A few minutes later my message receptor beeped. I pushed the receive button, and a holographic image of Fifka, about four inches tall, appeared in the center of my desk. Ralph skittled away in surprise—he still hadn’t gotten used to the Kwarkissian version of a phone call. I pushed the send button, so that Fifka could see me as well.

We started to talk about the dinner. He was excited because his mom was coming. I almost got the feeling he was jealous of her. That surprised me. When I thought about it, I realized that I had never actually invited Fifka to come visit; I had only thought about it and waited for a good opportunity. Maybe he was more genuinely friendly than I had thought.

We got talking about something that had happened at school, and then about a game we were both working on, and by the time we were done I had pretty much forgotten about the printout Dad had given me. Next I did a little homework. Then I spent some time fooling around with Ralph J. Bear.

Before I knew it, it was time to get dressed.

That was when I noticed the printout lying on my bed.

I sighed. The thing had to be twenty pages long. No time to read that much before dinner. I would just have to be on my best behavior.

The flaw in that plan, of course, was that what one culture considers good behavior can get you in a lot of trouble somewhere else. . . .

The dinner party consisted of Dad, me, three Kwarkissians (including Fifka’s mother), and three beings from the planet that shall remain nameless. These guys only had two arms, which was sort of a relief, but they were bright green and seven feet tall.

The first part of the dinner went pretty well, I thought, if you set aside the fact that eating dinner with a bunch of Kwarkissians is like going to a symphony in gas-minor.

I had had a long talk about this with Fifka one day.

“Biology is biology,” he’d said. “What is it that you people find so bad about it, anyway? Good heavens, think what life would be like if your bodies didn’t process all the stuff you take in, if your bodies didn’t do their jobs! I hope this won’t offend you, Jay-cobe, but most of us feel that if your people paid more attention to ideas and less to biological by-products, you would all be better off. The important choices have to do with the mind and the heart, not the stomach and the intestines.”

When he put it that way, it was hard to answer.

Still, it was a strange thing to sit down to dinner with some of the most important people on the planet and have them punctuate their conversation with gaseous emissions.