Mrs. Sen greeted her husband anxiously on his return. They were a devoted couple, despite his playful habit of calling her Xantippe when they were entertaining guests. She had long ago threatened to make the appropriate retort by brewing him a cup of hemlock, but fortunately this herbal beverage was less common to New Athens than the old.
“Was it a success?” she asked as her husband settled down to a belated meal.
“I think so — but you can never tell what goes on inside those remarkable minds. He was certainly interested, even complimentary. I apologized, by the way, for not inviting him here. He said he quite understood, and had no wish to bang his head on our ceiling.”
“What did you show him today?”
“The bread-and-butter side of the Colony, which he didn’t seem to find as boring as I always do. He asked every question you could imagine about production, how we balanced our budget, our mineral resources, the birth rate, how we got our food, and so on. Luckily I had Secretary Harrison with me, and he’d come prepared with every Annual Report since the Colony began. You should have heard them swapping statistics. The Inspector’s borrowed the lot, and I’m prepared to bet that when we see him tomorrow he’ll be able to quote any figure back at us. I find that kind of mental performance frightfully depressing.” He yawned and began to peck halfheartedly at his food.
“Tomorrow should be more interesting. We’re going to do the schools and the Academy. That’s when I’m going to ask some questions for a change. I’d like to know how the Overlords bring up their kids — assuming, of course, that they have any.”
That was not a question that Charles Sen was ever to have answered, but on other points the Inspector was remarkably talkative. He would evade awkward queries in a manner that was a pleasure to behold, and then, quite unexpectedly, would become positively confiding. Their first real intimacy occurred while they were driving away from the school that was one of the Colony’s chief prides. “It’s a great responsibility,” Dr. Sen had remarked, “training these young minds for the future. Fortunately, human beings are extraordinarily resilient: it takes a pretty bad upbringing to do permanent damage. Even if our aims are mistaken, our little victims will probably get over it. And as you’ve seen, they appear to be perfectly happy.” He paused for a moment, then glanced mischievously up at the towering figure of his passenger. The Inspector was completely clothed in some reflecting silvery cloth so that not an inch of his body was exposed to the fierce sunlight. Behind the dark glasses, Dr. Sen was aware of the great eyes watching him emotionlessly — or with emotions which he could never understand. “Our problem in bringing up these children must, I imagine, be very similar to yours when confronted with the human race. Wouldn’t you agree?”
“In some ways,” admitted the Overlord gravely. “In others, perhaps a better analogy can be found in the history of your colonial powers. The Roman and British Empires, for that reason, have always been of considerable interest to us. The case of India is particularly instructive. The main difference between us and the British in India was that they had no real motives for going there — no conscious objectives, that is, except such trivial and temporary ones as trade or hostility to other European powers. They found themselves possessors of an Empire before they knew what to do with it, and were never really happy until they had got rid of it again.”
“And will you,” asked Dr. Sen, quite unable to resist the opportunity, “get rid of your empire when the time arises?”
“Without the slightest hesitation,” replied the Inspector.