I nodded. “Yeah. So they’ll set up trading posts on this planet instead of garrisons. But what do I do in all this?”

He punched my chest gently. “You, Dick—you do a job of public relations. You sell these aliens to the American people!”

The official had maneuvered around in front of me. I recognized him. He was the Undersecretary of State.

“Would you step this way, please?” he said. “I’d like to introduce you to our distinguished guests.”

So he stepped, and I stepped, and we scrunched across the field and clanked across the steel plate and stood next to our gastropodic guests.

“Ahem,” said the Undersecretary politely.

The nearer snail bent an eye toward us. The other eye drew a bead on the companion snail, and then the great slimy head arched and came down to our level. The creature raised, as it were, one cheek of its foot and said, with all the mellowness of air being pumped through a torn inner tube, “Can it be that you wish to communicate with my unworthy self, respected sir?”

I was introduced. The thing brought two eyes to bear on me. The place where its chin should have been dropped to my feet and snaked around there for a second. Then it said, “You, honored sir, are our touchstone, the link with all that is great in your noble race. Your condescension is truly a tribute.”

All this tumbled out while I was muttering “How,” and extending a diffident hand. The snail put one eyeball in my palm and the other on the back of my wrist. It didn’t shake; it just put the things there and took them away again. I had the wit not to wipe my hands on my pants, which was my immediate impulse. The eyeball wasn’t exactly dry, either.