"You can't. You can't possibly," Deez muttered. "To know the overwhelming—greediness I felt—turned loose in an archeological treasure house—I began waking up at night, sweating at the thought that I might die before I had seen all there was to see on that planet, read all its books, learned all its secrets—"
"And what did you learn?" Ky-Tann said.
Deez stood up slowly. He crossed the room to the view-glass, but they knew his eyes looked out at nothing.
"I learned," he said bitterly, "that it was a world which deserved to die."
On a balmy June evening, in the Spring of 1973, Dr. Carl Woodward opened his front door on a new era. The man who stood on his doorstep—Woodward never thought of Borsu as anything but a "man"—wore a sleeveless tunic that glistened like snake-skin. He was holding something in his hands, as if proferring it, a foot-square metallic box with rounded corners and a diamond-shaped screen that showed a moving tracery of spidery-thin lines.
Woodward was sixty-one. He had been a naval surgeon in two wars, and had lost a leg during the Inchon landing. He had survived the loss, but a treacherous heart condition forced his retirement. He chose a small village in Eastern Pennsylvania. He lived with a dog and a thousand books. Borsu, the alien, could not have chanced on a better host that night.
"Yes, what is it?" Woodward said. When no answer came, the doctor realized that his visitor expected him to watch the screen. He did. The lines wavered, shifted, blurred in their excitation, but conveyed nothing. Panacea, Woodward's aging beagle, finally came out of his warm bed near the furnace and set up a furious barking.
"Pan!" Woodward snapped. "Shut up, you mutt! Look, mister, perhaps if you came inside—"
Then his eyes became adjusted to the diamond-shaped screen; he saw a picture. The scene was a forest; there was the gleam of crumpled metal, and a prostrate figure lying on the leaf-strewn floor. It was the portrait of an accident, and Woodward was intuitive enough to know that the man in the doorway had come for help.