He lit a cigarette and exhaled, smiling faintly to himself as the vista of Redfern Canyons brought to mind the two directors from an Italian urban-development corporation who had approached him several days previously. Could the Ganymean “gravitic” technology—which enabled gravitational fields to be generated, manipulated, and switched on and off at will as readily as familiar electrical and magnetic effects—be somehow engineered into a piece of mountainous terrain, they had wanted to know, in such a way as to render it gravitationally flat? The idea was to create high—income habitats, or even entire townships, in places that would offer all the visual aesthetics of the Dolomites, and yet be as easy to walk around as Constitution Gardens. Ingenious, Hunt had conceded.
And typical of human adaptability.
It was hardly a year since mankind had made the first contact with intelligent aliens and brought them back to Earth; and as if that weren’t enough, the discovery of an interstellar alien culture, and Earth’s opening what promised to become a permanent relationship with it, had followed less than half as long since, with all the promise which that portended of unimaginable gains to human knowledge and the greatest single upheaval ever to occur in the history of the
race. The whole edifice of science could crash and have to be rebuilt afresh; every philosophic insight might be demolished to its foundations—but people only became seriously affected when they thought they saw a way of making a buck or two. The human alacrity for getting back to business-as-usual would never cease to amaze him, Hunt thought. Ganymeans had often marveled at the same thing.
Jerry came ambling back down from the house with a six-pack of Coors, a large bag of potato chips, and a tub of onion-flavored dip. He perched himself on one of the rocks lining the foot of the bank that Hunt was sprawled on and passed him a can. “I thought you guys were supposed to drink it warm,” he said again.
“English beer is heavier,” Hunt said. “If it’s too cold you lose the taste. It’s better at room temperature, that’s all—which in a pub means cellar temperature, usually a bit less than the bar. Nobody actually warms it.”
“And the lighter lager stuff, which is closer to yours, they prefer chilled, just like you do. So we’re not really so alien, after all.”
“That’s nice to know, anyhow. We’ve had enough aliens showing up around here recently.” Jerry flipped open his own can and tilted his head back to take a swig; then he wiped his mustache with the back of a hand. “Hell, what am I telling you for? You must get tired of people asking about them.”
“Sometimes, Jerry. It depends on the people.”
“There’s a couple I know across in Silver Spring—old friends— with this kid who’s about five. Last time I was over there, he wanted to know what planet Australians come from.”
“What planet?”
Jerry nodded. “Yeah, see: Australians. It was the way he heard it. He figured they had to be from someplace else.”
“Oh, I get it.” Hunt grinned. “Smart kid.”
“I never thought about it that way in over thirty years.”
“Kids don’t have the ruts yet that adults have carved into their minds. They’re born logical. Crooked thinking has to be taught.”
“It doesn’t work that way in your area, though—science? That right?” Jerry said.
“Oh, don’t believe that myth. If anything, it’s worse. You always have to wait for a generation of entrenched authority to die off before anything new happens. It’s not like revolutions in your business. At least in politics you can get rid of the obstructions yourself and move things along.”
“But at least you always know you’ve got a job,” Jerry pointed out.
“There is that side to it, I suppose,” Hunt agreed.
Although still officially an employee of the CIA at Langley, Jerry had been on extended leave for three months. With the residual Soviet-Western rivalry transforming into economic competition, and the global development of nuclear technology spelling an end to the dependence of advanced nations on oil-rich, medieval dictator—states and sheikhdoms, the world had been on its way to resolving the twentieth century’s legacy of political absurdities even before the first Ganymean contact. That had shaken things up enough, even though it involved only a single shipload of time-stranded aliens. But after the meeting with the Thuriens, immediately following that event, nobody knew what the next ten years would hold in store. Few doubted, however, that there was little in the realm of human affairs that would stand unaffacted.