They had a point. I reluctantly took off my pinafore and began to tug at the fingers of my rubber gloves. The buttlebot smugly opened up the suit locker. "You ought to send that little tin cretin," I said; and the Squeem replied, "We are."

I swear to this day that buttlebot jumped.

And so the buttlebot and I found ourselves drifting through a low orbit over the spectacular Xeelee landscape. We watched morosely as the main ship pulled away from the tiny, human-design flitter, and wafted our employer off to the comparative safety of the far-side of one of the planet's two moons.

My work for the Squeem, roughly speaking, was to do any fiddly, dirty, dangerous jobs the buttlebot wasn't equipped for, such as to clean out fish tanks and land on hostile alien planets. And me, a college graduate. Of course, the role of humanity at that time was roughly equivalent.

It isn't that the Squeem -- or any of the other races out there -- were any brighter than we were or better or even much older. But they had something we didn't, and had -- then -- no way of getting our hands on.

And that was stolen Xeelee technology. For instance the hyperdrive, scavenged by the Squeem from a derelict Xeelee ship centuries earlier, had been making that fishy race's fortune ever since. Tools and gadgets of all kinds, on which a Galactic civilization had been based. And all pilfered, over millions of years, from the Xeelee.

I use the word civilization loosely, of course. Can it be used to describe what exists out there -- a ramshackle construct based on avarice, theft and the subjugation of junior races like ourselves?

We began our descent. The dark side of the Xeelee world grew into a diamond-studded carpet: fantastic cities glittered on the horizon. The Xeelee -- so far ahead, they make the rest of us look like tree-dwellers. Secretive, xenophobic. Not truly hostile to the rest of us; merely indifferent. Get in their way and you would be rubbed aside like a mote in the eye of a god.

And I was as close to them as any sentient being had ever got, probably. Nice thought.

Yes, like gods. But very occasionally careless. And that was the basis of the Squeem's plan that day.

We dropped slowly. The conversation left a lot to be desired. And the surface of the planet blew off.

I recoiled from the sudden light at the port, and the buttlebot jerked us down through the incredible traffic. It looked as if whole cities had detached from the ground and were fleeing upwards, light as bubbles. The flitter was swept with shifting color; we were in the down elevator from Heaven.

Abruptly as it had risen, the Xeelee fleet was past. Immense, night-dark wings spread over the doomed planet for a moment, as if in farewell; and then the fleet squirted without fuss into infinity. Evidently, we hadn't been noticed.