n. He didn't have to ask
how to get to the camp. He made a few efforts to restore the conversation
to its original note of cordiality, gave that up as a bad job and blanked
out. There was a brief silence in the living room. Then Jimenez said
reproachfully:

"You certainly weren't very gracious to Dr. Kellogg, Jack. Maybe you don't
realize it, but he is a very important man."

"He isn't important to me, and I wasn't gracious to him at all. It doesn't
pay to be gracious to people like that. If you are, they always try to
take advantage of it."

"Why, I didn't know you knew Len," van Riebeek said.

"I never saw the individual before. The species is very common and widely
distributed." He turned to Rainsford. "You think he and this Mallin will
be out tomorrow?"

"Of course they will. This is a little too big for underlings and
non-Company people to be allowed to monkey with. You know, we'll have to
watch out or in a year we'll be hearing from Terra about the discovery of
a sapient race on Zarathustra; _Fuzzy fuzzy Kellogg_. As Juan says, Dr.
Kellogg is a very important man. That's how he got important."

VI

The recorded voice ceased; for a moment the record player hummed
voicelessly. Loud in the silence, a photocell acted with a double click,
opening one segment of the sun shielding and closing another at the
opposite side of the dome. Space Commodore Alex Napier glanced up from his
desk and out at the harshly angular landscape of Xerxes and the blackness
of airless space beyond the disquietingly close horizon. Then he picked up
his pipe and knocked the heel out into the ashtray. Nobody said anything.
He began packing tobacco into the bowl.

"Well, gentlemen?" He invited comment.

"Pancho?" Captain Conrad Greibenfeld, the Exec., turned to Lieutenant
Ybarra, the chief psychologist.

"How reliable is this stuff?" Ybarra asked.

"Well, I knew Jack Holloway thirty years ago, on Fenris, when I was just
an ensign. He must be past seventy now," he parenthesized. "If he says he
saw anything, I'll believe it. And Bennett Rainsford's absolutely
reliable, of course."

"How about the agent?" Ybarra insisted.

He and Stephen Aelborg, the Intelligence officer, exchanged glances. He
nodded, and Aelborg said:

"One of the best. One of our own, lieutenant j.g., Naval Reserve. You
don't need to worry about credibility, Pancho."

"They sound sapient to me," Ybarra said. "You know, this is something I've
always bee