"Well, I don't know, Miss Haer. I mean, Dr. Haer. Kind of gloomier, like. Shucks, I've seen this here town on Telly a dozen times."
"And seeing is believing," Joe muttered cynically. "It looks as though we have a reception committee." He looked at Nadine. "Are we supposed to know each other?"
She shrugged and made a moue. "It would be somewhat strange if we didn't, seeing that we flew over in the same aircraft, and were the only passengers to come this far."
He nodded and as the plane came to a halt, helped her from her chair, even as the plane's ladder slipped out and touched to the ground.
Joe grunted and said, as though to himself, "You realize that for all practical purposes there hasn't been any improvement in aircraft for a generation?"
Nadine looked at him from the side of her eyes, even as they descended. "That's what I keep telling you, Joe. We've become ossified. When a society, afraid of change, adopts a policy of maintaining the status quo at any cost, progress is arrested. Progress means change."
He grinned at her. "Sure, sure, sure. Please, no more lectures, teacher. Let what's already in my head stew a while."
On the ground, Nadine was met by one contingent from the Embassy and from the Sov-world authorities, and Joe and Max by another. Joe became occupied, hardly more than noticing that she had been whisked away in a hoverlimousine, ornately bedecked with official flags and stars.
Joe, no longer holding military rank, in spite of his mission, was in mufti, and restrained himself from returning the salute when greeted by two fresh young lieutenants from the Embassy and a be-medaled lieutenant colonel in Sov-world uniform, whose tight-waisted tunic reminded Joe of that worn by Colonel Lajos Arpád, the military attaché Joe had come across twice in West-world fracases, and who Frank Hodgson had branded an espionage agent. Joe swore again, inwardly, that these Hungarian officers must wear girdles under their uniforms, and wondered vaguely if they did so in combat.