"Are public relations men that hard to come by?" "No. But he's a good one--and the prospect of having him desert to the other side frightens me. He'll be forever grateful to me now. If I had fired him, he would've had half a dozen anti-Popeek articles in the _Citizen_ before the week was out. And they'd ruin us." McLeod smiled appreciatively. "You handle your job well, Mr. Walton." "I have to," Walton said. "The director of Popeek is paid to produce two or three miracles per hour. One gets used to it, after a while. Tell me about these aliens, Colonel McLeod." McLeod swung a briefcase to Walton's desk and flipped the magneseal. He handed Walton a thick sheaf of glossy color photos. "The first dozen or so are scenes of the planet," McLeod explained. "It's Procyon VIII--number eight out of sixteen, unless we missed a couple. We checked sixteen worlds in the system, anyway. Ten of 'em were methane giants; we didn't even bother to land. Two were ammonia supergiants, even less pleasant. Three small ones had no atmosphere at all worth speaking about, and were no more livable looking than Mercury. And the remaining one was the one we call New Earth. Take a look, sir." Walton looked. The photos showed rolling hills covered with close-packed shrubbery, flowing rivers, a lovely sunrise. Several of the shots were of indigenous life--a wizened little four-handed monkey, a six-legged doglike thing, a toothy bird. "Life runs to six limbs there," Walton observed. "But how livable can this place be? Unless your photos are sour, that grass is _blue_ ... and the water's peculiar looking, too. What sort of tests did you run?" "It's the light, sir. Procyon's a double star; that faint companion gets up in the sky and does tricky things to the camera. That grass may look blue, but it's a chlorophyll-based photosynthesizer all the same. And the water's nothing but H_{2}O, even with that purple tinge." Walton nodded. "How about the atmosphere?" "We were breathing it for a week, and no trouble. It's pretty rich in oxygen--twenty-four percent. Gives you a bouncy feeling--just right for pioneers, I'd say." "You've prepared a full report on this place, haven't you?" "Of course. It's right here." McLeod started to reach for his briefcase. "Not just yet," Walton said. "I want to go through the rest of these snapshots." He turned over one after another rapidly until he came to a photo that showed a strange blocky figure, four-armed, bright green in color. Its neckless head was encased in a sort of breathing mask fashioned from some transparent plastic. Three cold, brooding eyes peered outward. "What's this?" Walton asked. "Oh, that." McLeod attempted a cheerful grin. "That's a Dirnan. They live on Procyon IX, one of the ammonia-giant planets. They're the aliens who don't want us there." XII Walton stared at the photograph of the alien. There was intelligence there ... yes, intelligence and understanding, and perhaps even a sort of compassion.