"The hunch is this," said Porter, "and I'll not guarantee it, but I have the feeling that this pupping business, as you call it, may serve to somewhat endear the visitor to the people. This country goes all soft on motherhood."

"I don't know about that," said Marcus V/bite, the Secretary of State. "It scares me spitless. Not only do we have hundreds, perhaps thousands, of those creatures out in space, but the one that's here is spawning. What happens if they all come down and spawn?"

"The public won't think of that," said Porter. "Not now. Not right away. The spawning may give us a little time."

"Marcus," said the President, "I know you talked with the Russian. What did he have to say?"

"Not a great deal. Sounded as if he still was waiting for instructions from Moscow. Maybe Moscow doesn't know as yet quite what line it should take. Rumbled around a lot without getting anywhere. Gave some indication that his government might demand some hand in the study of this visitor of ours. I gave him no indication of what our policy might be. For starters, I told him we still considered it an internal matter. Personally, I still think we should give some thought to inviting foreign scientists to participate. It would make for better international relations and we probably wouldn't be hurt too much, if at all."

"That's what you said the other day," the President told him. "Since that time, I've given considerable thought to your suggestion. I'm inclined to be against it."

"What Ivan is afraid of is that we'll find out something from the visitor that will give us a defensive edge," said Hammond. "That's why the ambassador did his rumbling about being counted in. My feeling is that we should hold up until we at least have some inkling of what we might have."

"I talked with Mike at the U.N. just before you all came in," said the President. "He tells me we'll have a fight to keep the U.N. from declaring this an international situation. All our little brothers in Africa and Asia and some of our good friends in South America think, or at least are saying, that this is something that extends beyond national interest. The arrival of a visitor from space, they argue, is of international concern.

"Well," said Hammond, "we can fight them off for a while. There isn't much that they can do beyond attempting to amass worldwide opinion. They can pass resolutions in principle until they are purple in the face, but there's not much they can do to implement the resolutions."

"We'll hold the line for a time," said the President.

"If some others of the visitors drop in on us, that may be a different matter."

"You are saying, Mr. President," asked State, "that you'll not even consider my suggestion of a cooperative international study?"

"For the time," said the President. "Only for the time. We'll have to think about it and await further developments. The subject is not closed."

"What's vital for us to learn," said Hammond, "is the intention of these things. What is their purpose? Why are they here? What do they expect? Are they a band of roving nomads looking to pick up whatever's loose or are they a legitimate expedition out on an exploration flight? Do they represent a contact with some other civilization out in space or are they a pack of freebooters? How we react, what we do, must depend to a large extent on who and what they are."

"That might take a lot of finding out," said Porter.

"We'll have to try," said Hammond. "I don't know how it can be done, but we'll have to try. Allen's boys in the next few days may start turning up a few facts that could be significant. All we need is a little time."

The intercom on the desk purred and the President picked up the phone. He listened for a moment and then said, "Put him on." Again he listened, a frown growing on his face. "Thank you," he finally said. "Please keep in close touch with me."

He put down the phone and looked from one to the other of them.

"We may just have run out of time," he said. "That was Crowell at NASA. He's had word from the station. There seems to be some indication that the swarm in orbit is beginning to break up.

19. LONE PINE

"They're cute," said Kathy.

"I can't see anything cute in them," said Chet. "They're just little black oblong boxes scampering around."

Scampering they were, hastening from bate to bale, ingesting each bale in turn, doing it neatly and precisely, down to the last shred of cellulose. There was no scuffling or fighting among themselves for possession of a bale; they were well mannered. If one of them was working on a bale, another did not try to horn in, but found another bale. They had eaten a number of bales, but there were still plenty of bales left. The voracious youngsters had barely made a dent in them. A mile or more of bales was spread along the lane cut through the forest and the adult visitor, at the far end of the swath, still was burrowing its way into the forest, regularly ejecting bales.

"It seems to me," said Kathy, "that they are growing. Would that be possible? They seem bigger than they were just an hour or So ago.

"I can't think so," said Chet. "They've been feeding for only a few hours."

"It seems to me, too, that they are growing," said Quinn, the New York Times man. "I suppose it could be possible. They may have an extremely efficient metabolic system. Much more efficient than any kind of life on Earth."

"If they are growing now," said Kathy, "it won't be more than a few more days before they can be cutting their own trees and extracting cellulose."

Norton said, "If that is the case, there goes the wilderness area."

"I suppose that somewhere along the line," said Quinn, "the forestry people will have to make up their minds what they want to do about it. This thing is our guest at the moment, I would think, but how long can we put up with a guest that eats everything in sight?"

"Or a guest that litters a brood of young on your living room floor," said Norton.

"The problem is," said Chet, "what can be done about it. You can't just shoo this thing out of the woods like you'd shoo a pig out of a potato patch."

"No matter what you say," said Kathy, "I think those little things are nice. They are in such a hurry and they are so hungry."

She tried again, as she had tried unsuccessfully before, to pick out the one she'd helped to regain its feet. But there seemed to be no way to distinguish one from the other. They were all alike.

And she remembered, too, that moment after she had helped the youngster to its feet and then reached out to pat the mother. She could still feel, in the imagination of memory, the gentle twitching of the hide and then the hide folding over her hand in a soft embrace. I can't believe, she told herself fiercely, that there can be too much wrong with a creature of any sort at all that would respond like that—a gesture of recognition? a sign of gratitude for a service rendered? the friendliness of one life to another? or an apology for subjecting another intelligence to the trouble it had brought?

If only, she thought, she could put this in the story that in another couple of hours she'd phone into the Tribune. But there was no way that she could. If Johnny didn't throw it out to start with, the ogres on the copy desk would not ~et it pass. It would be an intrusion of the reporter into the story. It was something for which there would be no kind of proof, no documentation. How, Kathy asked herself, does one document a handshake with an alien?

Norton was asking Quinn, "Have you folks gotten anything out of the governmental observers?"

"Nothing much," said Quinn. "They've taken the visitor's temperature, or at least the temperature of its skin. They may have checked for a heartbeat, and I suspect they did, although they Won't own up to it. They know it isn't metal, but they don't know what it is. It hasn't any treads or wheels to move on. It just floats along a few inches above the ground. As if it were disregarding the force of gravitation. One observer was speculating that it may know how to control and use gravity and his fellow observers probably will pin his ears back for his ill-considered muttering. And they know it is sending out signals. And that's about all they know."