“Anything you can do, Chad. I hate to be a bother but…”
“Think nothing of it,” he said, entirely too tersely, as he went off to transmit the message to whomever.
That night she watched as the two envoys explained very clearly and concisely what the Confederation was and who the members were. They mentioned there were over fifty member races, most of whom lived at great distances from one another and from Earth, only about ten of them anywhere nearby. “Nearby,” Chiddy defined as “offering something worth the very high cost of interstellar flight.” Chiddy and Vess showed pictures, the non-predators first: flutelike Vixbots, swamp-living Oumfuz, the differentiated Credons, the winged Flibotsi, the crablike Thwakians.
Then, in greater detail, the predators: the Wulivery looked more like sea anemones than elephants. They had a ring of twelve tentacles around their mouthparts, which were on top of their heads. When relaxed, the head part was immediately above their relaxed, stumpy fat legs. When the creatures were not relaxed, the legs elongated from around eight feet up to thirty feet or more, moving the tentacles far above human eye level and allowing the rough gray skin of the leg to blend among the tree trunks of any forest or jungle. Their hunting was generally limited, said Chiddy, to wooded areas.
Oh, yeah, Benita commented to herself. Washington, D.C., wasn’t wooded, but that was the shape that had been on the roof!
While the Wulivery resembled sea anemones, the Xankatikitiki looked more like six-legged bears. They weighed a hundred twenty to a hundred fifty pounds. The fur and the personality were like that of a wolverine. The four longish legs were cheetah-like. The two arms were muscular, like a gorilla’s. The prehensile tail was like the back end of a python, and the jaws were as strong as hyenas’. Adding to the general ferocity, their claws were retractable and the teeth were poisonous in the same way as a Komodo dragon’s teeth, that is, so filthy that any wound led to sepsis and eventual death. All of which meant, so Chiddy said, they could climb very well, run very fast, and kill almost anything. They hunted in small, family packs, mostly in open areas.
The Fluiquosm were virtually invisible. They flew and had rending organs (beaks? talons?). The body they had pictures of was pale yellow, about the size of a Rottweiler, with a strange complicated growth on its back that Chiddy identified as the flying organ, not wings, but something else. Chiddy said to think of them as large, intelligent, invisible eagles who happened to be quite ferocious.
The broadcast continued with Chiddy apologizing profusely to all the people of Earth who, he said, would understand what was happening, because on Earth there were member nations of the U.N. who were always telling lies and trying to beat the system, like Iraq or Libya, or members who didn’t pay their dues but still expected to be respected and listened to, like the U.S.
At the very end of the broadcast, they explained why they had brought the Inkleozese and introduced the score of them who were already on Earth. Their names were unpronounceable. They didn’t seem threatening or unlikable, though when the Inkleozese turned to leave, the audience could see rear ends much like a wasp’s rear end, terminating in a lethal looking dagger-like arrangement.
Benita’s phone rang about an hour after the broadcast: Chad, wanting to know if it would be a violation of Neighborliness if humans went hunting for the Xankatikitiki and others. The White House was receiving hundreds of calls, and he said for every call they got, there were probably a dozen hunters out there, already planning their expeditions.
When she hung up, she uttered this question loudly and her phone rang.
Chiddy’s voice said, “You caught us just as we were leaving to go hunt predators, Benita. What is it?”
She explained Chad’s problem.
“Predators’ rules are different from civilized rules,” Chiddy replied in a reproving voice. “Any Confederation predator who goes on the hunt is fair game for anyone, although the odds on Earthian hunters actually killing one are vanishingly small.”
To help out, however, he said the body temperature of a Xanka was 116° F, a Fluiquosm 80° F, and a Wulivery 104° F, so heat detectors could be used against cooler or warmer backgrounds. All their worlds were reasonably Earthlike, and they didn’t need any kind of protective gear except for the Wulivery, who need breathing tubes to furnish them with methane.