The big shots of W.G. had found out about it, of course. It didn't take them too long. Only about two years went by before they were convinced of what had happened, and they had had suspicion of it long before. But it took W.G. twenty years to do anything about it. Twenty years, mind you, when the average lifespan of a Martian is forty. Of course there were reasons. Good, sound, diplomatic reasons. In the first place, it would have been embarrassing to act sooner. There had been such hoopla and ballyhoo during the first negotiations with the Rockheads, so many grandiose statements and telepix of interplanetary amity, that to have confessed then would have been diplomatic suicide--or so they thought. So the fiction had been maintained. Not only maintained, but magnified and distorted. So bad did the distortion become that the people back home had almost no inkling of the difficulties in negotiation, of the many concessions Earth had to make to Mars' totalitarian rulers. They didn't know how many insults the Earth envoys had to swallow, or of the innumerable conferences that ended in deadlock because of the Rockheads' impossible demands--demands made to impress their own subject people with their might--or of the W.G. investigators who were imprisoned because they had stumbled across some particularly noisome secret of the corrupt Martian government. Scott was getting quite wound up. He was pointing a finger again when the door opened. His finger paralyzed in midair. The thing that entered was taller than he. The entire upper half of it was a face. An idiotically-grinning, white-toothed face. Its eyes were outlined in black and its lips were an oversized red. A caricature of a woman's face, with a great mass of blonde hair coiled fantastically above. "What the hell," said Scott. The figure bent forward, and the huge mask came off. "Hello, Scott," a girl said. "My Terrestrial aunt," said Scott. "Ylia." She was a Martian, the daughter of one of the subcommissioners of her government. Ylia wasn't pretty by any Earth standard. She had the big head of her race, the stocky body and the flat face. But she was esteemed by the Martians as attractive, as far as looks count on that planet. "Why the mask?" asked Scott. "I didn't think you went in for all this brothers-together nonsense." "Everybody's masked tonight," she said, meaning all the women. "I had to see you, and I thought I'd attract less attention if I wore one, too."