His eyes flickered back and forth, down the table and across the camp. Just inside the forest, a log cabin stood half erected; but the Finnish couple who had been making it now crouched with the rest of the crew, among guns and silence. The captain tamped tobacco into his pipe and growled: "We are all here together, Reds and Whites alike. We cannot even return to Earth without filling the ship's reaction-mass tanks, and we need a week or more just to refine enough water. Meanwhile, non-humans are operating a mine and have killed one of us without any provocation we can imagine. They could fly over and drop one nuclear bomb, and that would be the end of man on Novaya. I'm astonished that they haven't so far."
"Or haven't even been aware of us," murmured Ekaterina. "Our boats were coming and going for a pair of months or three. Did they not notice our jet trails above the mountains? Comrades, it does not make sense!"
Ximénez said very low: "How much sense would a mind which is not human make to us?"
He crossed himself.
The gesture jarred Holbrook. Had the government of the United World S.S.R. been that careless? Crypto-libertarians had gotten aboard the Rurik, yes, but a crypto-believer in God?
Grushenko saw the movement too. His mouth lifted sardonically. "I would expect you to substitute word magic for thought," he declared. To Svenstrup: "Captain, somehow, we have alarmed the aliens—possibly we happen to resemble another species with which they are at war—but their reasoning processes must be fundamentally akin to ours, simply because the laws of nature are the same throughout the universe. Including those laws of behavior first seen by Karl Marx."
"Pseudo-laws for a pseudo-religion!" Holbrook was surprised at himself, the way he got it out.
Ekaterina lifted one dark brow and said, "You do not advance our cause by name calling, Lieutenant Golbrok." Dryly: "Especially when the epithets are not even original."
He retreated into hot-faced wretchedness. But I love you, he wanted to call out. If you are Russian and I am American, if you are Red and I am White, is that a wall between us through all space and time? Can we never be simply human, my tall darling?
"That will do," said Svenstrup. "Let's consider practicalities. Dr. Sugimoto, will you give us the reasons you gave me an hour ago, for assuming that the aliens come from Zolotoy?"