"Evidently they didn't have to. At any rate, the plenipotentiaries from the Galactic Confederation have arrived."
"Wanting what, sir?" Hank said.
"Wanting nothing but to help." Hennessey said. "Stop interrupting. Our time is limited. You're going to have to be on a jet for London in half an hour."
He noticed Hank Kuran's expression, and shook his head. "No, it's not farfetched. These other intelligent life forms must be familiar with what it takes to progress to the point of interplanetary travel. It takes species aggressiveness—besides intelligence. And they must have sense enough not to want the wrong kind of aggressiveness exploding into the stars. They don't want an equivalent of Attila bursting over the borders of the Roman Empire. They want to channel us, and they're willing to help, to direct our comparatively new science into paths that won't conflict with them. They want to bring us peacefully into their society of advanced life forms."
Sheridan Hennessey allowed himself a rueful grimace. "That makes quite a speech, doesn't it? At any rate, that's the situation."
"Well, where do I come into this? I'm afraid I'm on the bewildered side."
"Yes. Well, damn it, they've landed in Moscow. They've evidently assumed the Soviet complex—the Soviet Union, China and the satellites—are the world's dominant power. Our conflicts, our controversies, are probably of little, if any, interest to them. Inadvertently, they've put a weapon in the hands of the Soviets that could well end this cold war we've been waging for more than twenty-five years now."
The president's right-hand man looked off into a corner of the room, unseeingly. "For more than a decade it's been a bloodless combat that we've been waging against the Russkies. The military machines, equally capable of complete destruction of the other, have been stymied Finally it's boiled down to an attempt to influence the neutrals, India, Africa, South America, to attempt to bring them into one camp or the other. Thus far, we've been able to contain them in spite of their recent successes. But given the prestige of being selected the dominant world power by the extraterrestrials and in possession of the science and industrial know-how from the stars, they'll have won the cold war over night."
His old eyes flared. "You want to know where you come in, eh? Fine. Your job is to get to these Galactic Confederation emissaries and put a bug in their bonnet. Get over to them that there's more than one major viewpoint on this planet. Get them to investigate our side of the matter."
"Get to them how? If the Russkies—"