courteously to every question? If only their answers weren’t so vague in our terms! But they are such complex and artistically minded creatures, so chockful of poetic sentiment and good manners that it’s impossible to make mathematical or even verbal sense out of their vast and circumlocutory explanations. Sometimes, when I think of their highly polished manners and their seeming lack of interest in the structure of their society, when I put that together with their spaceship, which looks like one of those tiny jade carvings that took a lifetime to accomplish—”

He trailed off and began riffling the pages like a Mississippi steamboat gambler going over somebody else’s deck of cards.

“Isn’t it possible we just don’t have enough stuff as yet to understand them?”

“Yes. In fact, that’s what we always come back to. Warbury points to the tremendous development in our language since the advent of technical vocabularies. He says that this process, just beginning with us, already affects our conceptual approach as well as our words. And, naturally, in a race so much further along—But if we could only find a science of theirs which bears a faint resemblance to one of ours!”

I felt sorry for him, standing there blinking futilely out of gentle, academic eyes.