“And there’s your job.” The prof pointed. “Those two visitors.”

They were standing on a flat metal plate surrounded by the highest the republic had elected or appointed. Nine feet of slimy green trunk tapering up from a rather wide base to a pointed top, and dressed in a tiny pink-and-white shell. Two stalks with eyes on them that swung this way and that, and seemed muscular enough to throttle a man. And a huge wet slash of a mouth that showed whenever an edge of the squirming base lifted from the metal plate.

“Snails,” I said. “Snails!”

“Or slugs,” Trowson amended. “Gastropodal mollusks in any case.” He gestured at the roiling white bush of hair that sprouted from his head. “But, Dick, that vestigial bit of coiled shell is even less an evolutionary memento than this. They’re an older—and smarter—race.”

“Smarter?”

He nodded. “When our engineers got curious, they were very courteously invited inside to inspect the ship. They came out with their mouths hanging.”

I began to get uncomfortable. I ripped a small piece off my manicure. “Well, naturally, prof; if they’re so alien, so different—”

“Not only that. Superior. Get that, Dick, because it’ll be very important in what you have to do. The best engineering minds that this country can assemble in a hurry are like a crowd of South Sea Islanders trying to analyze the rifle and compass from what they know of spears and wind storms. These creatures belong to a galaxy-wide civilization composed of races at least as advanced as they; we’re a bunch of backward hicks in an unfrequented hinterland of space that’s about to be opened to exploration. Exploitation, perhaps, if we can’t measure up. We have to give a very good impression and we have to learn fast.”

A dignified official with a brief case detached himself from the nodding, smiling group around the aliens and started for us.