"Don't you see, Ambassador," the old man said earnestly, "that only the inferiority complex kept us from knowing right away that those worms were no better than children? They hadn't been trying to send us any message with radiations. No, it had been only the natural radiations of their bodies, changing as they changed their formations around us—as they played. One of them picked up poor Kroner. Why not? The thing was curious. Took him apart, later, the way a child will take apart a toy. My business with the square on the hypotenuse? Hell, how could they understand when they'd never learned any mathematics?"
"How could they?" the Ambassador echoed, and he was smiling.
"And that little trick of theirs, making a solar system. Well, don't you see that they had to show off? One of their natural functions is simply gathering and stacking together the scattered atoms of space. I'll bet they can't make anything but black balls of amorphous matter. It's possible they build themselves a little world here and there to lay their eggs on, or something. So, there they were feeling kind of abashed because they had no space ship or anything, so they just had to show us what they could do, and that they actually had gone and counted the planets of this system—on their tentacles, I'll bet, since they had more than nine tentacles. And wasn't it childish, getting together in the middle to show us a nice, glowing sun?"
They were locking the thorax section on the Ambassador. He stood straight and silent. Very straight.
"Ambassador," the old man pleaded over thirty million miles, "you don't know what you're going to meet on Venus. You don't know that they're particularly smart. And they don't know about you. Maybe they're a little afraid of you. Maybe they're a lot afraid of you. We don't know one way. But we don't know the other.
"But you know now, the best way and the best minute I can tell you, that some pretty dumb creatures live beyond Earth. Now, the way my grandfather's grandfather used to say, you wouldn't start selling your horse to a stranger by telling him that your horse is no good?"
Silence, then, on the beam from Earth to Venus.
The dressers began to lower the helmet over the Ambassador's head. He stopped them. "Wait a minute."
Still that nakedness in his mind, and the fear ready to pounce again. But that was only an effect of space, not Venusians. Or was it simply Lampell's heritage. A conditioning?