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Clementina," Ainson said. "Whatever you say, their spaceship is a spaceship, and consequently we have
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intelligence on our hands."
Mihaly came to his rescue then, and called for the next report, but it was obvious that a vote of no
confidence had been passed on Master Explorer Ainson.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The sun, as its inalienable custom was, went to bed at sun-set. At the same time, Sir Mihaly Pasztor
put on a dinner jacket and went to meet the guests he had invited to dine at his flat. This was a month
after the dismal meeting at the zoowhen Bruce Ainson had received the intellectual equiva-lent of a flea in
his ear.
Since then, the situation could not be said to have unproved. Dr. Bodley Temple had accumulated an
impres-sive hoard of alien phonemes, none of which had a certain English equivalent. Lattimore had
amplified in print the views he had expressed at the meeting. Gerald Bone -traitorously, thought Pasztor -
had done a malicious little skit on the meeting forPunch.
These were but pin-pricks. The fact was, there was no progress being made. There was no progress
being made chiefly because the aliens, imprisoned in their hygienic cell, showed no interest in the humans,
nor any wish to co-operate in any of the stunts the humans devised. This disobliging attitude had its effect
on the research team try-ing to deal with them; their increasing moroseness became increasingly
punctuated with bouts of self-pitying oration, as if, like a Communist millionaire, they felt impelled to
explain a position of some delicacy.
The general public, too, reacted adversely to the alien cold shoulder. The intelligent man in the street
could have appreciated an intelligent alien, no matter what his shape, as a new distraction to compete
with the world series, the grim news from Charon, where Brazil seemed to be win-ning the war, or the
leaping taxes that were a natural con-comitant to both war and TP travel. Gradually the queues that
stood all day to see the aliens in the afternoon dwindled away (after all, they didn't move about much,
and they looked not so very different from terrestrial hippos, and you weren't allowed to throw nuts at
them in case it turned out they really lived in skyscrapers back home) and went back to their old routine
of watching instead the Pinfold III primaritals, which indulged in a form of group intercourse every hour
on the hour.
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Pasztor was, as it happened, thinking of intercourse as he ushered his guest, Mrs. Hilary Warhoon,
into hismodest dining-closet; or if not thinking of it, reviewing with a whimsical smile at his own
weaknesses the fantasies with which he had indulged himself half an hour before Mrs. Warhoon's arrival.
But no, she was not quite enchant-ing enough, and Mr. Warhoon by repute was too power-ful and
spiteful, and anyhow Sir Mihaly no longer had the zest necessary to carry off one of those illicit affairs -
even though "illicit" was one of the more alluring words in the English language.
She sat down at the table and sighed.
"It's wonderful to relax. I've had a vile day."
"Busy?"
"I've made work. But I've accomplished nothing. And I'm oppressed by a sense of failure."
"You, Hilary? You are far from being a failure."
"I was thinking of it less in a personal than in a general or racial sense. Do you want me to elaborate?
I'd like to elaborate."
He held up his hands in playful protest.
"My idea of civilized intercourse is not to repress but to bring forth, to elaborate. I have never been
other than interested in what you have to say."
There were three globular table ovens standing on the table. As she began to speak, he opened the
refrigerated drawers on his right and began to put their contents into the ovens to cook: Fera de Travers,
the salmon of Lake Geneva, to begin with, to be followed by eland steaks flown that morning from the
farms of Kenya with, to add a touch of the exotic, fingertips, the Venusian asparagus.
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"When I say I'm oppressed by a general failure," Mrs. Warhoon said, attacking a dry sherry, "I'm fully
aware that it sounds rather pretentious. 'Who am I among so many?', as Shaw once said in a different
context. It's the old problems of definitions, with which the aliens have confronted us in dramatic new
guise. Perhaps we cannot converse with them until we have decided for ourselveswhat constitutes
civilization. Don't raise that suave eye-brow at me. Mihaly; I know civilization does not consist of lying
indolent in one's own droppings - though it's pos-sible that if we had a guru here he would tell us it did.
"When you take any one quality by which we measure civilization, you will find it missing from various
cultures. Take the whole question of crime. For over a century, we have recognized crime as a symptom
of sickness or un-happiness. Once we recognized that in practice as well as theory, crime statistics
dropped dramatically for the first time. But in many periods of high civilization, life imprisonment was
customary, heads fell like petals. Cer-tainly kindness or understanding or mercy are not signs of
civilization, any more than war and murder are signs of the lack of it.
"As for the arts that we rightly cherish, they were all practised by prehistoric man."
"This argument is familiar to me from my under-graduate days." Sir Mihaly said, as he served the
salmon. "Yet still we cook our food and eat according to rules with carefully wrought utensils." He
poured some wine. "Still we choose our vintages and exercise our judgments and our prejudices over
that choice." He offered her a basket full of warm crisp rolls. "Still we sit together, male and female, and
merely converse."
'Tin not denying. Mihaly, that you keep a good table, or that you have failed as yet to throw me on the
floor. But this meal - and I cast no aspersions - is now an anachronism, and strongly disapproved of by a
govern-ment pushing the new poison-free man-made foods and drinks. Besides, this lovely meal is the
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