“Oh? Uh, maybe we picked up the kid, at least. If you’d like to go see—”

“No,” she said, toneless and yet somehow with a dim returning pride. “I got Hauki away. I rode straight to the mansion and got him. Then one of your fire-guns hit the roof and the house began to burn. I told Huiva to take the baby—never mind where. I said I’d follow if I could. But Karlavi was out there, fighting. I went back to the barricade. He had been killed just a few seconds before. His face was all bloody. Then your cars broke through the barricade and someone caught me. But you don’t have Hauki. Or Karlavi!”

As if drained by the effort of speech, she slumped and stared into a corner, empty-eyed.

“Well,” said Golyev, not quite comfortably, “your people had been warned.” She didn’t seem to hear him. “You never got the message? But it was telecast over your whole planet. After our first non-secret landing. That was several days ago. Were you out in the woods or something? —Yes, we scouted telescopically, and made clandestine landings, and caught a few citizens to interrogate. But when we understood the situation, more or less, we landed openly in, uh, your city. Yuvaskula, is that the name? We seized it without too much damage, captured some officials of the planetary government, claimed the planet for IP and called on all citizens to cooperate. But they wouldn’t! Why, one ambush alone cost us fifty good men. What could we do? We had to teach a lesson. We announced we’d punish a few random villages. That’s more humane than bombarding from space with cobalt missiles. Isn’t it? But I suppose your people didn’t really believe us, the way they came swarming when we landed. Trying to parley with us first, and then trying to resist us with hunting rifles! What would you expect to happen?”

His voice seemed to fall into an echoless well.

He loosened his collar, which felt a trifle tight, took a deep drag on his cigar and refilled his glass. “Of course, I don’t expect you to see our side of it at once,” he said reasonably. “You’ve been jogging along, isolated, for centuries, haven’t you? Hardly a spaceship has touched at your planet since it was first colonized. You have none of your own, except a couple of interplanetary boats which hardly ever get used. That’s what your President told me, and I believe him. Why should you go outsystem? You have everything you can use, right on your own world. The nearest sun to yours with an oxygen atmosphere planet is three parsecs off. Even with a very high-powered agoratron, you’d need ten years to get there, another decade to get back. A whole generation! Sure, the time-contraction effect would keep you young—ship’s time for the voyage would only be a few weeks, or less—but all your friends would be middle-aged when you came home. Believe me, it’s lonely being a spaceman.”