Someday there might be a limited agricultural trade, since we were now growing a few exotic hybrids, but in ’Home they were understandably cautious for the time being. Even people not old enough to remember the ag plague learned about it as a disaster of mythic proportion, started by one wayward organism.

I spent a few hours at the office and then walked around town for a while. I even tried a bicycle, but though the breeze was pleasant I was still a little too wobbly not to be a hazard to myself and others.

Hilltop’s pattern of growth was eccentric. The original experimental farms were still being planted, even though they were surrounded by buildings and there was better acreage in the low land. Perhaps that was conscious planning. In my mind’s eye I could see them becoming parkland in a few decades; islands of green in the bustle of a planet’s capital city.

I still had another half of a life to look forward to. How long would it be before I remembered this primitive scene with nostalgic longing?

I’d been back three days when Dennison asked me to “give a little talk” about the experience with the eveloi. I wasn’t thrilled, but at least it was an opportunity to set the record straight.

The administration building had a whitewashed meeting room big enough to seat five hundred people on benches; half again that number showed up, lining the walls and sitting on the floor. I supposed they were starved for novelty.

The night before, I had written out descriptions of the places the creature had taken me and what it had said, mostly from my diary, adding some things the analysts got through hypnosis. (I didn’t trust those notes as much as simple memory, though what you “reveal” under hypnosis depends a lot on how the question is worded. It’s not the shortcut to truth that some people think it is, or want it to be.) I had to be vague about what the creature said, since it so rarely used actual words.

I gave an unornamented description of the experience and asked if there were any questions. There were plenty of hands raised.

“If it wasn’t a ‘test,’” Kisti Seven asked, “what would you call it? An ordeal?”

“I think it was a series of experiments. The thing was emphatic about it not being a test in the sense of something you pass or fail. But I think it may have been a test in the objective way engineers sometimes apply the word: take a piece of metal and see what happens when you stretch it, heat it, dip it in acid—you’re not judging the metal; you’re just trying to find out things about it. When you’ve learned enough, you stop. They haven’t bothered anybody else, have they?”