Photographers brought cameras to focus on him standing on the lowered gangplank of his ship, and color TV projected his image to the screens of the world--a tallish person, only a little strange and ugly, with a smooth greenish tint to his skin. The photographers finished flashing stills, and the TV sound booms moved in to pick up his voice. * * * * * The oldest reporter there was named McCann, and experience had made him leathery and cynical. He already knew what V'gu would say--the alien's superior attitude had made it only too clear. Someone reminded V'gu respectfully that he had promised a speech. "Yes indeed," he replied sonorously. His English was perfect. He had spent all of three hours in learning to speak it. "You may write in your history books that I think Earth is a pleasant little planet," he went on, "but sadly backward and primitive in many respects. I believe that this is caused by the numerous wars, and the generally quarrelsome behavior of your species." He said this without anger, and looked at the crowd and the cameras with a kind of superior pity and compassion in his gaze. "If you could only stop this bickering among yourselves, with a planet as green and pleasant as this you could attain a harmony and pleasure of life equal to any of the truly civilized worlds of the galaxy. My home world, for example, abolished wars generations ago. We learned a philosophy of cooperation." He paused, and gestured up dramatically at the starry night sky, and again looked at the crowd with contempt. "Yes there are many worlds out there which are peaceful, productive and cooperative. But there are also worlds which are dead and shrunken cinders where there had been green planets and thriving races of people who could not give up war. For your sake I hope that you will be able to change your path, but I think that you do not have the ability, and that at last you will reach the end of the path you are on, and destroy each other and perhaps your world also. Each nova that you see in the sky marks the suicide of a race. Our knowledge of these matters is certain: there is never a nova caused simply by accident; power sources cannot fail this way. Each nova tells us of a war, of the death of a culture which probably thought of itself as civilized, and yet could not subdue its innate savagery." The reporters scribbled and the cameras whirred. McCann closed his notepad, bored, and gazed at the sky, prepared to suffer through the rest of the speech. His paper could get the words of the speech from the TV. McCann had no comment to add; he had heard such ideas before. To the east in the sky was the distant glare of the landing lights of an oncoming aircraft.... No. Not a plane, a star. A star almost fantastically brilliant, brighter than the others, brighter than Mars. "Mr. V'gu!" a young reporter said excitedly. "Isn't that a nova, there?" He pointed and everyone looked.