“Nothing, my love.” Ilitch sighed, as he looked in at his wife. She was a big woman, big as Melna, his horse. He had fallen in love with her the day he had seen her pitch four wagonloads of hay in a row. Now he found himself wondering if perhaps there weren’t other things about a woman that mattered also. He remembered seeing an American magazine during the war; the women in those pictures—weak as kittens, but, by Stalin, what—
The mind censor clicked in again.
As Ilitch turned to go in he chanced to look up. He stopped stock-still there in the doorway. Slowly floating down to his farm were three metal balls with corrugated tubes sticking out of them like arms and legs. The “arm” tubes were entwined about each other so that the three balls looked liked children at play. Hitch’s eyes followed them down while the rest of him stood there as if carved. They came to a gentle, vibrationless stop not ten feet from where he stood. The balls separated from each other almost immediately. A small glass section in the front of each began to screw outwards.
Cakna, Drul, and Druit climbed out of their suits and stretched thankfully. Almost as soon as they saw Ilitch, they went for their sidearms. Ilitch’s thatched hut was far from a fifth-level structure, and they weren’t going to take chances with barbarians, particularly not barbarians that size. But they had no need for their weapons. Ilitch’s staring eyes had suddenly become glassy; he slid down the door jamb, sat hard on the ground, and fell heavily forward in a dead faint.
The captain, the first officer, and the chief navigator landed closest to the rendezvous point. In fact, they were practically on it when they floated to Earth on a narrow strip of beach in the Gravesend section of Brooklyn. Since it was quite early in the morning at the time of their arrival, no one saw them land. By daylight, the three had shucked their spacesuits and were sitting on the beach munching their emergency rations. The captain spread out the map, studied it for a while and then looked down the bay towards Manhattan.
“Our rendezvous point is just a few land-units north of here. There’s a small clearing at the entrance to the harbor where I planned for us to meet. Across the harbor, there’s an island which is literally covered with seventh-level structures. We will make our contact with this planet’s civilization there.”
“Sir,” the chief navigator said, “why don’t we make our contact right here and now? I noticed a large number of seventh-level structures just a little to the east.”
“We might,” the captain nodded, “but I’d rather stick to interstellar protocol. We’ll wait for the rest of the crew to assemble before we make formal contact. Besides, I’d like to consult with the alien sociologist about this culture—if his group made it, that is.”
“Huge structures, aren’t they, sir?” the first officer observed as he sat staring at the distant buildings.
“Yes,” the captain agreed. “There must be millions of them in that city.”