Blaine wasn't the right guy. He was a fine technician, good at machinery, radar--anything of the sort. And a nice fellow. Maybe he'd just blown off steam--uncertainty, tension. I knew that no paper relating to him would be marked, "Psychologically unsuited for task in hand." But I knew just as surely that he would be quietly transferred. In a big thing like this, Miller would surround himself only with men who saw things his way. That night we moved everything to our labs on the outskirts of St. Louis. Every particle of that extraterrestrial wreck had been packed and crated with utmost care. Klein and Craig went to work to build a special refuge for that mud lump and what was in it. They were top men. But I had got tied up with Miller more or less by chance, and I figured I'd be replaced by an expert. I can say that I was a college man, but that's nothing. I guess you can't give up participation in high romance without some regret. Yet I wasn't too sorry. I liked things the way they'd always been. My beer. My Saturday night dates with Alice. On the job, the atmosphere was getting a bit too rich and futuristic. * * * * * Later that evening, Miller drew me aside. "You've handled carrier pigeons and you've trained dogs, Nolan," he said. "You were good at both." "Here I go, back to the farm-yard." "In a way. But you expand your operations, Nolan. You specialize as nurse for a piece of off-the-Earth animal life." "Look, Miller," I pointed out. "Ten thousand professors are a million times better qualified, and rarin' to go." "They're liable to _think_ they're well qualified, when no man could be--yet. That's bad, Nolan. The one who does it has to be humble enough to be wary--ready for whatever _might_ happen. I think a knack with animals might help. That's the best I can do, Nolan." "Thanks, Miller." I felt proud--and a little like a damn fool. "I haven't finished talking yet," Miller said. "We know that real contact between our kind and the inhabitants of another world can't be far off. Either they'll send another ship or we'll build one on Earth. I like the idea, Nolan, but it also scares the hell out of me. Men have had plenty of trouble with other ethnic groups of their own species, through prejudice, misunderstanding, honest suspicion. How will it be at the first critical meeting of two kinds of things that will look like hallucinations to each other? I suspect an awful and inevitable feeling of separateness that nothing can bridge--except maybe an impulse to do murder.