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thought your friend deserved some pity."
Quilter stopped laughing and looked at Melmoth. He wiped his mouth on his hand.
"What are you trying to give me, Mac? I'm only laugh-ing at the odd things that happen to people. And
why should Wally need your goddamned pity? He had a free choice, didn't he? He could do what he
liked when he came out of jug, couldn't he?"
Melmoth began to look as stubborn and hurt as his father who bore a different name.
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"By what you say, he was seduced."
"Okay, okay, he was seduced. Now you tell me if we aren't all seduced at some time or other in some
way or other. That's when our principles are betrayed, isn't it? But if our principles were stronger, then
we wouldn't give in, would we? So what happens to Wai is his own look out."
"But if he'd had some friends -"
"It's got nothing to do with friends or seducers or enemies or anything else. That's what I'm saying. It's
Wai's own look out. Anything that happens to us is our own responsibility."
"Ah, now, that's a load of garbage," Honeybunch protested.
"You're all sick, that's your trouble," Quilter said.
"Honeybunch is right," Melmoth said. "We all start out in life with more trouble than we can sort out all
our days."
"Look, feller, nobody asked your opinion in the first place. Speak for yourself," Quilter said.
"I am."
"Well, kindly refrain from opening your gob on my behalf. I bear my own woes on my own back, and
further-more I believe man possesses free will. I do what I want to do, see?"
At that moment, the speaker system crunched into life: "Attention. Will Rating Hank Quilter, Mess No.
307. Hank " Quilter. Mess No. 307, proceed at once to the Flight Advisor's Office on the Scanning
Deck, Flight Advisor's Office .on the Scanning Deck. That is all."
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Grumbling, Quilter moved to obey.
Flight Advisor Bryant Lattimore did not like his office on the Scanning Deck. It was decorated in the
modern so. called Ur-Organic style, with walls, floor and ceiling con-tinuously patterned with bas-relief
plastic of varied tones. The pattern represented surface crystals of molybdenum oxide under a
magnification of 75,000. It was designed to put him in harmony with the Buzzardian universe.
Flight Advisor Bryant Lattimore did like his job.
When the knock came at his door, and Rating Quilter entered, Lattimore nodded him amiably to a
chair.
"Quilter, you know why we are hitting vacuum. We intend to discover the home planet of the aliens
that I believe are popularly known as rhinomen. My particular task is to formulate in advance some of the
lines ofapproach we can use when we have uncovered this planet. Now I happened to flip through the
crew lists and came on your name. You were on theMariestopes, were you not, when this first group
of rhinomen was discovered?"
"Sir, I was in the Exploration Corps then, sir. I was one of the men who actually came across the
creatures. I shot three or four of them as they charged me. You see -"
"This is very interesting, Quilter, but may we just have this a little more slowly?"
Quilter told his story in elaborate and elaborated detail, while Lattimore listened and gazed at the
molybdenum crystals in which he was imprisoned and nodded his head and intermittently loosened a
speck of dried mucas from inside one of his nostrils.
"You're certain these creatures attacked you?" he asked, removing his spectacles to stare at Quilter.
Quilter hesitated, weighed Lattimore up, and decided on the truth as he saw it.
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"Let's say they came towards us, sir. So we let 'em have it without going into committee first."
Lattimore smiled and resumed his spectacles.
When he had dismissed the rating, he pressed a bell and Mrs. Hilary Warhoon appeared. She looked
very smart in a flared mock-male with recessed carnation paltroons; the glint in her eyes showed how
delighted she was to be loose in the Buzzardian universe.
"Had Quilter anything of interest to say?" she asked, sitting down at the table next to Lattimore.
"Only inadvertently. He's read his newscasts and his poppers, and on the surface his attitude is the
civilized one: that we don't know much about the rhinomen, as he calls them, and that we give them the
benefit of the doubt until we find whether or not they are glorified hogs. Under-neath, and not very far
underneath, heknows the critters are just big game, and to be shot like big game, because he has shot
them like big game. You know, even if it doesturn out that they are brilliant thinkers and all that, our
relationship with them is going to be precious damn difficult."
"Yes. Because if they are brilliant thinkers, their thought is going to be remarkably different from our
thought."
"Check. And not that only. Philosophers who live in mud are not going to cut much ice with Earth; the
masses have always been a deal more impressed by mud than by philosophers."
"Fortunately, what the masses think won't affect us out here."
"You think not? Heck, you're the cosmoclectic, Hilary, but I've been in TP before, and I know a
strange psycho-logy rules on shipboard. It's like an exaggerated version of Kipling's 'East of Suez ...',
how's it go now? 'Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst, where there ain't
no Ten Commandments....' The best are very like the worst when you step on a planet lying under
another sun, Hilary. And you feel that - well, it's a sort of irresponsibility - you feel that you can do
anything you like because nobody on Earth will judge you for it: while at the same tune, 'just what you
like' is naturally part of what the masses of Earth would like to do, had they the licence."
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Mrs. Warhoon tapped four pliant fingers on the table.
"You make it sound very sinister."
"Hell, the irrational drives of man are sinister! Don't think I'm generalizing. I've seen this mood come
over a man too often. It was probably that that undid Ainson. And I feel it in myself."
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