The Star Beast by Robert A. Heinlein

But he himself was sitting in the boss’s chair at the moment. Well?

Was that why the boss had placed him there? To let him correct his own mistake? No, the boss was subtle but not omniscient; he could not have predicted that Greenberg would consider reopening the matter.

Still. . . He called the boss’s private secretary. “Mildred?”

“Yes, Mr. Greenberg?”

“That brief-and-rec on that intervention I carried out Rt0411, it was. It went out fifteen minutes ago.

I want it back.”

“It may have been dispatched,” she said doubtfully.

“The communications desk has been running only about seven minutes behind demand today.”

“There is such a thing as too much efficiency. If the order has left the building, send a cancellation and a more-to-follow, will you? And get the original document back to me.”

Finally he got to the pending-urgent file. As Mr. Kiku had said, the jacket marked “Ftaeml” was not large. He found it subtitled: “Beauty & the Beast” and wondered why. The boss had a sense of humor. . . but it veered so much that other people had a hard time following it.

Presently his eyebrows lifted. Those tireless interpreters, brokers, go-betweens, and expounders, the Rargyllians, were always popping up in negotiations between diverse races; the presence of Dr. Ftaeml on Earth had tipped Greenberg that something was up with a nonhumanoid people. . . non-human in mentality, creatures so different psychologically that communication was difficult. But he had not expected the learned doctor was representing a race that he had never heard of. . . something termed “the Hroshii.”

It was possible that Greenberg had simply forgotten these people with a name like a sneeze; they might be some unimportant breed, at a low cultural level, or economically inconsequential, or not possessing space travel. Or they might have been brought into the Community of Civilizations while Greenberg had been up to his ears in Solar System affairs. Once the human race had made contact with other races having interstellar travel the additions to the family of legal “humans” had come so fast that a man could hardly keep up; the more mankind widened its horizons the harder those horizons were to see.

Or perhaps he knew of the Hroshii under another name? Greenberg turned to Mr. Kiku’s universal dictionary and keyed in the name.

The machine considered it, then the reading plate flashed: NO INFORMATION.

Greenberg tried dropping the aspirate on the assumption that the word might have degenerated in the mouths of non-Hroshii. . . still the same negative.

He dropped the matter. The. universal dictionary in the British Museum was not more knowledgeable than the one in the Under Secretary’s office; its working parts occupied an entire building in another part of Capital, and a staff of cyberneticists, semanticians and encyclopedists endlessly fed its hunger for facts. He could be sure that, whatever the “Hroshii” were, the Federation had never heard of them before.

Which was astounding.

Having let astonishment persist a full second Greenberg went on reading. He learned that the Hroshii were already here, not landed on Earth but within waving distance. . . in a parking orbit fifty thousand miles out. He let himself be astonished for two whole seconds before going on to discover that the reason he had not heard of their advent was that Dr. Ftaeml had urgently advised Mr. Kiku to keep patrol ships and such from challenging and attempting to board the stranger.

He was interrupted by the return of his report of the Lummox matter, bearing on it Mr. Kiku’s confirmation of the sentence. He thought for a moment, then added to the endorsement so that it read: “Recommendation approved. . . but this action is not to be carried out until after a complete scientific analysis of this creature has been made. Local authorities will surrender custody when required to the Bureau of Xenic Science, which will arrange transportation and select the agency to pursue the evaluation.”

Greenberg signed Kiku’s name to the change and put it back into the. system. He admitted sheepishly that the order was now weasel-worded. . . for it was a sure thing that once the xenobiologists got their hands on Lummox they would never let him go. Nevertheless his heart felt suddenly lighter. The other action was wrong; this one was right.