His ignorance overwhelmed him. Because there was far more to it than just personal curiosity. His own fate, that of his family and friends, indeed that of the entire human species, might well depend on how efficiently he and his colleagues interacted with the aliens. He would have to be careful what questions he asked. While he badly wanted answers to so very, very many, he could not risk antagonizing Vantolos or his thus far silent attendants. There was too much at stake.

As he started brushing his teeth, the battery-powered brush humming softly, he stared back at himself in the mirror. What he saw there did not rouse him with confidence. Was there more danger in possibly asking the wrong questions—or in not asking the right ones? He and his colleagues knew so little. If they held back from inquiring, he told himself, they would learn nothing more. Such as the reason for the tall biped’s single backward glance. Only one way to really find out.

At the next meeting, should the opportunity arise, Dev resolved to ask it.

Vantolos refused every suggestion that they might change the meeting place. Informed that the corn and wheat and other materials he had requested might be more quickly and easily delivered via a main container port such as New Orleans, or better still, St. Louis, the alien insisted it all be brought to the site where the previous encounters had taken place. The poor undersecretary of agriculture who had been charged with fulfilling the aliens’ demands was greatly relieved when he was informed that the tons of requested grain did not have to be trucked down the narrow road that bisected the peninsula but could instead be delivered via ship onto scoop-like receptacles just offshore.

Having arrived in a single cargo vessel especially designed and equipped to transport grain, the sea-going vessel anchored off Lake Surprise while several aliens saw to the transfer of its cargo. Through binoculars, Dev and his colleagues could see at least two representatives of Vantolos’s kind supervising the transfer operation. Under their direction, members of the bodyguard species operated a variety of smooth, almost featureless machinery in conjunction with a swarm of automatons. Resembling neither alien species, these robotic workers were little more than efficient amalgamations of internal lights and busy limbs.

Dev was about to pose his why-did-you-look-back question to one of Vantolos’s two personal bodyguards when it struck him that not only did he not know which of them had made the glance, he did not even know if the two present at today’s encounter were the same pair who had accompanied Vantolos previously. They knew that the alien speaker was Vantolos because he identified himself as such. But as far as the tall bipeds were concerned, they remained essentially visually interchangeable. It might be easy to find out. Or it might initiate the apocalypse.