"When I was a child, stories about visitors from Mars or Venus were already trite and stereotyped. What could a visitor do? What might a visitor look like? All the possible answers had already been given, and we were familiar with every one of them. We imagined visitors with tentacles and without, with a thousand legs and no legs, with five heads and seven feet, and eighteen stomachs. We imagined visitors who were plants, or electrical impulses, or viruses, or energy-creatures. They had the power to read minds, to move objects telekinetically and to travel through impossible dimensions. Their space ships were of all kinds, and they could race along with many times the speed of light or crawl with the speed of molasses. I do not know, sir, in which category you fall--whether you are animal, vegetable, mineral, or electrical--but I know that there is nothing new about you." "But you are familiar merely with the ideas. I am a _real_ visitor!" "Young man, I am a hundred and ten years old, and the idea of you was already ancient when I was eight. I remember reading about you in a comic book. You are not the first visitor who has pretended to be real. There were hundreds before you. I have seen press agent stunts by the dozen, and advertising pictures by the hundreds about Mars, about Venus, about the Moon, about visitors from interstellar space. Your pretended colleagues have walked the streets of innumerable cities, until now we are weary of the entire tribe of you. And you yourself, sir, if you will pardon the expression, you are an anticlimax." "Your race must be insane," protested Xhanph. "For all you know I may come with great gifts which I wish to confer upon you." "We have been fooled before. And in view of the fact, as I have reminded you, that time is money, we do not wish to bankrupt ourselves by investigating." "But suppose I'm here to harm you!" "If your race is capable of it, we can hardly stop you, so it is no use trying. If incapable, you are wasting your efforts." "This is insanity, genuine racial insanity!" "You repeat yourself. The fact is, we have become blasé," said the old man. "Thanks to the efforts of our science fiction writers, we have experienced in imagination all there is to experience in interplanetary contact, and the genuine article can be only a disappointment. I am reminded of an incident that occurred when Gerald Crombie, who was City Councilman at the time, ordered a twenty-five inch stereo set...." * * * * * Xhanph rolled away. He had his answer now, and he couldn't stand listening any longer to the old man's babbling. He rolled aimlessly, up one street and down another. And he thought of how they would receive his answer when he went back to Gfun.