"It was my pleasure, of course," Joel said. He thought perhaps if he could manage a smile—"I am gratified that you accept my clumsiness with such excellent grace. As intruders to begin with, my men and I—"
"Intruders, sir?" She had taken a few steps away from him to stroke the neck of the kaelli and quiet it, but she was still looking at him. "Why intruders? At one time, all the people of this world were not of one great community as they are now, surely you know that. But when one group travelled and visited another, no one thought of it as an intrusion." She laughed. "Are we all not one under the sun?"
"But they were of your own kind, from elsewhere on your own planet—"
"A visitor is a visitor," she said, as though suddenly puzzled. "What can it matter where he is from?"
Joel started to reply, but checked himself. Of course these people had no way of knowing. Of course they were still under the impression that intelligent life, wherever it might exist, would necessarily be in their own form. The fact that it might not be had never occurred to them! Then that was why they had not feared the White Whale and her crew. It was something Carruthers had probably perceived at once, something he could no doubt explain. But now Joel was seeing it first-hand for himself. Psychologically, this girl and her people were incapable of conceiving a way of life based on different reasons for living than their own, with different motives, different—ambitions.
Just, he reflected, as his own people were psychologically incapable of greeting a stranger without subconscious suspicion.
To these people, a visitor was—a visitor, and therefore a friend!
He wondered how many others beside himself, Carruthers and Dobermann knew.
"Perhaps it does not matter at all," Joel said, and he was surprised at the gentleness in his voice. He had not felt it that way in his throat for a long time. Not for a terribly long time. "Now, if you'll let me help you with that harness, we'll free your kaelli, and see what can be done about getting you on toward your destination!"
Joel's big fingers started fumbling with the thick leather thongs of the kaelli's rig. The harness felt strange and confusing to hands disciplined to the limiting exactnesses of servocircuits and pressure-control studs, and the complexity of their co-ordination was thrown into confusion by sheer simplicity.