Then he thought, jingling a luxurious bourbon-and-ginger abstractedly; the sound of ice was peculiarly comforting. Why the hell had the Pentagon people picked him as the ‘lay volunteer’, out of so many? The alien ship had asked for a sampling of human beings to go back to its far star, and of these, it had wanted one to be a man of no specialities whatsoever – or no specialities that the ship had been willing to specify. The Pentagon had picked its own samplings of experts, who probably had been ordered to ‘volunteer’; but the ‘lay volunteer’ had been another matter.
Like everyone else, Carl had been sure the Pentagon would want the ‘lay volunteer’ actually to be a master spy among all possible master spies, not a James Bond but a Leamas type, a man who could pass for anything; but it hadn’t worked that way. Instead, the Pentagon had approved Carl, one slightly beat and more than slightly broke dropout, who believed in magic and the possibility of spaceships, but – leave us face it, monsters and gents – didn’t seem to be of much interest either to alien or to human otherwise.
Why, for instance, hadn’t the ‘lay volunteer’ the aliens wanted turned out to be a Bircher, a Black Muslim, a Communist or a Rotarian – in short, some kind of fanatic who purported to deal with the real world – instead of a young man who was fanatic only about imaginary creatures called hobbits? Even the ordinary science-fiction fan would have been better; why was a sword-and-sorcery addict required to try to figure his way out of a classical spaceship clink?