There was an atmosphere of innocent enjoyment all about as the police tenderly loaded this large box on the second truck they'd sent for, and festooned themselves about it as it trundled away. Strangely, it did not head directly for the spaceport. The police carefully explained this to each other in loud voices. Then some of them were afraid the box hadn't heard, so they knocked on it. The box coughed, and it seemed hilariously amusing to the policemen that the contents of a freight parcel should cough. They expressed deep concern and—addressing the box—explained that they were taking it to the Detention Building, where they would give it some cough medicine.
The box swore at them, despairingly. They howled with childish laughter, and assured the box that after they had opened it and given it cough medicine they would close it again very carefully—leaving the diplomatic seal unbroken—and deliver it to the spaceport so it could go on its way.
The box swore again, luridly. The truck which carried it hastened. The box teetered and bumped and jounced with the swift motion of the vehicle that carried it and all the police around it. Bitter, enraged, and highly unprintable language came from within.
The police were charmed. Even so early in the morning they seemed inclined to burst into song. When the Detention Building gate opened for it, and closed again behind it, there was a welcoming committee in the courtyard. It included a jailer with a bandaged head and a look of vengeful satisfaction on his face, and no less than three guards who had been given baths by a high-pressure hose when Bron Hoddan departed from his cell. They wore unamiable expressions.
And then, while the box swore very bitterly, somebody tenderly loosened a plank—being careful not to disturb the diplomatic seal—and pulled it away with a triumphant gesture. Then all the police could look into the box. And they did.
Then there was dead silence, except for the voice that came from a two-way communicator set inside.
"And now," said the voice from the box—and only now did anybody notice what the muffling effect of the boards had hidden, that it was a speaker-unit which had sworn and coughed and sneezed—"we take our leave of the planet Walden and its happy police force, who wave to us as our space-liner lifts toward the skies. The next sound you hear will be that of their lamentations at our departure."
But the next sound was a howl of fury. The police were very much disappointed to learn that Hoddan hadn't been in the box, but only one-half of a two-way communication pair, and that Hoddan had coughed and sneezed and sworn at them from the other instrument somewhere else. Now he signed off.
The space liner was not lifting off just yet. It was still solidly aground in the center of the landing grid. Hoddan had bade farewell to his audience from the floor of the ambassador's ground-car, which at that moment was safely within the extra-territorial circle about the spaceship. He turned off the set and got up and brushed himself off. He got out of the car. The ambassador followed him and shook his hand.