All this was not to say that the Ganymeans were a cold and unemotional people. As their reactions to the destruction of Minerva had shown, they were warm, friendly and deeply sentimental, at times to a degree that an Earthnian reared in the “old school” might have considered unbecoming. And they possessed a well-developed, though very subtle and sophisticated, sense of humor, not a little of which was evident in the basic design of ZORAC. Also as Shilohin had indicated, they were a cautious people, cautious not in the sense of being timid, but of premeditating every move and action. They never did anything without knowing exactly what they were trying to achieve, why they wanted to achieve it, how they were going to do it, and what they would do if the expected failed to materialize. To the average engineer from Earth the disaster of Iscaris would have been shrugged off as just one of those things to be forgotten or tried again with hopes for better luck; to the Ganymeans it was inexcusable that such a thing should ever have happened and they had not yet fully come to terms with it, even after twenty years.
Hunt saw them as a dignified and proud race, moderate in speech and noble in bearing, yet underneath it all sociable and approachable. They exhibited none of the suspicion and mistrust of strangers that was typical through much of the society of Earth. They were quiet, reserved, self-assured, and above all they were rational. As Danchekker remarked to Hunt one day in the bar at Pithead: “If the whole universe went insane and blew itself up, I’m sure the Ganymeans would still be there at the end of it to put the pieces together again.”
The bar at Pithead became the main focus of social activity between the small group of Ganymeans and the Earthmen. Every evening after dinner, ones and twos of both races would begin trickling in until the room was filled to capacity and every square foot of horizontal space, including the floor, was covered by a sprawling body of one kind or the other, or littered with glasses. The discussions rambled on to touch every subject conceivable and usually went through to the early hours of the morning; for anybody not disposed to seek solitude and privacy, there was little else to do after work at Pithead.
The Ganymeans developed a strong partiality for scotch whiskey, which they preferred neat, by the tumblerful. They reciprocated by bringing in a distillation of their own from the Shapieron. A number of the Earthmen experimented with it and found it to be pleasant, warming, slightly sweet . . . and of devastating potency, but not until about two hours after beginning to drink it. Those who had learned the hard way christened it GTB- Ganymean Time Bomb.
It was during one of these evenings that Hunt decided to broach directly the subject that had been puzzling more than a few of the Earthmen for some time. Shilohin was present, so was Monchar, Garuth’s second-in-command, together with four other Ganymeans; on the Earth side were Danchekker, Vince Carizan the electronics engineer, and a half-dozen others.
“There is a point that’s been bothering some of us,” he said, by that time having come to appreciate the Ganymean preference for direct speech. “You must know that having people around today who can describe how Earth was in the distant past makes us want to ask all kinds of questions, yet you never seem to want to talk about it. Why?” A few murmurs from all around endorsed the question. The room suddenly became very quiet. The Ganymeans seemed ill at ease again and looked at each other as if hoping someone else would take the lead.
Eventually Shilohin replied. “We know very little about your world. It’s a delicate issue. You have a culture and history that are completely strange. . . .” She gave the Ganymean equivalent of a shrug. “Customs, values, manners. . . accepted ways of saying things. We wouldn’t want to offend somebody by unwittingly saying the wrong thing, so we tend to avoid the subject.”
Somehow the answer was not really convincing.