“They will hate me even more if I take one of them—all of them except that one, I mean. If they want to hate you … well, I can manage that. And you deserve to be there, same way you deserve to be here on ship. You found way into Humpty Dumpty. And you were first to see centaurowls. Centaurowls—is word I like.” Kalyakin paused for a bite of filet mignon. He followed it with one from his lobster tail.

Jerry ate some lobster, too. He realized the astronomer headed the Soviet delegation not just for his seniority and scientific brilliance. He was also a shrewd practical politician. If his comrades blamed Jerry, they wouldn’t blame him.

Kalyakin ate more steak. “Is food on ship always so good, or do you have special things now because Russians are here?” He understood Potemkin villages, all right. Well, a Russian would.

But Jerry answered with the truth: “It’s always been like this.”

“I guessed it was so,” Kalyakin said with a sigh. “In Great Patriotic War, soldiers who saw countries in Western Europe saw they were richer than the rodina, the motherland. I saw this in Hungary. Men who fought in Germany said it was so rich, they wondered why Nazis also wanted what little we had. And United States, I know, is richer than Germany ever was.”

Enough to eat, a tolerable place to live, a car of his own … Listening to the man from the Soviet Union reminded Jerry how much he took for granted. The freedom to tell a senior CIA man Fuck you! was bound to be one more thing Kalyakin would be jealous of, if he could imagine it at all.

“Next to the centaurowls, we’re all a bunch of ignorant barbarians,” Jerry said, remembering his vision of New Guinea natives rowing out to a battleship.

“Is bound to be true.” Kalyakin sighed again. “If we learn from them, before long we are not so ignorant, not so much barbarians.”

“I hope you’re right.” Jerry imagined humans suddenly bursting into whatever interspecies society there was in this part of the galaxy. Wouldn’t the races that had been part of it for a long time look down their noses—if they had noses—at the upstart bumpkins moving in and lowering planetary real-estate values? Jerry didn’t know they would, but it sure seemed likely to him. Hadn’t Japan needed to thump the czar in the Russo-Japanese War before the other great powers, all of them white, grudgingly began to admit her to their club?

“I hope so, too,” the Russian astronomer said. “If I am wrong, Earth remains in danger even if the centaurowls here prove friendly.”