The cordon opened to let them through, and suddenly the people massed together across the roadway found themselves staring up into the awesome faces from another world. While the noise from all around continued unabated, the ranks immediately in
front of the Giants grew strangely hushed, and fell back as if to maintain a respectful distance. Garuth stopped and looked slowly around the semicircle of faces. As his gaze traveled from one to another the eyes averted. Hunt could understand their uncertainty, but at the same time he was anxious that the gesture the Giants had wanted to make should not go unreciprocated.
“I’m Vic Hunt,” he called to the crowd in a loud voice. “I have traveled with these people all the way from Jupiter. This is Garuth, commander of the Ganymean ship. He and his companions have come to meet you all personally and at their own request. Let’s make them feel at home.”
Still the people seemed to shrink back. Some seemed to want to make a welcoming gesture, but everybody was waiting for somebody else to take the first step. And then a boy at the front of the crowd wrenched his hand free from his mother’s, marched forward and confronted Garuth’s towering frame boldly. Wearing stout mountain boots below a pair of alpine-style leather shorts, he was about twelve years old with a tangle of fair hair and a face covered with freckles. His mother started forward instinctively, but the man standing next to her restrained her with his arm.
“I don’t care about them, Mr. Garuth,” the boy declared loudly. “I wanna shake your hand.” With that he confidently extended his arm upward. The Giant stooped, his face contorting into an expression that could only be a smile, grasped the hand and shook it warmly. The tension in the crowd evaporated and they began sUrging forward jubilantly.
Hunt looked around and saw that the scene had suddenly transformed itself. In one place a Ganymean was posing with an arm around the shoulders of a laughing middle-aged woman while her husband took a photograph; in another, a Giant was accepting a proffered cup of coffee while behind him a third was looking down dubiously at a persistent, tail-wagging Alsatian dog that one f amily had brought along. After patting it experimentally a few times, the Giant squatted down and began ruffling its fur, to be rewarded by a frenzy of licks on the tip of his long, tapering face.
Hunt lit a cigarette and sauntered across to join the Swiss police chief, who was mopping copious perspiration from his brow with a pocket handkerchief.
“There-it didn’t go badly at all, Heinrich,” he said. “Told you there was nothing to worry about.”
“Maybe, Dr. ‘unt,” Heinrich answered, still not sounding too happy. “All ze same, I will be much ze ‘appier when we can, ‘ow you say in ze America. . . ‘get ze ‘eli out of ‘ere.”
Hunt spent a couple more days in the Earthmen sector of Ganyville helping the liaison bureau get organized and taking his own share of rest and relaxation. Then, having voted himself a spell of special leave for conduct which, he was sure, was well beyond the call of duty, he collected Yvonne, hitched them both a ride into Geneva on one of the still-shuttling VTOL jets, and embarked on a spree in the city. Three days later they tumbled out of an eastbound groundcar that stopped on the main highway running along the perimeter, slightly disheveled, distinctly unsteady on their feet and deliriously happy.
By that time-over a full week since the day the Shapieron had landed-the liaison bureau had got things fully under control and parties of Ganymeans were already beginning to leave to make visits and attend conferences all over the world. Some groups, in fact, had been gone for some time and news reports were already coming in on how they were faring.
Small panties of eight-foot-tall aliens, together with their ever-vigilant police escorts, had become accepted, if not yet commonplace, sights in Times Square, Red Square, Trafalgar Square and the Chanips-Elysées. They had listened appreciatively to a Beethoven concert in Boston, toured the London Zoo with a mixture of awe and horror, attended lavish receptions in Buenos Aires, Canberra, Cape Town and Washington, D.C., and paid their respects at the Vatican. In Peking their culture had been complimented as the ultimate exemplification of the communist ideal, in New York as that of the democratic ideal, and in Stockholm as that of the liberal ideal. And everywhere the crowds thronged to greet them.