Then he discovered that his voice was stuck. Dammit, an explorer captain for over fifteen years, and he didn't know what to say when he banged up some farm girl's _dhennah_! "I--ah, am terribly sorry. It will be replaced, of course. Very stupid and clumsy of me. I--ah, you hurt?" Rather smooth, at that! She smiled. Slender lips, golden-colored eyes, delicately contoured face--all seemed to smile together. A breeze ruffled her tawny mass of shoulder-length hair, and Nicholas Joel just stood there. "You are forgiven, the _dhennah_ was not a costly one. I know how difficult it must be for you to guide those machines of yours at such terrible speeds ... but of course the speeds are necessary to you in your work. Thank you for helping me." Joel reassured himself that if only the conversation were in his mother tongue, he would of course not feel so ridiculously at a loss for words. After all, this young female was only an--an alien being. "It was my pleasure, of course," Joel said. He thought perhaps if he could manage a smile--"I am gratified that you accept my clumsiness with such excellent grace. As intruders to begin with, my men and I--" "Intruders, sir?" She had taken a few steps away from him to stroke the neck of the _kaelli_ and quiet it, but she was still looking at him. "Why intruders? At one time, all the people of this world were not of one great community as they are now, surely you know that. But when one group travelled and visited another, no one thought of it as an intrusion." She laughed. "Are we all not one under the sun?" "But they were of your own kind, from elsewhere on your own planet--" "A visitor is a visitor," she said, as though suddenly puzzled. "What can it matter where he is from?" Joel started to reply, but checked himself. Of course these people had no way of knowing. Of course they were still under the impression that intelligent life, wherever it might exist, would necessarily be in their own form. The fact that it might not be had never occurred to them! Then that was why they had not feared the _White Whale_ and her crew. It was something Carruthers had probably perceived at once, something he could no doubt explain. But now Joel was seeing it first-hand for himself. Psychologically, this girl and her people were incapable of conceiving a way of life based on different reasons for living than their own, with different motives, different--ambitions. Just, he reflected, as his own people were psychologically incapable of greeting a stranger without subconscious suspicion. To these people, a visitor was--a visitor, and therefore a friend! He wondered how many others beside himself, Carruthers and Dobermann knew.