“It was urged,” Vandange said. “I, and a few others who felt as I do, fought the proposal bitterly. In the end, as a compromise, the government decided to dump the whole problem in the lap of the Rangers. Who turn out to be, in effect, you. Now I must persuade you to be properly cautious. Don’t you see, if those…beings…have some hostile intent, the very worst move would be to send them on—let them spy out our civilization—let them, perhaps, commit nuclear sabotage on a vital center, and then vanish back into space.” His voice grew shrill. “That’s why we’ve kept them here so long, on one excuse after the next, here on our home planet. We feel responsible to the rest of mankind!”

“But what—” Laure shook his head. He felt a sense of unreality. “Sir, the League, the troubles, the Empire, its fall, the Long Night…every such thing—behind us. In space and time alike. The people of the Commonalty don’t get into wars.”

“Are you quite certain?”

“What makes you so certain of any menace in one antiquated ship. Crewed by a score of men and women. Who came here openly and peacefully. Who, by every report, have been struggling to get past the language and culture barriers and communicate with you in detail—what in cosmos’ name makes you worry about them?”

“The fact that they are liars.”

Vandange sat awhile, gnawing his thumb, before he opened a box, took out a cigar and puffed it into lighting. He didn’t offer Laure one. That might be for fear of poisoning his visitor with whatever local weed he was smoking. Scattered around for many generations on widely differing planets, populations did develop some odd distributions of allergy and immunity. But Laure suspected plain rudeness.

“I thought my letter made it clear,” Vandange said. “They insist they are from another continuum. One with impossible properties, including visibility from ours. Conveniently on the far side of the Dragon’s Head, so that we don’t see it here. Oh, yes,” he added quickly, “I’ve heard the arguments. That the whole thing is a misunderstanding due to our not having an adequate command of their language. That they’re really trying to say they came from—well, the commonest rationalization is a dense star cluster. But it won’t work, you know. It won’t work at all.”

“Why not?” Laure asked.

“Come, now. Come, now. You must have learned some astronomy as part of your training. You must know that some things simply do not occur in the galaxy.”

“Uh—”

“They showed us what they alleged were lens-and-film photographs taken from, ah, inside their home universe.” Vandange bore down heavily on the sarcasm. “You saw copies, didn’t you? Well, now, where in the real universe do you find that kind of nebulosity—so thick and extensive that a ship can actually lose its bearings, wander around lost, using up its film among other supplies, until it chances to emerge in clear space? For that matter, assuming there were such a region, how could anyone capable of building a hyperdrive be so stupid as to go beyond sight of his beacon stars?”