My heart was pounding and I was having trouble breathing.

An alien.

And, without doubt, an intelligent alien. The creature’s spherical body was hidden by clothing — what seemed to be a single long strip of bright blue fabric, wrapped repeatedly around the torso, each winding of it going between two different limbs, allowing the extremities to stick out. The cloth was fastened between the arms by a jeweled disk. I’ve never liked wearing neckties, but I’d grown used to tying them and could now do so without looking in a mirror (which was just as well, these days); the alien probably found donning the cloth no more difficult each morning.

Also projecting from gaps in the cloth were two narrow tentacles that ended in what might be eyes — iridescent balls, each covered by what looked to be a hard, crystalline coating. These stalks weaved slowly back and forth, moving closer together, then farther apart. I wondered what the creature’s depth perception might be like without a fixed distance between its two eyeballs.

The alien didn’t seem the least bit alarmed by the presence of me or the other people in the Rotunda, although its torso was bobbing up and down slightly in what I hoped wasn’t a territorial display. Indeed, it was almost hypnotic: the torso slowly lifting and dropping as the six legs flexed and relaxed, and the eyestalks drifting together, then apart. I hadn’t seen the video of the creature’s exchange with Raghubir yet; I thought that perhaps the dance was an attempt at communication — a language of body movements. I considered flexing my own knees and even, in a trick I’d mastered at summer camp forty-odd years ago, crossing and uncrossing my eyes. But the security cameras were on us both; if my guess was wrong, I’d look like an idiot on news programs around the world. Still, I needed to try something. I raised my right hand, palm out, in a salute of greeting.